Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen

by Lisa J Shannon

  But during that year of bad news, we sat together at her dining room table over many a cup of peach tea, both of us suspended somewhere between Congo and America.

  Then it dawned on me: What if we could go to Dungu together, just as she had suggested so many times before? Even if the US media weren’t covering Kony’s attacks on her homeland, her remote pocket of Congo, we could collect her family’s stories and share them with the world. Maybe Francisca could transform those anxious nights into a greater good. Maybe I could help her help her people.

  We were wading into a deeper crocodile swamp than we knew, of course. We couldn’t see then what our prodding might unravel. Or the fact that by the time our story reached its end, so many of the people central to our time in Dungu would be dead.

  At the time we dreamed up our journey, it seemed purely good.

  Francisca mulled over the notion of a joint trip to Dungu. All those losses. All those late nights. All those groggy mornings, up early to peddle gourmet salts to aspiring foodies who would never ask or understand her newly tired eyes.

  Francisca decided to go.

  Dust

  • • • •

  Our plane skipped along a dirt landing strip stamped into a grassy field on the edge of Dungu. Francisca’s family members, about twenty of them, emerged from the shadows of the brick hangar and stood at attention as our plane came to a stop. To Francisca, after endless ringing and ringing and what-might-have-happened redials, it felt surreal. Looking out the tiny window at her beloved familiars, they now seemed somehow unfamiliar. This was not the joyous celebration of previous arrivals: Francisca could see by the way they held themselves that things had changed. The mournful drape of skinnier bodies, panicked eyes, the roomy smiles that had once greeted her now collapsed. They all looked older.

  Dungu smacked of dust and heat. It hadn’t rained yet that season, a misfortune worn by every blade of roadside grass, hovering in the air, sucked in with each gritty breath. Wisps of ash swarmed in drifts against a dull sky.

  I followed as Francisca stepped down from the plane, enveloped by family under the wing. She embraced Mama Koko first. They both cried with relief.

  As family members took their turns to say hello to Francisca, each holding on extra long and hard, Mama Koko stood back. She wore a vivid print dress and wrap like the rest of the women, each bursting with colors and patterns. Unlike the others who clutched their handbags and donned Sunday-best wigs and heels, Mama Koko wore comfortable sandals and a loose wrap. Her hair was cut close to her head for low maintenance. She held herself with an easy grace that must come with being the family’s presiding matriarch.

  Gunshots echoed across town, from the direction of Mama Koko’s place. Francisca watched the family exchange tense glances. Francisca looked over at me, snapping photos, oblivious. She wondered: Should I tell her?

  We’d almost canceled the trip. About a week before our departure, Francisca got another bad-news call about a fresh attack.

  Most attacks raged in the countryside north of Dungu, driving villagers into town, under the shadow of the United Nations compound and the Congolese army patrols. But a week before our trip, an attack happened inside Dungu. As if calling a bluff, the gunmen just strolled into town. Right past the UN airstrip. Right past the Congolese army patrols. The LRA opened fire on residents, killing, abducting, beating a woman to death with firewood.

  No one—not the United Nations, not the Congolese army—intervened.

  It happened about a mile from Mama Koko’s home, where we had been planning to stay.

  Before Francisca got the news, Kevin and their kids hadn’t offered any commentary on our plan. Francisca could feel it, though: They didn’t want her to go. When Francisca mentioned the in-town attack to Kevin, he didn’t say much, but Francisca’s daughter Lomingo came over and gave her a talking-to about abandoning the trip. “But think how you would feel if it was me over there,” Francisca said. “If I don’t go now, I may never see Mama Koko again.”

  Francisca knew she had to tell me about that attack. When she called, I could hear the angst in her voice—fear, but not for her own safety, or mine. She was scared that I would cancel. And she wouldn’t go alone.

  I said, as though willing it to be true, “We’ll be fine.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Francisca said.

  “We’ll be fine.”

  “Yeah. We’ll be fine.”

  Neither of us slept that night. When we talked the next day, we stumbled on an eerie kismet: We’d both dreamed the night before that the LRA cut off our arms.

  At the time, I tried to problem-solve. I sought counsel from policy experts. Some advised that the key was having a getaway vehicle and staying on the other side of town. I asked my friend Sasha, who had spent two years in Northern Uganda, “So, if we see the LRA, any safety tips?”

  Stunned by the naiveté of the question, he replied, “If you see the LRA, you’re dead.”

  LRA gunmen were spotted in Mama Koko’s neighborhood the morning of our arrival.

  Francisca was plenty safety-conscious. She was so nervous about the rape crisis to the south that she wore layers of tights and leggings under her skirt throughout our layover in Ituri. She figured the layers would slow any would-be predator while she screamed for help. But when she heard the gunshots on the landing strip, she decided we were already in Dungu. There was nothing to be accomplished by freaking out her American travel companion with reports of gunfire.

  Francisca decided to keep it to herself.

  Dette

  • • • •

  Francisca introduced me to Mama Koko, who seemed almost shy as she smiled and nodded formally while we shook hands. But with no words in common, the undercurrents of this kind of vague pleasantry are so often misunderstood. She was sizing me up, just as she had Kevin so many years ago.

  As though Mama Koko understood English, I said, “So lovely to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much about you!”

  We slid onto the peeling vinyl seats of a banged-up Toyota 4Runner that would transport us across town. I turned to look at Mama Koko and Francisca in the back seat. When Francisca showed me her family photo albums back in Portland, Oregon, I thought that Mama Koko and Francisca looked the same age, despite their sixteen-year difference. But crammed against these peeling vinyl seats, Mama Koko looked like the younger of the two, next to Francisca’s graying hair. Mama Koko carried herself with the reserve and grace of a woman who’d been worshiped by men for a lifetime. Back when she was young Bernadette, her long hair and gap-toothed smile made her the definition of beauty in these parts.

  She was born around 1940, to mother Vivica (later known as Tita Vica) and father Bi. Her father was the first child of Bondo and Nahilite. He was a twin, hence the name Bi. In Dungu, twins are always named Bi—first twin—and Siro—second twin. Girl or boy, it doesn’t matter. The issue for Bondo and Nahilite was that after the boy twins, they had a set of girl twins. They dutifully named the girls Bi and Siro, like their brothers. Even with Nahilite’s third pregnancy, and the subsequent birth of yet another set of girl twins, they followed the custom and named the girls Bi and Siro. The fourth set of twins, this time a boy and a girl, was another story. To avoid confusion, they broke with the custom and named the babies Fabino and Veronique. Shortly thereafter, when Nahilite was pregnant with what everyone assumed was a fifth set of twins, she died due to complications with the pregnancy. All of the other twins lived to adulthood.

  Mama Koko, young Bernadette, was married as an infant, though she didn’t know it until she was called out of class at the age of twelve. Her classmates and the nuns watched as the young beauty in her Catholic-school uniform arrived in the mission’s courtyard garden to find a strange old man waiting for her, introducing himself as her husband.

  She mostly noticed he was old. As in way older than a twelve-year-old. As in who cares what he was wearing, where he worked, if he had money, why he was there … old. He hovered and declared he had
come to claim her. She wept, protesting until the priest called her into his office, along with the old man and her father Bi, who, it turned out, had made the arrangement at Bernadette’s birth.

  The custom dictated that when a woman was pregnant, any want-to-be husband planted a special flower in front of her home. If the baby was a girl, and the parents kept the flower, it meant their daughter was betrothed. Apparently Bi and Vivica let this man’s flower stay on. One can’t say why motherless Bi would care to marry off his infant daughter, or why his word was strictly adhered to, but Bi was a man who stuck to his commitments.

  Nonetheless, the priest asked Bernadette, “Do you want to marry this man?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s decided,” the priest decreed.

  Bi did not speak to his daughter for three years. Nor did Bernadette speak to her father. Silence hung in the family home like a death sentence. The priest had issued her the one and only intervention she would ever get. With each new suitor, the threat was sharpened: Get married or die, if not by a rejected would-be husband, then dad would do the job.

  Bernadette focused on squeezing every last drop out of school before that dreaded event.

  At fifteen, Bernadette finished the fifth grade, which the Belgians—during their colonization of Congo—deemed the highest level of education necessary for the Congolese. Few went on to sixth grade or beyond. It didn’t matter how smart or dedicated a student Bernadette may have been.

  When the school year ended, Bernadette retreated to the family farm to help her mom, as she did every July. One day, they told her to dress up and get out to the receiving room. A man had come calling. André worked at the general store. He had spotted Bernadette in town running errands with her mother.

  André and his only brother Alexander were both sons of Gamé, who had four wives and forty-three children. André was more like a father to Alexander, who was more than twenty years his junior and the youngest of the forty-three children. They had grown up on their father’s land in then–Belgian Congo, picking cotton for the Belgians and Greeks who had come to the colony to build their personal empires.

  For the most part André and Alexander didn’t mind the white people. Except, of course, if André or Alexander or any of the other workers got behind in planting and the white people made them lie on the ground and whipped them like they were slaves. If anyone did anything they deemed bad, like brew local liquor, they beat the offender. As Alexander would later recall, “They had a right to do it because they were white. They acted like they owned people.”

  André did not intend to spend his life picking cotton. He got a job as a salesman for the local Greek shopkeeper who ran the general store in town so he could observe, up close, how to run a business. That’s where he spotted Bernadette.

  Peeking out into the private family receiving room, Bernadette knew the game was up. Bi had entertained other suitors outside like any other visitor, but he invited this man into the private family home. He was serious.

  André was about thirty years old and his salesman job was respectable, on a par with Bi’s work as a watchman for the cotton company. Bernadette knew that her parents would never push for her to go back to school.

  The way she figured it, she had two choices: Marry this man, or escape.

  She accepted the proposal and stalled. André visited often, and took to calling her Dette for short. She laughed and charmed and played along. All the while, she was scheming that when the time was right she would make a run for it, far away, to a life entirely her own.

  After months of long talks together, André came to escort Dette to his home. Her mother and aunt gathered her things and walked with her on the mile-long trek into the center of town, where André lived in a couple of rooms attached to the back of the store. They left her with a pile of wedding gifts, mostly household items like baskets and spoons and cooking pans that she didn’t know how to use. Dette had been too focused on math tables and calligraphy to learn the domestic arts. Doing laundry, scouring scalded pots, following a good recipe for leafy greens—none of these had ever entered her daily routine, a major flaw in her fake-wife charade.

  But the biggest threat to Dette’s grand getaway scheme turned out to be André himself. Instead of beating her or mocking her lack of domestic prowess, for a month André patiently taught Dette. They did laundry together. They scoured pots, swept, husked rice, and cooked leafy greens. They fed and clothed André’s young brother, eleven-year-old Alexander, who decided that Dette was his new mother, even though she was only four years his elder.

  No, André didn’t pounce on her. But sometime during that month of new marriage, sometime between the cooking lessons, the shared rice and burnt fish, the shopping trips to the market, maybe in the dark hours in their dark room behind the store, hands wandered. For a few minutes, the gap-toothed, long-haired beauty abandoned her getaway plan.

  Dette buried her dream of escape forever in the quiet moment she realized she was pregnant with their first baby, Francisca.

  Lost Shiny

  • • • •

  On shock absorbers worn to nothing, the 4Runner—or “Runner,” as I called it—bounced and lurched along the open fields on the outskirts of town. Cattle grazed with white crane-like birds perched on their backs. “Beya,” Francisca said. When she was a child, the kids all chanted and clapped a little song to those birds: Beya pesa ngai pembe, napesa yo moindo. If you give me your whiteness, I will give you my blackness.

  The children would point out little pale spots on their skin, like under their fingernails, and declare, “See! I’m turning white!” Years later, the joke took hold with Kevin. They would point at her pale nail beds or his freckles. See, I’m turning white! See, I’m turning black!

  Smoke rose from the blackened ground along the edge of the road like smoldering arteries as huts grew denser, hedges or twig-fences defining the yards—“parcels,” as locals called them. Each parcel consisted of several round adobe huts, topped with straw and supported with crooked, polished wooden poles. Wood and woven palm-leaf chairs followed the shade across each yard. Locals were burning away the roadside brush for easier LRA sightings.

  Dungu’s soil was hard-packed under the weight of the 100,000 extra heads lying down for the night, the extra 200,000 feet pacing its grounds. We couldn’t see them from the main road, but tucked away under shady palm groves and fields designated for planting, the town bulged with refugees living in tents made of palm leaves, open fire pits out front, next to oil cans marked USA: Not for Resale. Dungu was comfortably suited to fit its 25,000 residents. By January 2010, it had swollen—according to reports from Francisca’s family—to 125,000, due to an influx of those fleeing surrounding villages in LRA territory.

  On our flight’s descent, we could see the town radiating from converging rivers—the Dungu and the Kibali. The south was the safer part of town: the airport, the hospital, the big mission, the Procure de Mission where we arranged to stay after news of the in-town attack. The main road ran through the center of town and then arched across the Dungu River, splitting into two roads stretching upward, like arms flung open in celebration, or hands cradled in offering. That neighborhood to the north, that offering, was Bamokandi, the site of the most recent attack. Mama Koko’s place sat on that junction. With the exception of the UN airbase, everything, even one mile beyond Bamokandi, was considered LRA territory.

  As we approached the town center, it was obvious that the Belgians had had some kind of grand plan for this place. Who wouldn’t? Open grassy fields on the banks of converging rivers must have positively screamed for a manor house. And they got one.

  The story went that back when Congo was still a colony Belgium funded a two-lane bridge across the Kibali, but the Belgian administrator responsible for the project built just the one lane to specifications, with its frills and high arches. He used the remaining funds to build himself a European manor house on the Kibali’s banks, like a welcome gate. The house was aband
oned at Independence. By the 1970s, its roof had caved in, but the floors still held strong. Locals used it for terrace parties for a time; Francisca and Kevin attended dances there in the 1980s. By 2010, the manor was a roofless mass of plants and stone crumbling into the river: Townspeople, chickens, bicyclists with precariously balanced loads, and SUVs still shoved past each other between the brittle archways of its half bridge. The single slender lane stretching across the Kibali River was the only passage from the south into the center of town.

  We bounced across the river in our Runner. I watched the water gliding over smooth rocks below, reeds and grasses bent with the breeze, so inviting. It made me thirsty. It made me want to rip off the suffocating black cotton sticking to my limbs. “It makes me want to swim.”

  “Not safe,” Francisca said. “Crocodiles.”

  Among the polished rocks, women laid out laundry to dry as water rushed through the rusted skeleton of a truck. According to Francisca, the driver had plowed straight off the bridge, made the long drop, and crashed the truck. He walked away from the accident without much more than a few scratches. A few months later, when he was hunting in the bush, a buffalo killed him. When I remarked on the irony, Francisca shrugged. “When it’s your time, it’s your time.”

  Downtown Dungu was a ghost of someone’s colonial dream. Long rows of ancient mango trees lined the main roads, reminiscent of the driveways to southern plantations. Everything was scattered wide, in overgrown fields that never became the thriving town center: a government office here, a police station there, in the shade of a mango tree. Mostly the buildings, stamped with old bureau or shop names, were empty cement shells, or boarded up, in various states of decay. Some had rotten doors swung open to building innards that now housed only piles of broken bricks fixed in place by fast-growing weeds.

  An old-fashioned general store, labeled with Greek lettering from the colonial days, marked the center of town. Its cracked front steps led up to a wide, wraparound veranda. Inside, the old Victorian-era wooden shelves held the best of Dungu’s imported goods.