A couple years after I was born, my family left the mountains amid one of the many conflicts in the region and moved to a city in the valley below, Uvira. The city is known for its beauty—the glistening Lake Tanganyika, the winding Kalimabenge River—and also for its conflicts. War was part of our everyday life.
There was always a new rebellion, a new battle. There are hundreds of different tribes in Congo. My people, the Banyamulenge, have long been discriminated against and targeted in the region. Much of our early history is from word of mouth. I learned about it over the years from my parents, who told stories of our roots when I asked about various conflicts and wars. They had heard the tales from their own parents. They explained that in the late 1800s, many members of my tribe began moving from their native Rwanda to the mountains of South Kivu, a Congolese province. The tribe migrated for several reasons, including civil war and discrimination at home, as well as the fact that the mountains held an abundance of grasslands—a paradise for grazing cows. My people are famous for cattle farming. We are known for being a strong, strapping group, healthy from drinking lots of milk straight from the cow.
My tribe’s migration came amid the time of European colonialism, and life was violent and turbulent across the region, as Africans were seized as slaves and forced into hard labor. Eventually, in 1960, the Congolese won a bloody battle for independence from Belgium. But the region was left deeply unstable, and civil wars raged. My people in South Kivu ran into political problems because they lived in a Congolese province but spoke a language of their native Rwanda. My people looked different, sounded different. They tried to keep to themselves. And so they were seen as foreigners. The Congolese didn’t know where my tribe stood. Different groups vying for power would come after my people to get them to fight for one side or another, and chaos reigned. Over the decades, the Banyamulenge got caught up in various conflicts and civil wars, but no matter what, they were always seen as outsiders, not truly Congolese. We were—and still are—stateless. So many of my people today are languishing in refugee camps, belonging to no country, always in limbo.
My parents grew up amid these conflicts, and were sometimes forced from their homes and villages. During my own childhood, the battles continued, and I was always aware of them. It seemed like the norm.
For the most part, I loved my childhood in the city of Uvira. I often think back to its beauty—the warm summer sun shining down on the sparkling lake, the towering blue-gray mountains in the distance, and the ancient, shady mango tree in our neighborhood that people used as a guidepost when giving directions: “Turn left at the mango tree.”
Things seemed simple then. I knew my parents loved me, and I felt safe with them. People I meet now assume that my childhood years in Africa were dark and deprived. But they were the opposite.
One of my most vivid early memories is of my little sister, Deborah. I was around four years old when she was born, and I remember this tiny, squirmy baby girl with a big, beautiful Afro of soft curls appearing in our home. Studying her face, I thought: Who are you? Where did you come from? I knew my mother had been pregnant, her belly protruding more by the day, but I was so young, I couldn’t put it all together. I just remember Deborah suddenly arriving, and my mom making baby food, mashing together bananas and avocados by hand. I would sometimes steal a bite of the sweet, soft mixture, and my mom would shoo me away. It took me some time to understand that Deborah was truly ours and that we could keep her.
Until Deborah came, I had been the youngest. I had five older brothers and sisters—my brother Heritage, followed by my sister Princesse, my brother Chris, my sister Adele, my brother Alex, and then me.
In our tribe, parents give their kids both a first and last name—family members don’t share a last name. My father’s name is Prudence Munyakuri. My mother’s name is Rachel Namberwa. My siblings are Heritage Munyakuri, Princesse Nabintu, Christian Ntagawa, Adele Kibasumba, Alex Ngabo, and Deborah Mukobgajana. Parents typically choose names with a goal of helping to shape their children’s character. I was named after a Rwandan prime minister, Agathe Uwiringiyimana, an influential woman in the history of Rwanda. I love that my parents named me after her. It makes me feel like I have big shoes to fill, and that someday I can do something worth being remembered for—although, let’s not kid anyone, my last name is way too long, and I don’t wish that on any other child. My last name means “one who believes in God,” another aspect of my name that helps define me.
Alex and I were the closest in age among my siblings, and we always played together, and got into trouble together—usually his fault. He was a small kid, funny and mischievous, a bit of a troublemaker. I called him my “little brother,” even though he was older than me. He taught me tomboyish things, like how to do a handstand: He would hold my legs up against the wall to keep me steady as I stood on my hands, then he would start to let go and freak me out. He taught me to play soccer with his friends, using makeshift balls made from wadded-up plastic bags and rubber bands. We played in a dusty alleyway, with brick walls on either side, where there wasn’t much parental traffic. We were always getting scrapes and scratches.
One time, my shorts ripped when I fell and my butt was showing, but I knew not to cry. Alex wouldn’t allow it, probably because he didn’t want to get in trouble if I went home in tears. Instead, I considered my ripped shorts a badge of honor; I was like one of the boys.
Alex also taught me how to ride a bike, or at least he tried. It was an adult bike that was too big for me, so I couldn’t keep it under control. We weren’t supposed to be riding it at all. It was my mom’s bike, and she used it to run errands and go to the market. One day, Alex decided it would be a good idea for both of us to get on the bike and ride down a steep, fast hill. I trusted my brother so much that I would have ridden that bike blindfolded. I wanted his approval—I wanted him to think I was cool—and so I hopped on.
“Hold on tight!” he said. We flew down the hill, but couldn’t keep the bike stable, and we crashed. I got scraped up pretty badly.
“Don’t tell Mom,” Alex begged me. “She’ll kill me.” And so I didn’t tell. I still have scars on my arms and knees.
It was a typical scenario with Alex. But he also had the purest heart. One night, he thought he heard people talking outside of our home in the dark. He feared they were burglars who would come and find us in our beds. He poked me to wake me up.
“We need to pray,” he said. “We need to pray to protect our family.”
“We’re fine,” I told him. “The wind is probably carrying people’s voices from somewhere else.” But he insisted that I pray to God with him, to help make the prayers stronger. I got up and we prayed together.
I had a different kind of relationship with my older sisters. I idolized them. Princesse was seven years older than me, and Adele was five years older. I wanted to wear clothes like them. I wanted to hang out with them and their friends. If my mom made skirts or dresses for them, I wanted the same ones. I would look at their new outfits and say, “Mom! What about me?”
Princesse was elegant and ladylike, at least on the surface. Underneath, she was more like a rebel, a tomboy. She wore pants and T-shirts into her teens, which you weren’t supposed to do once you were a teenager. It was okay when you were a little girl, but as you grew up, you were supposed to wear dresses and make yourself into marriage material. She also had a quirky sense of humor and loved to clown around; I remember her cracking up at fart jokes during dinner. Mom would usually laugh. Dad would eye us, unamused. Yet Princesse was also very responsible: She often helped Mom take care of us younger kids, getting us bathed and into bed at night. If Princesse told me to do something, I would do it.
With Adele, who was a little closer in age to me, it was different: If she told me to do something, I would snap back, “You’re not my mother.” Still, I wanted to be like her. She was outgoing, dynamic, and stylish, with a lot of friends. She and her friends often got into gossipy tangles, and she was always in
a cool clique. She grew tall quickly, with long limbs that made her awkward as a child. She was not the most coordinated dancer, but she was strikingly pretty.
My brother Chris was handsome and shy, a sweet, skinny kid with the greatest smile in the world. Like my brother Alex, he looked out for me. Unlike Alex, he seemed proud of me. Alex was a little too close to me in age for that. Chris would often take me to a little kiosk down the street, where a man sold things like matches, candles, and candy. We would hang out there and buy little things. Sometimes Chris would mind the kiosk himself if the man needed a break. When Chris took over, he always gave me candy.
As a young girl, I never knew my oldest brother, Heritage. Congolese soldiers snatched him from our home in Uvira when he was in grade school and I was too young to remember. Armed soldiers approached and grabbed him so they could force him to serve in the army. My dad begged the soldiers to take him instead of Heritage, arguing that his son was too young, but they didn’t listen.
It was typical at the time for soldiers to kidnap boys—they would seize kids and brainwash them, training them to do unthinkable things, then send them out to different regions of the country. I have vivid memories of seeing young kids in the streets of Uvira holding guns bigger than themselves. On the day the soldiers grabbed Heritage, they seized around two hundred kids. Imagine being a child and being whisked away from your home by violent strangers. My parents didn’t know if they would ever see Heritage again. But from that day, my father vowed to find his son and bring him home. I wondered if I would ever know my oldest brother.
As my sister Deborah grew, I began teaching her the same kinds of athletic things that Alex had taught me, like how to do handstands. We shared girly things too, like our collection of soft fabric dolls that we would dress with outfits we concocted from cloth remnants. Sometimes we would get bright scraps of fabric from dresses Mom had made. Other times, we would go to the tailor and ask for leftover fabrics. He always handed them over. Our dolls were lumpy and amorphous, fun to cuddle up with in bed.
All of us kids shared bedrooms, and Deborah and I began sharing a bed when she was a few years old. At night before bedtime, we all took turns brushing our teeth, but when money was tight and we couldn’t afford toothpaste, my mom told us to brush with coal. We rubbed it on our teeth, then rinsed. The nights were hot and steamy, as we had no air-conditioning. I didn’t even know that there was such a thing.
We went to sleep to a cacophony of crickets, their chirps floating through the windows. We lay on mattresses with mosquito nets draped overhead. The nets hung from the ceiling, and we tucked them in under the mattresses each night. Our windows had netting to keep the mosquitoes out as well, but the pests still managed to find their way in. Dad would sometimes give us shots to prevent malaria. We would have to lie down on the bed and get the shot in our butts—and that shot really hurt.
I’ll never forget those nights with Deborah. She was such a loyal little sister. She was so beautiful, it was almost unfair. She had wonderfully thick, black curly hair. My mother brushed it every day, but you couldn’t really tell that she had brushed it because the curls always kept their form. Deborah could walk through a tornado and still come out with her curls intact. I was envious of her hair because mine was coarse and harder to maintain.
Deborah had big, soulful brown eyes that could light the whole world. We used to make fun of her when she would cry: We said she could produce a bucket of tears, her eyes were so big. And she had long, thick eyelashes that were the key to my parents’ hearts. When we needed their permission to do something, we often sent Deborah to ask. If I wanted to play with my friends, I would tell Deborah that she could come and play with the little sisters of my friends—if Mom would let us. So then she would go and ask Mom. There was just something about Deborah that my parents couldn’t say no to. I think it’s because no one wanted to see her cry; her eyes were just too pretty.
Deborah was my constant companion, calm and thoughtful, like my dad. I was more stubborn and feisty, like my mom. Deborah knew all of my secrets. I was always instructing her not to tell on me if I did something bad, and she never did. I could trust her. She wanted me to like her, just like I had longed for Alex’s approval when I was her age. She never betrayed me.
We were all very respectful of our parents. If we talked back, we got a spanking. But my parents were more gentle than strict. If my dad was unhappy with me, he would sit me down and calmly explain why. He would start by saying in his wise, deep voice, “You see, Sandra . . .” And then he would logically outline what I had done wrong.
We did, however, often defy our parents by going swimming. The Kalimabenge River, which separated the mountains from the city, was not far from our house, and we spent a lot of time there. We washed our dishes and clothes in the river, and then jumped in the water in our underwear. After swimming, we sat on boulders and collected smooth pebbles to juggle in the air. We also liked to swim in nearby Lake Tanganyika, one of the biggest lakes in the world. Our parents were always warning us not to swim.
“You could get malaria,” Mom would say.
“You could drown.”
“You could get eaten by crocodiles.”
None of these possibilities ever stopped us.
Sometimes we would sneak away from home, quietly climbing the dark-green gate in our front yard and jumping over it so our parents wouldn’t hear it creak. We would spend hours in the sunbaked water, emerging with skin so tight it felt like if you smiled, your face would crack. Our skin would look ashy from the residue, a telltale sign that we had been swimming. To wipe away the ashy evidence, we would rub ourselves with lotion or Vaseline before we returned home. Deborah would always be waiting for me outside our gate with the Vaseline. She rubbed it all over my body, making sure she got every spot so I wouldn’t get in trouble.
I knew she longed for the day when she could swim with us.
THREE
I HAVE MAGICAL MEMORIES OF OUR HOME IN Uvira, before we lost my sister to war. We had a big African palm tree inside our front gate, and in the backyard, a banana tree and my favorite tree, called a madammé tree. It produced a fruit I loved—like a mango, rough and green on the outside, with reddish-yellow flesh on the inside, tart and sweet. My brother Alex taught me how to climb the tree to get more fruit, and, of course, I fell out of the tree.
I remember Deborah sitting beneath the tree, looking up at us in the branches. She was not big enough to climb, but you could see the desire in her eyes. She wanted to be up there with me.
“Come, I’ll lift you up!” I would call to her.
“Oh no, you won’t!” Mom would yell from the kitchen window.
One of my favorite memories is of my pet monkey, Kiki, a playful little fellow who was about as tall as my knees and followed me everywhere. Deborah loved Kiki too, but she was so young, she didn’t understand that she shouldn’t tease him with bananas. She would show him a banana and playfully yank it back, and they would get into these banana fights, pushing and pulling the fruit back and forth. That never ended well.
Our big yellow house was kid heaven. It was so roomy that we could play hide-and-seek with our friends indoors without annoying the adults. The house was one story, with high ceilings, a living room lined with cushy gray sofas, and a big dining room with a long wooden table. Deborah and I would eat our meals sitting directly on the table because we were too short to sit in the chairs. We had all the modern conveniences—electricity, running water, indoor plumbing, a bathtub, and a small stove. We didn’t have hot running water. No one in our neighborhood did. It never even occurred to me that you could have hot water coming from the faucet. We didn’t need it: It was almost always warm outside, and if the nights got chilly, Mom would heat up the water for our baths.
My parents weren’t wealthy. They moved into the house when they came down from the mountains, as the house had simply been abandoned. Many homes in Uvira had been left empty by families fleeing the conflicts that plagued the area
. The homes belonged to no one. My parents saw it as a temporary living situation, and began building a house of their own. But in the meantime, that yellow house became home.
We had a radio, and I remember an educational UNICEF program for kids about different topics, like HIV. We also had a television, which was rare at that time. Dad was always calling Alex to adjust the antenna to get the best reception. Alex was small, the perfect height to fiddle with the antenna.
“Move it to the left,” Dad would direct him from the sofa.
“Try to the right.”
“Wait.”
“Hold it. Try it there.”
Alex would oblige, but not without rolling his eyes.
I watched soccer, cartoons, music shows featuring British boy bands, and world music from Ireland, America, Burundi. There was a Saturday program called Au-delà du Son—Beyond the Sound—which featured music from all over the world. This was the only way we knew which American songs were trending. Nelly, R. Kelly, Destiny’s Child, Westlife, and Céline Dion were among the Western artists we liked. I could sing Nelly and Kelly Rowland’s “Dilemma” word for word, but I had no idea what the words meant. The same went for any R. Kelly or Céline Dion song.
As for Congolese music, I was the best dancer in the house, and I made sure everyone knew it. I danced the popular hip-swinging Ndombolo dance step by step, without missing a beat, starting at the age of five. I wasn’t afraid to perform for anyone willing to watch me.
I also watched the soccer World Cup with great interest; I loved the game. My team was Brazil, and when my guys lost to France in 1998, I cried my eyes out. My parents and siblings all laughed at me because I was such a passionate fan.
How Dare the Sun Rise Page 2