by Helen Thorpe
While visiting an orphanage (armed conflict leads to fatalities and poor health care, both of which produce orphans), we stumbled across a young father who had come to surrender his child, swaddled in a white blanket. The mother had died in childbirth, the father said. He was turning the baby over to officials in the laundry room, of all places—nearby industrial-sized washing machines churned dirty clothing in soapy water. The father spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, as if the abandonment of his child were one more domestic routine, akin to housekeeping.
Outside, children in rags were kicking a ball made out of old plastic bags wound into a sphere. The head of the orphanage brought over a former child soldier. The onetime rebel was now in his twenties, and he worked as a laborer at the orphanage. He wore dark blue coveralls tucked into boots splattered with manure and he carried a switch, as if at any moment he expected to herd cows.
The young man said his parents had been killed during the Second Congo War, and he had been kidnapped by a militia group that reported to Bosco Ntaganda, known as “the Terminator.” Ntaganda was a notorious commander in the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP). He was later accused by the International Criminal Court in The Hague of rape, murder, sexual slavery of civilians, and kidnapping hundreds of boys, plying them with drugs and alcohol to numb their fear, and using them to cook, clean, or fight alongside his adult soldiers. “I was not happy to fight,” the former child soldier told us. “I was forced to do this.” He added casually that he had killed many people. “Sometimes I dream that now they are coming back to attack me,” he said, in the same flat voice.
Before leaving Goma, we visited Heal Africa, one of the city’s largest hospitals. It specializes in treating victims of sexual violence, and its doctors have become experts in surgery required by rape victims, such as fistula repair. Women travel to Goma from many neighboring provinces to seek treatment. The Democratic Republic of Congo is not unique in experiencing epidemic levels of sexual violence, as rape has been used for some time as a weapon to terrorize populations elsewhere in Africa and in other parts of the world, but the prevalence of rape in the Congo has been especially severe and long-lasting. Women in North Kivu report significantly more sexual violence than women in other parts of the Congo. As a result, Goma has earned the sad distinction of being named the rape capital of the world. Another study, published in the journal Conflict and Health, about the experiences of 193 survivors of rape in the eastern part of the DRC, found that 83 percent said their attacker wore some kind of military uniform, 69 percent were gang-raped, and 46 percent had been abducted in the process of the assault.
At Heal Africa, we spoke with staff about their efforts to lead a regional campaign for more open conversations about the extent of sexual violence, so that victims would feel comfortable seeking help. The study published in Conflict and Health reported that almost half the women surveyed had waited more than a year before obtaining medical treatment. The study also reported that 29 percent of the women who had been raped were subsequently rejected by their families. The hospital was conducting the outreach effort in partnership with local pastors throughout the nearby provinces of North Kivu, Rutshuru, and Oriental. The goal was to explain that rape was widespread, that women who experienced it were not alone, and that rape victims should feel no shame about coming forward to ask for medical attention.
After speaking with staff at Heal Africa, we stepped back outside into the powerful glare of the sun at the equator. Off in the distance, I heard singing. It occurred to me vaguely that I had heard the same sound earlier, when we had arrived at Heal Africa. Who was singing? I wandered off in the direction of the voices, which were harmonizing in a compelling way. On the far side of a pickup truck, gathered in the shelter of a generous shade tree, I found a dozen women standing in a circle along with a man who was holding a Bible. Many of the women were dressed as nurses; I saw one in rose-colored scrubs, with her hair curled into ringlets, wearing gold hoop earrings, clapping her hands over her head. Next to her was a woman wearing a form-fitting pagne in a majestic shade of purple, and beside her, a nurse in aqua scrubs, then a woman in a lemon pagne. The group was swaying in unison, making the flared skirts of the form-hugging dresses flounce as the singers moved back and forth. We asked why they had assembled in the courtyard of the hospital. One of the singers said they belonged to a local church, and they thought the women seeking treatment might find it comforting to hear the sound of gospel music. In this way, I kept being reminded that the Congo is full of people who choose to meet the challenges of life in a sometimes harsh place with courage, faith, and generosity. Such uncelebrated gentleness, alongside the publicized atrocities. Here, in the middle of the week, people gathered to sing hymns. It was the kind of truth that does not make headlines, giving Goma a lopsided reputation. From afar, it seemed like a terrible place, but up close I saw evil and extraordinary goodness manifested side by side.
As we drove away from Heal Africa, I thought back to the day when Miss Pauline from Jewish Family Service had told me about her breakthrough with Methusella: his tissue paper collage with a pale pink square at the center. Both Miss Pauline and I had known it meant something—even if we couldn’t say what, exactly. Visiting Heal Africa, I felt as though I understood better what Methusella had been saying. In fact, he had been speaking quite plainly; I simply had not known enough about the place he was from to understand. Of course he would have worried every day about his mother’s well-being, and about the sanctity of women in general. He would have thought it was his job to save his female relatives if the rebels had found their hiding spot. How terrifying it must have been for him to think of what might have ensued had he failed.
* * *
That evening, I was standing outside our hotel in Goma, admiring the blue-gray expanse of the vast lake, when I turned around to see a tall, handsome young man in a pale pink dress shirt and black trousers walking toward me. He looked like Solomon. This was Imani, the boys’ first cousin. He was twenty-eight years old, and he lived in Goma, where he worked as a uniformed security guard for the United Nations. Imani wore a cautious expression, but I smiled broadly at the sight of his familiar-yet-unfamiliar face and tried to put him at ease. I described how well his cousins had done during their first year in America, bragging about Solomon and Methusella’s prowess in the classroom, and mentioning that Methusella had been invited to serve in student government. Imani remembered the two boys fondly from the era when they had lived in Buganza. “They were always playing football,” he said. “They were always calling their friends to play with them. They would have constant football games. They were so active.”
Because I could not make it safely to Buganza, Imani returned to his home village, picked up one of his uncles, and traveled across the border into Uganda so that we could meet in a location that was safer for me. This was Nehemie, Tchiza’s younger brother. The only brother to remain in the DRC, Nehemie had become the de facto leader of the family members who remained there. I met with Imani and Nehemie at Lake Bunyonyi, where we spent several days together. Nehemie was a tall, thoughtful man who reminded me a lot of my maternal uncles. They were the kind of men who could pull silver-sheathed calves out of recumbent cows, who could pick up runts from pigs’ litters and guess their weight by holding them in one hand, who could eyeball a tree and know its age. Men who understood birth, death, dirt, and animals. One day, Nehemie and I took a walk along the shores of the lake, and he named all the plants we saw. It was what my uncles would have done.
The village of Buganza was secreted away in a remote location, and it had remained largely untouched during the early phases of the Congo’s strife. At that time, it had been home to approximately nine thousand people. Most of the villagers made a livelihood by farming, although a few merchants sold salt, soap, and sugar. As the wars ground on, however, the village’s population was cut by one-third. Many residents were killed by militia groups; others died of diseases that followed in the wake of the
conflict; scores more fled, seeking safety. The violence escalated slowly over time, hitting a peak in 2008. After some local young men joined groups of mai mai, and the mai mai began pillaging to support themselves, the attacks grew more frequent, because the young men knew the location of all the nearby villages. “Things got worse because they got guns,” Nehemie said. “Every day, attack; every day, attack. Maybe you are digging in the fields, and you hear guns and shouting, you hear the sounds of bullets. And you see mai mai moving through the area, going to another forest that is nearby. It is like a daily process. The other day, some people were carrying baskets of peas, and the rebels attacked those people, and took them into the forest.”
Nehemie and Tchiza had a sister named Hinja, who was killed at the hands of rebels. Imani’s father died during this period, too. They provided no details, and I was left to imagine what must have happened to family members who had perished. Nehemie conveyed the extent of the violence, however, saying: “In the morning, you might step over four dead bodies.” Rebels were constantly wiping out the livelihoods of the villagers. I learned this after Nehemie explained why he had gotten married only recently, although he was in his forties. “The rebels stole everything I owned, four different times,” he said. “Each time, I had to start over. Everything was stolen—sorghum, goats, it was all stolen. It was like starting a whole new life. So it took a long time for me to have enough money to be able to propose to a woman.”
The violence had peaked during what became known as “the Kivu conflict.” Local mai mai had feuded with Nandes from the nearby Rwenzori Mountains, a range of snow-capped peaks on the border between the DRC and Uganda. Widespread violence broke out again after the formation of the CNDP, a militia group friendly to Tutsis and Nandes but hostile to Hutus. This was the same militia group Tchiza had mentioned during one of our early conversations—“say, ehn, day, pay”—and also the same group that had abducted the child soldier we spoke with at the orphanage. For a period of several years, the CNDP clashed repeatedly with both the DRC’s military and the main Hutu militia. The violence was especially marked from 2006 through 2008. Anybody who played a role in local politics became a target.
Wondering what impact these circumstances had upon Solomon and Methusella, I found a study of adolescent mental health in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, published in 2009 in JAMA Pediatrics. It described a survey conducted between November 2007 through February 2008 in the Ituri district, a neighboring province that also saw high conflict during the same time frame. A total of 1,016 teenagers participated, their average age between fifteen and sixteen years old. Of the total, 95 percent witnessed at least one traumatic event, and the average number of traumatic events a given teenager had witnessed was between four and five; about 10 percent had witnessed nine or more. The types of events the teenagers had lived through were the loss of a family member or a friend due to a violent event (72 percent), witnessing someone being killed (66 percent), experiencing attacks involving gunfire (66 percent), seeing dead or mutilated bodies (66 percent), experiencing the looting or the burning of their own homes (62 percent), witnessing the act of rape (33 percent), losing a parent (26 percent), and being kidnapped themselves (19 percent). Just over half the respondents reported symptoms that researchers identified as post-traumatic stress, including intrusive thoughts, hyperarousal, avoidance, or numbing.
In August 2008, after the violence had grown intolerable, Tchiza and his entire extended family had fled on foot from Buganza. All of Tchiza’s siblings left, including Nehemie. So did Tchiza’s mother, even though she was seventy-four years old and suffered from rheumatism, poor circulation, and an irregular heartbeat. They all made it across the border into Uganda, where they sought refuge in various transit centers (temporary structures set up to house refugees) or in the homes of good Samaritans. Then Tchiza and his siblings, along with their children, began the long walk to Kyangwali. However, Tchiza’s mother kept falling behind. After UN peacekeeping forces clashed with the CNDP in a series of heated battles at the end of 2008, the rebel forces and the peacekeeping forces announced a cease-fire. During the ensuing calm, Nehemie turned back to Buganza, because his elderly mother could not manage the journey. Essentially, Nehemie, who was childless, sacrificed himself so that his siblings who had children could continue on to Kyangwali.
* * *
During the time we spent in Goma beside the blue-gray waters of Lake Kivu, I gradually became aware of the extensive economic links between the Democratic Republic of Congo and the place that I called home. These links primarily involved the manufacture of smartphones and laptops. Over its history, the Congo has served as a place from which other powers have extracted resources; as Adam Hochschild documents in King Leopold’s Ghost, Belgium’s plunder of the Congo began with the desire for rubber and later expanded to include gold, copper, and precious gems.
In the present moment, many miners were digging for coltan. After the black metallic ore is refined into tantalum, it can hold a high electrical charge and yet resists heat. Coltan has become essential for the miniaturization of electronic devices, and approximately 30 percent of the world’s supply comes from the Congo. Warlords frequently capture mines in the DRC and use the proceeds to fund the operations of their militia groups. According to news reports, children make up 40 percent of the mining workforce, and miners work in highly unsafe conditions. The same issues apply to the trade in cobalt, a mineral used in the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries. Sixty percent of the world’s cobalt comes from the Congo.
Although manufacturers such as IBM, Apple, and Samsung employ entire departments to ensure that minerals sold by Congolese warlords do not wind up in their products, this is difficult to enforce. Cobalt is bought by middlemen and sold as if it originated elsewhere, while coltan is smuggled out of the Congo and commingled with ore from other places. Everywhere we went, people referred to the coltan rush. They said things like, “Coltan is worth more than gold.” The United Nations estimates that perhaps three-quarters of the coltan coming out of the DRC originates in illegal operations. In other words, the violence taking place in the Congo “feeds off of the global demand for electronics,” as a video from Intel acknowledges. What is happening in the DRC sounds barbaric and far-off, and we want to believe that we are not complicit, yet we carry small parts of the Congo everywhere we go, in the very devices we use to define ourselves as belonging to the developed world.
* * *
The two instructors from the Air Force Academy planned to remain in Goma for several more days to interview former rebels. I separated from my traveling companions in the hopes of gaining admittance to Kyangwali, the refugee settlement where Solomon and Methusella had lived before moving to the United States. It was located in an especially remote part of Uganda. Getting there would take fifteen hours, and I was told to expect a bumpy ride. It was a relief to leave the gray cityscape of Goma behind. We drove through the countryside’s reassuring refrain of red dirt, emerald-green crops, and turquoise sky for what felt like an eternity. I saw many fields of sorghum and many fields of tea. In Rwanda, we drove on the right side of the road, and in Uganda, we drove on the left, because that country had been colonized by the British. We reached our hotel close to midnight and got on the road again the next morning by 6:00. The settlement did not appear on many maps, and we wanted to allow for the possibility of getting lost. On our second day of driving, most of the roads we took were unpaved, and in our wake billowed a long train of seething red dust. We drove past scores of children walking to school in their uniforms—light blue in one village, maroon in the next—and the children covered their mouths, so as not to eat the dust.
As we drew nearer, we began asking for directions of anyone we saw on the road. We stopped to consult with an especially well-dressed woman wearing a gold pagne. She had a lavender boa draped around her neck and wore black pumps, even though she had been walking along a dirt road. The woman asked for a lift—she was headed to Kyangwali as well
. She climbed into our vehicle and said her name was Tamari. Her family had moved to the refugee settlement from North Kivu when she was a small child, and she had lived there until the age of eighteen. Recently, Tamari had moved to Kampala, where she had been putting herself through college. She traveled to the Congo to buy its brilliant fabrics, then returned to Uganda to sell the cloth. When she amassed enough proceeds, she paid for a year of tuition. She was studying to become a social worker.
At Tamari’s instruction, we turned down an unmarked dirt road. Almost two miles later, we came to a sign that said KYANGWALI REFUGEE SETTLEMENT, with a gatehouse. A sign there asked, WHAT IS YOUR CONTRIBUTION IN PREVENTING GBV? (gender-based violence). Tamari guided us toward a cluster of administrative buildings, near an enormous magenta bougainvillea. She pointed out the field office, a yellow building with a blue metal roof. Inside, an officious man sat behind a desk, stubbornly thwarting all who sought entrance. We grappled with him ineffectively until Tamari scolded the man. Then he ushered us into a conference room, a harried secretary materialized, and I met with the settlement’s efficient commandant.
The commandant accepted a used laptop computer that I had offered to donate to the refugee settlement. Then she provided a thorough overview of the settlement’s population. One-quarter of the world’s refugees housed in formal camp settings live somewhere on the continent of Africa; Uganda’s refugee population had swelled to half a million, and Kyangwali was one of five major settlements located in that country. The refugee population at Kyangwali had grown to forty-three thousand people as of May 2016; the vast majority were Congolese. The settlement was more than fifty years old and consisted of sixteen villages spread over ninety-two square miles. It had been receiving a continual stream of new arrivals, over one thousand individuals in the preceding three months, primarily from North Kivu. The most recent spasm of violence there had caused another sizable influx.