Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen

by Lisa J Shannon

  Francisca never knew how they heard the news, but they eventually learned that the Simba were ousted and life could go back to normal. After harvesting the peanuts they’d planted upon their arrival in the grove, the family returned to Dungu.

  Everything André had built was stolen, broken down, gone. He held off buying replacement household goods such as the nice mattresses they used to have. The family slept on stacks of palm leaves so that André could invest, instead, in restocking the boutique and getting the plantation back to full capacity.

  It was a dry year. The citizens of Dungu were hungry for the Simba violence to be washed away with the rains that seemed like they would never come. The town buzzed with plans for a collective early-morning offering to the spirits. Tita Vica was among the elders in Dungu who knew the rituals best. Cisca asked to go with her, and Tita Vica agreed, though she had no plans to wake Cisca. It was a school night.

  Cisca slept lightly that night on her stack of palm leaves. She woke to the sound of the white chicken clucking as her grandma Tita Vica packed it into a basket. It was still dark. Cisca slipped out of bed and put on her little sweater to keep warm in the middle-of-the-night chill. It was well before 3 a.m.

  “I’m ready,” Cisca said.

  “I didn’t think you were serious,” Tita Vica said.

  “I’m serious.”

  “You still have to go to school.”

  “I will.”

  Tita Vica wrapped her shawl around her neck, and they left the rest of the sleeping family. Hundreds of people from the Bamokandi neighborhood had gathered at the crossroads in front of their parcel, with chickens, eggs, rice, and other food, to begin the procession.

  The crowd began swaying toward the town center. Tita Vica held Cisca’s hand as the singing began. A woman’s voice rose above the crowd with the twists and lifts of a bird in flight, singing one word: Baati. The procession began, with the crowd calling back: Baati. Baati. Baati. Cisca didn’t know the word, but she figured it was an old Azande call: Rain come down.

  With palm leaves waving above the crowd, women beating on old plastic oil containers, the procession moved through town toward that spot where all their chiefs had been dumped into the Kibali River. Processions from every neighborhood in Dungu converged on the Belgians’ one-lane bridge. To Cisca, it looked like the whole town was there on those banks, in the early-morning shadows, hovering around the abandoned manor house and under the bridge’s decorative cement railings. As the dark silhouettes of palm leaves waved above, ladies bundled like Tita Vica lined up and down the banks of the Kibali.

  They called to all the good spirits, chanting the litany of names of the ancestors, the chiefs who were killed and thrown in the river, to the spirits of old chiefs, the spirits of the Christian saints, the spirit of Abraham, praying to them all to bring the rain:

  Here we are. We have nothing. Children to feed. Send us rain. We need to grow. We are looking to you. Don’t turn your back on us. This is what we used to do for you. This is what we still do for you. We keep on doing it. We don’t forget you. Don’t forget us.

  Tita Vica was among the first to step up to the edge of the bridge, where grease that Cisca still imagined was Kumbawandu’s remained. Tita Vica made her offerings to the river, tossing the white chicken, bound, into the rushing water below.

  Cisca made it home before the sun came up and was off to school on time as promised.

  In the late afternoon, she was playing in the yard with her brother when the sky went dark. Cisca listened as wind rushed through the mango trees and bent the palm leaves, like the trees were talking. Like the wind was saying something. Thunder rolled like the harvest drums. Then lightning flashed from one end of the sky to the other, to the limit of their eyes.

  Cisca scrambled inside with her brother. The rain came like heaven had opened. Everything dry became wet. The termites came out the next day. From that day, for years on, the rainy season had rain, and the family had food.

  Shortcut

  • • • •

  We wanted to see the site of Antoinette’s attack, where they found her body. The fringe of Bamokandi was still a no-go area, at least to most locals. Residents had abandoned the neighborhood and crammed into the homes of friends or family on the other side of town. The few who stayed on lived with sporadic LRA sightings, enough to lead to the popular assumption that the LRA must have set up camp not too far from town.

  Our driver Mayano was the one and only way out there, and he seemed to have sobered up since the verbal lashing he got from Francisca over his drunk driving. We had to pay extra-close attention to tell the difference, though. Sober or drunk, his loose saunter and puffery made it hard to tell.

  We piled into the Runner at Mama Koko’s. After several failed running starts, it puttered to life. We drove a few houses up. Francisca rolled down her window and called to a young man, perhaps in his late teens, with the muscular build of someone who had eaten well most of his life. It was Antoinette’s brother. He reluctantly slid into the backseat, agreeing to show us the attack site.

  Mango trees sheltered the dusty road out to the UN airbase, where we decided to stop first, hoping to retrace the LRA’s tracks into town and perhaps discern how the UN could have missed a massacre in an area it had supposedly secured.

  The scent of burning brush grew as we cruised farther out toward the attack site. Parcels gave way to dense, jumbled meshes of vegetation, smoldering as men tried to burn back the grasses and palm leaves and climbers, refusing to give a spare inch of potential cover to lurking LRA.

  Farther on still, the compounds thinned.

  We looped around the UN airbase like it was a race track. It wasn’t hard to understand how the LRA gunmen managed to sneak past the UN fortress and its lookout, surrounded by fields and bush. Not because the forest was so dense, which it was, but because of the UN compound’s insular nature. Like an air-tight submarine or a pressurized aircraft cabin, the UN maintained a Congo-tight presence, sealed off from the elements, whatever or whoever those elements might be. How on earth would the UN have known an attack was under way?

  As for the Congolese army, a few soldiers hung out on the side of the road, but they didn’t patrol off the main roads. The expanse of land surrounding Dungu was open for gunmen of any stripe to mark their new territory as they saw fit, in this case with the bodies of locals.

  We cruised back up the road toward town.

  Suddenly, Mayano took a hard right, into dense roadside bushes.

  Palms and vines and blind corners swallowed us faster than I could grasp what was happening. It must have been an old road, now overgrown and corroded into a single footpath, with just enough grassy shoulder to fit the Runner. Branches enclosed us in a narrowing tunnel, pawing at the windows.

  Call it a vibe, call it primal fear. Francisca’s skin puckered into goose bumps. We were heading straight into the gunmen’s new hub. Their presence permeated the air.

  She knew this road; it used to be a wide avenue. An old cemetery sat just on the other side of the bushes, its cement headstones abandoned decades ago. She imagined the LRA choosing that old cemetery as their campground, trying to draw on the power of the dead. She pictured gunmen blocking our way out.

  We’ve got to turn around.

  We’ve got to get out of here.

  We’re giving ourselves to them.

  Still, we lurched forward, revving the Runner engine through crevasses deeper with every few feet forward. We’re swinging at a beehive, I thought. And if the Runner died? There was no way to push-start even a lawnmower on this rutted-out, overgrown road.

  “Let’s stop,” I said to Mayano, as though he spoke English. Mayano giggled as though we were thumb-wrestling or playing footsie. He thrust the car out of a crevasse and kept plowing forward. I turned to Francisca: “Can you ask him to stop, please?”

  She asked. He giggled again.

  I looked him in the eye: “Stop the car.”

  He laughed, as though to
say “Have no fear, little ladies—leave it to me!”

  The wheel slipped down another foot-deep crevasse, but it didn’t break Mayano’s seeming delight in riling us up.

  Trusting that my tone would say it all, I slammed my hands together in an abrupt line, signaling a wall, and yelled “Stop!”

  That, he got.

  He thrust the Runner into reverse and backed us out to the main road.

  “I was scared back there,” Francisca said.

  “You felt it too, huh?”

  “Bad vibe.”

  Antoinette’s brother had been quiet, but as we drove back toward town, he said, “LRA were spotted around there Tuesday morning.” That was just a few hours before we had flown in. “They came down that road and hid in the cemetery watching,” he continued. “There were five of them.”

  “Which road?” I asked.

  “The road we were just on.”

  Impression in the Grass

  • • • •

  We took the long way around, through a disorienting maze of adobe huts, roads like a rubbed-out sketch of city plans drawn in a more prosperous time, now all but erased. “They used to have street signs,” Francisca said, pointing to back lanes turned into narrow trails. The deeper we crept into the neighborhood, the sparer each yard became. Then sparer still. The Bamokandi primary school’s brick classrooms were abandoned, classes discontinued. The LRA had marked their territory, as if to intentionally leave a repellant aura and render the landscape empty.

  The path rutted out, and the Runner slammed to a halt.

  We climbed out of the car tentatively, gingerly, as though softer steps and quieter voices would matter. The area was dusty and open. No smoke, no ash, no people.

  We followed Antoinette’s brother, weaving through parcels, and up to a tall wall of sticker-bushes. He pointed over it. “She was over there.”

  “Can we see the actual spot?” I asked.

  He motioned us onward. We paused at a crossing, as he pointed to Antoinette’s old place up the path.

  I pictured her running.

  “She was shot there, and came this way.” We followed him away from her home and traced her course to a spot a few feet off the path, splayed in the grass, where she had dragged herself to hide, grasping her baby, waiting for the sun to set.

  The grass feathered out in the shape of her body, her impression clear with the imprint of her head and outstretched arms and legs. Like mini-graves, two small piles of sand marked the spot where she bled to death from her wounds.

  “They put the piles of sand to cover the blood,” her brother said.

  Francisca stood back, too sad to stare, or to stand too close. What have I gotten myself into, she thought, looking away. She didn’t want to see the face of Antoinette’s brother, afraid she would cry. She thought about Antoinette’s deflated breast, the oxygen draining from her. She didn’t want to be there anymore.

  I stood over the spot where she died.

  I pictured her hours after she saw the dreadlocked gunmen, in the middle of the night, left behind, clenching her baby. Did she watch the sky, the silhouettes in the grass? Did she know she was dying? No one was coming to help her. She must have known that. She gave her baby the only thing she had to keep him from wriggling and fussing and getting himself killed: her breast.

  What was the baby feeling those hours after Antoinette had slipped away? With his mother growing cold, his ploys for comfort unmet, what panic took hold as he was trying to move her stiffening arms, or squeezing her limp breasts? What was it like for him with the morning light coming, neighbors hovering above him, scared to pick him up?

  Bystanders left him on her body until the family came, as though his little soul might be haunted, like his misfortune might rub off.

  I filmed, as if the lens could remove me from this place, make it less real. I turned to Antoinette’s brother, who was trying to be elsewhere.

  Francisca said, “He never wanted to come here again. He only came because we asked.”

  Sensing his pain, I asked him: “Is it difficult for you?”

  I only heard him say mercy, one of the few words shared by French, English, and Lingala. But the remote look in his eyes, his effort to hold it together, was unmistakable.

  He said, “Yes, I’d like to go, please.”

  Gunshots

  • • • •

  Mama Koko began retiring early most nights during our time at the Procure. Francisca rolled out a mattress and piled thin blankets for Mama Koko on the floor of their dark room. Francisca laid on the metal bed above, and they stayed awake late, talking until they drifted to sleep.

  The unspoken question—perhaps the unspoken premise—of our visit hung in the background through our time in Dungu, especially those nights. Will this be our final time together? From time to time, Mama Koko would say to Francisca, “I’m happy you’re here. But I’ll be happier the day you leave. At least I’ll know you’re safe.”

  One night, gunshots woke Francisca. It was at a distance, from Bamokandi maybe? Mama Koko’s parcel? She lay silent, listening. Her thoughts raced. What happens if we have to run? Lisa can’t go to Bamokandi. The UN, we’ll go there… .

  “Cisca, are you sleeping?” Mama Koko whispered.

  “Did you hear that, too?”

  Mama Koko had. Another gunshot cracked in the distance.

  A priest passed through the Procure, calling out “Alert! Alert! Be prepared!”

  Francisca tensed. How long do you wait? When do you run? Where do you go? It occurred to her that Mama Koko and the family had lived with this question nearly every night for the last year and a half. Francisca said, “We need to get Lisa.”

  “Don’t. Her spirit is at rest,” Mama Koko said. “You can’t wake her with bad news. It harms her spirit. The priest will knock on everyone’s doors if we need to leave.”

  “When this happens, what are we supposed to do? Are we going to run?”

  “Jesus is bigger than these people. Your dad, your brothers and sisters, the ancestors will intercede for us,” Mama Koko said. “Nothing will happen.”

  Through the small cinderblock slit eight feet up the wall, they heard footsteps and men’s voices from the street, just outside the mission.

  Mama Koko said, “God is big. Keep praying.”

  “What about the family?” Francisca asked, thinking of her brothers, her baby nieces and nephews.

  “Give it to God.”

  They prayed the rest of the night.

  Francisca’s brother Gamé came at first light. Several versions of the story had already circulated around town by breakfast, all involving drunk Congolese soldiers. One had a bad dream or shot off his gun while sleepwalking or fighting over a girlfriend.

  At breakfast, Francisca decided to ask me, “Did you hear it last night?”

  “Hear what?”

  Hospital

  • • • •

  Francisca asked an old physician friend to take us on a tour of the Dungu hospital, only a few blocks from the Procure. Under yellow-washed cement chambers with high ceilings, filled with rusty beds and plastic mattresses, we met LRA victims. Most had been there only a week.

  Many of the patients were from the town of Bangadi, part of the Red Triangle, as the UN called it, the epicenter of LRA activity to the north. Many men wore thick bandages covering machete wounds on their skulls and backs, a twelve-year-old girl had been rescued by the Ugandan army just before being made a “forest wife,” and another young woman, who held a baby on her hip, took a bullet through her ankle and had dead eyes that said it all.

  We didn’t ask.

  Francisca seemed anxious and disturbed by the time we got back to the Procure for our 4 p.m. curfew. As I sipped Coca-Cola and Mama Koko had her beer, Francisca didn’t want to talk. We hadn’t asked, but still, her doctor friend came by to show us photos documenting the LRA victims’ injuries. He squeezed himself in tightly between Francisca and me while scrolling through the photos.
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  A man’s back, with five bullet holes doused in iodine. A three-year-old girl shot through her stomach. Some of the images were so close up and gory that they seemed like abstract paintings of fleshy holes, shattered bone exploding like fireworks through a bloom of flesh.

  With each new photo, Francisca gasped.

  Mother with child, covering her mouth with a cloth. Then the cloth dropped, revealing a fleshy hole around her gums and teeth patched up with crude stitching. The LRA had sawed off her lips.

  “Oh! How could they do that?” Francisca blurted out.

  The doctor continued through his slideshow, photo after photo of faces with ragged holes where mouths used to be, but Francisca was done. While she cried, I asked for copies of the photos on a thumb drive.

  I had only ever known a Congo where limbs were hacked off and fed to children, where women had the “look of utter death” in their eyes after being raped. That was the noticeable difference between Dungu and South Kivu. In the Kivus, the war had raged for more than a decade; some kids in their teens remembered nothing else. Shock there had gone numb. In an emergency, the life-and-death stakes can only go on so long before they seep deep into the psyche and become their own kind of normal. You can only scream for so many hours, so many days, until the vocal cords fry. People in the Kivus grew to expect the brutality, and I did too.

  But no one in Dungu was acclimated to the violence. No one there knew of the world that watches lion-breathed militia snag Africa’s young with the same curiosity and detached pity that one watches antelope devoured in nature specials.

  And if the locals weren’t acclimated, then Francisca was a year and a half behind even that curve. The fresh wounds on a child felt as if they’d been inflicted on her own daughter. To her, Congo was home; these people were her neighbors. Violence was not inherent to the landscape of her Congo—mango trees were, and the fragrant air after a rain.

  We’d only started on our project, just days into what was to be five weeks of a packed interview schedule, and already Francisca was hungry to retreat, to cocoon with her family, to be absorbed with crazy aunties and familiar fingers braiding her hair, as though she could find her old home still there, if only I would stop asking so many questions.