Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (13 page)

Serukiza’s features conformed with the stereotypes many Congolese have of Banyamulenge. He was over six feet tall, with high cheekbones, a thin and hooked nose, and slightly protruding teeth. In Congolese French, some words are known to illiterate farmers that educated Belgians and French rarely use.
Morphologie
was one of them; Banyamulenge would learn it as children, knowing that it connoted a vulnerability, a danger. “His morphology is suspicious,” one sometimes heard people saying when they suspected someone of being Tutsi. As if you could tell someone’s subversion by his bone structure or the slant of his nose.

The postwar housing of the former rebels can be revealing. Serukiza’s threebedroom flat next to the justice ministry was bare and run-down, a far cry from the gaudy interiors of some of his former colleagues. The windows were draped with slightly dirty voile curtains, the tables covered in cheap plastic spreads. The toilet—to my embarrassment—did not flush, and the doors were loose on their hinges, sticking in their frames. Most tellingly, in a country where importance can be measured in the number of cell phones and frequency of calls, he only had one phone, which remained silent throughout our three-hour meeting.

When I asked Serukiza about the war, he seemed weary of the subject, like a witness interrogated a dozen times but with little faith in justice. Instead of beginning in 1996, however, he started four generations earlier, with his ancestors’ arrival in the country. Like other persecuted minorities, the Banyamulenge have an obsessive sense of history, clinging to names and dates. “The truth is, we have no idea when we left Rwanda. According to historians, it was in the mid-nineteenth century. All I know is that my great-grandfather was born in the Congo. But they still call us Rwandans! Imagine calling Americans British.”

The controversy surrounding the Banyamulenge focuses on when they arrived in the Congo. Their detractors dismiss them as recent immigrants who are more Rwandan than Congolese. They often refer to colonial maps of tribes, pointing out that no “Tutsi” or “Banyamulenge” marker is to be found until after independence in 1960. Most academics, not to mention thousands of Banyamulenge, disagree. Isidore Ndaywel, a leading Congolese historian, writes in his
General History of the Congo
: “[The Rwandan immigration] is confirmed by oral sources from Rwanda that evoke the departure of lineages from Kinyaga (Rwanda) in the 19th century to install themselves in Mulenge. The reasons for this movement was reportedly the search for better pastures, but in particular also the flight from attacks by King Kigeri Rwabugiri (1853–1895), who was determined to bring an end to Kinyaga’s autonomy.”
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It is likely that roaming pastoralists had been visiting the high plateau for centuries, fleeing the frequent fighting between different clans in densely populated Burundi and Rwanda and trying to find new pastures for their cattle to graze. The nineteenth-century wars in Rwanda just fueled these migrations.
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Other factors probably contributed to their exodus, including a devastating rinderpest epidemic that killed up to 90 percent of cattle in some parts of Rwanda, as well as the arrival of Europeans with smallpox and other diseases around the same time.
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Most Banyamulenge have only a vague idea, passed on through their elders, of when their ancestors first came to the Congo. Before the war, almost none had known relatives in Rwanda.

The Banyamulenge’s original exodus took the cattle herders across the Rusizi plain into what is today Congolese territory. There the immigrants and their cattle fled the malaria that is endemic at lower altitudes and scaled the Itombwe mountain range. They settled in the town of Mulenge, from which they derive their name. Tensions with their neighbors soon arose. The Tutsi are pastoralists, and their cows trampled their neighbors’ fields. The newcomers also ate different food, had their own myths, and adhered to particular conjugal habits. The Banyamulenge poet Muyengeza distilled these tensions, along with his community’s defiance, into a stanza:

They came across
They came across the shores of Lake Tanganyika
They were swallowed by a python
It found them too strong to crush.
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As in much of Africa, land in the eastern Congo was managed by traditional chiefs. While initially the local ruler from the Fuliro tribe was happy to lease land to the newcomers in return for cows, relations deteriorated when the traditional chief hiked up their tribute in the 1920s, prompting Banyamulenge to move to higher, less accessible pastures away from his control. The Banyamulenge’s resentment was also stoked by the Belgian colony’s refusal to give them their own administrative entity for fear of alienating neighboring communities.

The hunger for land rights became a central concern in Banyamulenge politics and religion. During the upheaval of the 1960s, several evangelical prophets came forward, all claiming that they had received prophecies about a promised land, their own Canaan. In 1972, a prayer group received divine instruction that they should go to a place called Nyabibuye, where they were told by God to look to the west, the east, the north, and the south—“the land surrounded by horizons that your eyes are seeing, I will make it your dwelling place.”
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The postindependence period was a tumultuous time for the Congo, as the country crumbled into chaos following the assassination of its independence leader and first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. In April 1964, the rebellion reached the eastern Congo, led by Lumumba’s followers and fueled by local communal grievances against the central state. One of the leaders sent to mobilize the locals from neighboring Burundi was Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a hitherto little-known youth leader from Katanga province. Black-and-white pictures show a grinning twenty-five-year-old Kabila with long sideburns and a budding afro, his chubby face somehow too big for his still relatively trim frame, accentuated by bell-bottomed jeans.

It was into this tense environment that Serukiza was born in 1964. He remembers his mother telling him stories about rebels streaming through their villages armed with bamboo, machine guns, and machetes and shouting “
Mai!
” invoking the ritual water, or
mai
, they believed made them invincible to bullets. She also told him about a group of white soldiers who spoke a foreign language and were only known by the order they arrived in the country:
moja
,
mbili
,
tatu
(one, two, three in Swahili), and so on. Serukiza smiles. “It was only much later that she found out that these were Cubans and that
tatu
, the third to arrive in the country, was Che Guevara.” In the cold war world of international proxy warfare, the mountains of Mulenge had become a battleground between Cuba and the United States.

The rebellion exacerbated the tensions between the communities, as Kabila’s rebels began to prey on the Banyamulenge’s cattle. “It was some sort of bizarre Marxist approach,” Serukiza said, “anyone with cattle was rich and therefore bourgeois and close to Kinshasa. But we were peasants!” Thousands of Banyamulenge fled to the shores of Lake Tanganyika, where they thought they could find protection and aid, but many died of malaria and malnutrition, unaccustomed to the hot climate. Desperate, the Banyamulenge sent a delegation, including one of Serukiza’s uncles, to convince Mobutu’s army to come to their rescue.

The Banyamulenge’s siding with Mobutu marked their entry into regional politics and the origin of open hostilities with the neighboring communities. In 1966, Kabila’s rebels attacked a Banyamulenge village, forcing dozens into a church and massacring them, prompting hundreds of Banyamulenge to join Mobutu’s Forces Armées Zairoises (FAZ) and beat back the rebels from their pastures in the high plateau.
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Kabila’s troops’ abuses led Banyamulenge, who attach great value to cows, to dub him “the one who cuts cows’ teats.” Serukiza’s mother told him that no milk would flow where Kabila had been.

“There are many ironies in our history,” Serukiza philosophized as a cool breeze blew in off the Congo River. “Who would have thought that Kabila would lead us many years later to overthrow Mobutu?”

When asked about discrimination, many Tutsi in the Congo immediately bring up schoolyard taunts. As everywhere, schools were places of socialization, where the ground rules were laid out. The most common insult was
bor
, which was local slang for “thing” as well as “penis.” “For them, we were no better than objects,” Serukiza remembered. Across the border, in Burundi, where many Banyamulenge fled, they were call
kijuju
after a local plant that looked like cassava but couldn’t be eaten—a useless, treacherous substance. “They had songs they used to sing about us,” Serukiza said. “They were all variations on ‘Banyamulenge, go home to Rwanda.’ They also called us ‘RRR’: ‘Rwandans Return to Rwanda,’ or
kafiri
, uncircumcised—that was a huge insult for us. We aren’t Rwandans.” For many communities in the eastern Congo and elsewhere in Africa, elaborate circumcision rituals mark the graduation to manhood; Banyamulenge are usually not circumcised.

Most Banyamulenge live in the remote villages of the high plateau, where the discrimination is less obvious and biting. But since they do not have good high schools, hospitals, or administrative offices, all Banyamulenge have to conduct regular pilgrimages to the lakeside towns of Uvira, Baraka, or Kalemie, where they are treated with disdain. “When you want to obtain a birth certificate, take a national exam, or get an ID, you had to walk three days to town,” Serukiza said. “There, they threw stones at us and called us names.”

A sociologist from the Bembe tribe (the neighboring community and the majority in the area), Kimoni Kicha, distilled this prejudice succinctly: “Bembe consider the Tutsi as no-gooders, weaklings, uncircumcised, an inferior people who do not do anything but drink milk all day long, and who do not cry over their dead brethren but over their deceased cows.”
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