We needed water, so Francisca’s brother Antoine ran inside while we stalled outside the store. I looked back at the cathedral of ancient mango trees hovering over brick walls capped with razors: the United Nations compound. From the road, we could see just the tops of their sterile-white cargo containers serving as offices and housing. That compound was where whites used to play tennis when Francisca was a child, and where Kevin played hackie-sack in the ’80s.
I stared down Dungu’s other main street, about two blocks long, a row of old shops with wide columns and frilly Victorian embellishments ornamenting the porches, broken or in half-hearted states of repair. Most of the shops looked closed. A couple of hopeful stalls were set up on the road, at the base of mango trees. Each had a simple plank. One belonged to a local artist who sold decorative ebony carvings; the other held about a dozen reused bottles of petrol.
Those were my impressions of Dungu, ten minutes deep.
To Francisca, Dungu was something else entirely. She noted what had changed since her last visit. “In Dungu, we have dark skin and we’re shiny. People lost their shiny.”
“From malnutrition?” I asked.
“From misery.”
“We slept there,” Mama Koko said from the backseat of the Toyota 4Runner, gesturing toward one of the covered verandas, referring to the family’s quasi-refuge during attacks, when they camped out in front of the UN. She had a straightforward, just-the-facts manner. No recounting of the horror, the horror. She pointed to the opposite veranda: “There, too.”
Francisca skimmed the scene with its familiar textures of home. Her first memories faded in at that very spot, under the Greek lettering, in the Dungu general store.
Harvest
• • • •
Francisca first remembers looking at general-store customers through glass display cases, listening to the rattle of sewing machines making ladies’ dresses on the spot, the songs of women camped on the front porch cleaning coffee beans and little fish, their harmonies echoing into the shop. Her dad André was still a salesman at the general store, working for the Greek owner. He took her to work, where she sat behind the counter, surrounded by dry goods stacked on shelves so high it seemed like the tops disappeared into the shadows of the ceiling. Customers were greeted on their way in by displays of ladies’ cloth, piles of beans along one side, bags of dried sardines and big cuts of smoked fish along the other.
Francisca, or Cisca as they called her then, didn’t know much about white people—just the Greek store owner and those she met when her dad took her out to eat at the Bon Garcon, the Good Boy, where she gorged on bread. Sometimes little Cisca got bored with the grown-ups coming and going at the store, so she slipped out back to play with the Greek’s son Nico, who was about her age. They spent hours playing with his toys from Europe, wind-up cars and wooden choo-choo trains.
Kids in Dungu didn’t have toys like that. Mama Koko—Dette back then—taught little Cisca how to make baby dolls out of husks from banana trunks. Sometimes she sawed off the ends of corncobs and arranged them upright like bowling pins so Cisca and her brothers could bowl them down with oranges.
One day Nico’s dad sent a gift for little Cisca: a toy horse-scooter, one whose head bobbed up and down as the children scooted it around the yard. Nico’s dad had brought it all the way from Greece. Cisca and her brothers squealed with delight as they rode their new metal horsey, head bobbing as they crisscrossed their own dirt tracks. Little Cisca was so enthralled by the new toy that it took a while for her to notice the cars speeding by.
When she finally looked up, she saw all the white people’s cars on their way out of town, their roofs piled high with everything they owned roped down, covered in tarps.
She asked her mama Dette, “What’s going on?”
“We got independence,” Dette answered. “The white people have to leave.”
Little Cisca would later learn that “We got independence” meant that the Belgians had finally released their colonial claim on Congo and granted sovereignty. Congolese collective resentment over decades of maiming, murder, and rubber shipped downriver sent most white people fleeing for fear of reprisals.
“What about Nico?” Cisca asked. She set aside her horsey and watched the road, hoping to see her playmate. His parents’ little car did eventually speed by, piled with stuff just like the others. Francisca waved, hoping to say good-bye. The whole family joined her in waving. The Greeks didn’t wave back. She figured they were probably going too fast to even see her.
The Greek owner gifted his employees with the goods he had to leave behind. In André’s years working at the general store, he’d studiously observed the Greeks doing business. André and Dette lived on a prime piece of real estate, right on Dungu’s junction to the north. Men began delivering cases of beer to the house, and André and Dette set up a shop all their own.
André noted that all the Greeks and Belgians had farms on the other side of the river, growing their own coffee and cotton. On the road a few miles outside of the village of Duru, André spotted a beautiful piece of dense jungle. No one lived out that far, but the trees with big thorns grew there. He knew that meant rich soil, perfect for a plantation. He approached the village chief about a purchase.
Dette managed the store in Dungu, while André and Alexander cleared three acres of jungle and hired a few families to help plant his first crop of coffee, cassava, rice, and peanuts.
Dette and André wasted nothing. Their plantation and shop ran on order, while home and family ran on Dette’s passion for clean. Even at the start of their new life, André’s clothes were pressed every day; Dette’s hair was always in fresh braids. The children bathed every day, the girls twice. Francisca didn’t wear clothes like the other girls did, store-bought dresses or imported used clothes from the markets, which they called tombola bwaka—Lingala for “lift and throws” or, in Zande, zili bwana, “rotten person’s clothes.” Instead, Dette made dresses for Cisca from scratch. She made them fancy, with polka dots, elastic waists, puffy sleeves, buttons up front, oversized pockets, and full skirts to twirl in the wind.
In the late afternoons, Dette braided Cisca’s hair, while Cisca napped, draped over Dette’s knees. The day ended with a lotion rubdown, and not the store-bought kind. Dette’s mother Vivica, who they called Tita Vica (“Grandmother Vica”), whipped together batches of homemade lotion consisting of palm nuts, lemon, and honey.
Tita Vica was still young and strong then, beautiful in her fancy wax dresses. Francisca tagged along with Tita Vica to the Dungu River to collect baskets full of fish in homemade traps. Tita Vica kept a special little chair for Francisca at her hut, where no one else was allowed to sit. She washed Francisca’s feet, propped them up, and served her treats, like fresh-squeezed mango juice.
On the plantation, there was a time for everything. Coffee came in the fall. By Christmas they had rice and millet. Termites came in the springtime. Dette collected, boiled, and dried them, then wrapped them in a cloth, slowly squeezing out the termite oil, a delicacy for the year. Fruit ripened during summer vacation—lemons, avocado, guava, papaya, mango.
When André’s first harvest came in, they collected a full ton of rice, plus stacks of coffee. It was enough to reinvest and grow the plantation out to the stream running on the land’s perimeter.
Francisca’s summer break coincided with the peanut harvest every July. As soon as school was out, Dette and André loaded the kids up on their bikes and rode out to Duru. They could make it in one day if the smaller kids didn’t fidget and ask for too many pee breaks.
Monkeys dangled around in the forest surrounding the field, eyeing the crops, watching as Dette corralled the children out to the fields. The children sang all day as they and Dette and André worked alongside the farm hands pulling up the peanuts.
Francisca and her parents planted a small tree in their yard, as was the custom, and drew a circle around it with ash. Every morning, at the feet of this tree, her dad said a pray
er to the spirits and placed an egg in its branches. They raised their heads, drank water, and thanked the spirits who brought food and protected the family.
When the rains didn’t come, they woke very early and went to the nearby creek with a white chicken, feet bound, along with her eggs and a bundle of rice. Spirits of the forest and ancestors lived around streams, and everyone knew if you wanted to reach them, night was the time. They dumped all the food and the chicken, bound, into the river. The chicken sank to the bottom and drowned, as the family prayed for rain.
Soon enough, André had six people working on his farm and he built a wooden house for the family to live in during their school vacations: a rectangular house of all wood with two bedrooms, and a living room with chairs made of bamboo. The three steps up to the front door made it a grand place, one they nicknamed “the castle.”
This might have been the time a successful son of a polygamist, one of forty-three children belonging to four mamas, would think about a second, or third, or fourth wife. André didn’t. “Too much drama,” Mama Koko said decades later. She added, “I wouldn’t have cared if he did. I always knew I was the one.”
André was crazy for Mama Koko. He would burst into song in front of the whole family: Oooh, my wife Dette! Oooh my wife Dette!
It made her uncomfortable. “Oh, would you stop.”
Still, he’d go on about her during meals. “Wow! My wife really knows how to cook!”
“Calm down and eat,” she’d say. “You don’t have to preach about it.”
After dinner, André would get the kids to sing: church songs, new songs, any songs. He closed his eyes and waved his hands in the air in tempo. Dette would offer dryly, “See, kids, the angels are turning around your dad.”
As Cisca got older, she offered to do all the other chores, like cleaning, boiling the water, making dinner—anything other than pulling the peanuts. She gave the farm workers’ children hard candies from the general store as a preemptive thank-you for their help with her duties. André was not impressed. “You better hold tight to your pen, girl! You’re not cut out for life on some farm. Study. Maybe you’ll marry a white guy and you can eat bread!”
For many families there was nothing extra for a harvest celebration, but Cisca’s family hosted one almost every year, a feast to thank the spirits. They timed it so the full moon could light the place up. No need to decorate. The fruit trees surrounding their home were decoration enough. Cisca knew the feast was coming when Dette began to prepare the millet wine, cooking it slowly, slowly in water, over a fire. Then she smoked fish, dried gourds for cups, made a special banana drink for the kids.
By Saturday afternoon, neighbors began to show up, with chairs and drums carved out of wood, strapped down with goat skins. The millet wine flowed, drums started thump-thump-thumping, and singing and dancing commenced. Everyone danced in a circle around the drummers: grandmas, kids, neighbors, André getting down. Dette didn’t usually dance, but at the harvest feast she full-on shook it.
Cisca and her brothers and sisters ate everything, including wild black and white birds collected from the forest, cooked in termite-oil sauce. To little Cisca, it was no-tomorrow yummy. As the evening slid into night, the kids were stuffed with treats and sent to bed. But they stayed awake, listening to the dancing and singing, creeping out to spy as the party thumped on until the sun came up.
Cisca fell asleep thinking: I am like a princess.
Still Nursing
• • • •
We pulled up to Mama Koko’s place, a one-story road-front cement house, dripping with bright orange climbers. It stood just one block from the Dungu Bridge, the gateway to the Bamokandi neighborhood, which was the site of the in-town attack and LRA sighting earlier that day.
André and Bernadette had bought the land more than half a century before, but long gone were the shelves of household goods and cases of beer. The land was now only half hers, and not by choice. It sat right on the main junction, next to a roundabout crowned with a statue of a native warrior, marking the fork in two roads heading north. Because of the house’s strategic position on the road and its strong cement walls, the Congolese army kicked the family out when it suited them, and of late, that was often. The family had moved back in only four days before our arrival.
We slipped inside the three-bedroom house, where extended-family members squished together politely in the living room, watching Francisca, Mama Koko, and me feast on an astounding by-request vegan meal: pumpkin-seed dumplings, fried bananas, homemade soy milk, brown rice with cooked cassava leaves known as pondu, bean stew, and sweet pineapple.
But it was a welcome feast among ruins. Devastation hung in the air, like the gunshots everyone heard earlier that day. The children crowded around us, watching keenly as we ate the elaborate spread, mamas chastising them to stand back. The children ate only one meal a day, and this wasn’t it.
Everything had changed. All of the treasured household items were stolen when the Congolese army took over. Mama Koko stashed their remaining good dishes and furniture with friends on the other side of town. She didn’t replace them. She didn’t keep anything nice anymore. She knew they would be taken, again.
After we ate, we resettled into the backyard yapu, a large open-air hut made of palm leaves and adobe, furnished with traditional woven lounge chairs and wooden coffee tables. This was the real living room on the property, where kids played, women cooked, and guests were welcomed.
André’s grave sat off to the side, with a couple of other family tombs, large coffin-shaped cement blocks graced with rainbow pinwheels and the wires of decapitated plastic flowers cemented into cans in place of a headstone. Francisca had brought these love-gifts from America to honor the family members who died when she was so far away, but the plastic flowers had long ago been lifted by grave robbers. Only the rainbow pinwheels remained, spinning cheerfully in the breeze.
The rest of the sprawling property, well over an acre in size, was dotted with traditional adobe huts for family and squatters. Mama Koko lived in the back in a traditional hut, not in the cement house.
In the yapu, family gathered in a loose circle and small talk lurched along—how big the children had grown, the new babies born—and soon Mama Koko and the rest were hungry to share, their minds and tongues fixed on the in-town massacre only days before. Francisca stalled, asking after neighbors and old friends. She had always avoided blood and gore: When she was a kid, she wouldn’t kill a goat or hen like her brothers and sisters did. Back in Portland, Kevin always came home from the video store with his and hers movies: an action flick for himself and a smooth comedy for Francisca. While he watched his shoot-ups, she roamed the house in self-imposed exile. She couldn’t look at that stuff. She knew they were only movies, but she cried every time someone was killed.
That first afternoon in Dungu, the family wanted to talk. Some sat close to Francisca and held her hand. Francisca wasn’t ready. She didn’t want to know the details yet, what had been stolen, what they’d never get back, as if putting off the full report could make it less real. She wanted home to still be home.
It was easier for her to steer the conversation toward me, the guest. In the United States, we often lead with the question What do you do? In Congo, they lead with Who is your family? In my case, they asked: Was I married? Did I have children?
Francisca answered on my behalf: “Someone just wrote about Lisa in a big newspaper in the US,” she said, referring to an article that Nicholas Kristof had written in the New York Times about my complete life makeover and sudden foray into activism for the Congo. “She was engaged, but she had to choose between her fiancé and Congo. She chose Congo.”
The family was quiet for a moment, processing this oddity. Then her cousin declared, “So it is like that you are a Congolese woman!”
Everyone laughed, except Papa Alexander. He hung back through the welcome. He was thin and upright, with tired but watching eyes, hidden behind the shadows of his well
-worn baseball cap and faded, stained blue outfit. He was unassuming and reserved, second in command only to Mama Koko. Alexander had reached the end of his patience with the chirpy talk. He’d waited more than a year to tell his story to someone from outside, someone who could share the family’s catastrophic shock. As though impatient with the pretense that anything else at all—anything other than massacres and exile from their land—might be on people’s minds, Alexander steered the conversation toward the incident the year prior, when he was beaten by the LRA. It prompted his move into town from the family coffee plantation. He started to tell the story.
My video camera and notepad were tucked away in my bag at my feet. I thought it rude to whip it out too soon, and Francisca didn’t prompt me with translation. I didn’t want to lose any details. “We’d love to talk with you about it. Can we do it later?”
He agreed, and didn’t say much more that day.
But we couldn’t stop the current. Everyone else—the extended family packed into the family yapu—jumped in to share bits about the in-town attack down the road just days before.
The day of the attack, a few children were collecting water after school, at the community faucet in plastic jugs. They spotted men in long coats with guns. LRA. The children ran. The gunmen followed and started shooting. A bullet hit a father carrying his three-year-old. It flew through his arm and pierced his daughter’s stomach, blowing her intestines out the other side.
They shot a young woman running with her one-year-old baby boy, ripping apart her genitalia. She collapsed. Grasping the baby, she dragged herself on her back into the bushes to hide.
The United Nations didn’t send scouts that night to look for survivors, even though they were only a few miles up the road and it wasn’t even dark yet when the attack happened. No Congolese army patrols, either.
In the morning, a neighbor followed the bloody trail to the bushes, where they found her dead body. She had bled out during the night.
Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen Page 3