Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen

by Lisa J Shannon

  I tried to obscure the stacks of baby clothes and bright rattle from public view, embarrassed by the smoke signal for my newly pulsing maternal instincts.

  I went to the hospital on my own and found his auntie out back, again taking a clothed bucket-bath in the common area. I knew better than to pick him up while she stood right there. Instead, I hovered and waited too long for my gifts to appear to be a casual gesture. I waited while she bathed and dressed him in one of the blue outfits, wrapped up in my newfound maternal affection.

  The Red Triangle

  • • • •

  Mama Koko stared me down across the smorgasbord lunch filling her dining room table. For weeks now, she had obliged the probing questions, the hours I kept Francisca out and about and away from the family. But Bangadi? Francisca had filled her in on our plans: a day trip to the town at the axis of the “Red Triangle,” the area with a ceaseless flow of abductions, gunshot wounds, and machetes to the head. I figured we needed the most recent, most hard-hitting, hence most relevant stories in order to make the biggest difference. At least that’s how I’d always done it before.

  Francisca told me she wanted to go. She told me her brother was buried there and she’d never seen his grave. Paying her final respects was reason enough. Secretly, she didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to disappoint me, though, so she kept her reservations to herself.

  Mama Koko looked me in the eye across the table. She could read me, the same way she was able to look Kevin in the eyes and sense he was for real. I knew she saw something behind my electric draw to danger, to the epicenter of atrocity.

  Hers was a one-word protest. “Why?”

  Francisca tried to explain about the relevance of recent stories and the visit to her brother’s grave. I wasn’t sure our answer—my answer, really—was good enough.

  We went anyway, or at least tried to. When we got to the airport hangar the next morning, a stalky Canadian pilot squinted at the sky and told us we’d have to wait. The clouds were too low, let’s see what happened by afternoon. Maybe they’d burn off.

  Why?

  Standing in the airport hangar watching the low cloud cover, I contemplated Mama Koko’s question. In one word, she had nailed that elusive question I’d skirted for years. In some ways, I was living young Dette’s escape dream. I had arranged my life to minimize attachments, eliminate dependents, and maximize flexibility. It was one thing for me, the loner, the célibataire, to take those risks. But Francisca—Mama Koko’s daughter? The deaths of Mama Koko’s loved ones weren’t remote. She couldn’t hide behind video monitors or black ink in a moleskin notebook, the way I had trained myself to do so many years ago.

  An anxious, stout Italian priest roamed the back of the hanger and eventually introduced himself as Father Ferruccio. He was hoping for a free ride back to LRA territory. He was friendly but jumpy as we exchanged hellos and told him our destination. “Oh, no. It’s not safe.”

  He held out his arms, revealing deep scars. “LRA.”

  I couldn’t do it. I canceled our flight.

  Kevin called later that day. He’d heard from my mom that we were planning to go to Bangadi. He rarely commented on Francisca’s choices, and had never tried to persuade her to skip the original trip from Portland, even after the Bamokandi attack just before our departure. He respected her autonomy too much and had no interest in playing the role of controlling husband. But that day, he left word with her brother. Please, don’t do it.

  I let Bangadi go.

  Dutch Super Wax

  • • • •

  That night, staring into the distance on the Procure stoop, Mama Koko said, “I don’t understand why I’ve lost so many people.”

  She swam in memories of her departed. “If Justine were here, she would have been all over Lisa,” she said of Francisca’s younger sister. “‘What do you want to eat? I’ll have it on the table for you!’ Just like with Kevin.”

  “This dress was Justine’s,” Francisca noted. It was one of Francisca’s wardrobe regulars. Years ago on a visit, Francisca brought a new dress made of high-end Dutch Super Wax from Holland. Justine fingered the beautiful top.

  “It’s expensive,” she said.

  “You’re expensive!” Francisca countered. “You want it?”

  Justine burst out laughing. “I won’t be shy.”

  Francisca didn’t notice until she reached home that Justine had slipped one of her own dresses into Francisca’s bag while Francisca was busy saying her good-byes.

  Justine loved that Dutch Super Wax dress. It was her favorite. When she fell ill and died a few years later, she was buried in it, in Mama Koko’s yard.

  Francisca’s brother Nico was killed for a wristwatch that Francisca had brought him as a Christmas gift from America. About ten years before our visit, her brothers Antoine, Nico, and Claude rode their bikes to Bangadi to shop. In the market, Congolese army officers spotted the fancy watch, and wanted it. They stopped Nico and demanded that he turn it over. But it was precious to Nico, as much for being from his big sister as for its functional elegance. He refused.

  The soldiers pounced.

  Antoine and Claude tried to pull the army officers off of Nico. But they shot Nico anyway, and beat him to finish him off, in front of the whole town. Antoine and Claude dragged his bloody, bruised body away, desperate to get him to the hospital. He died on the way.

  The brothers couldn’t face pulling up to Mama Koko and André’s home with Nico’s body slumped across the back of their bikes. Grandfather Bi’s twin, Siro, had a daughter who lived in Bangadi. She allowed them to bury Nico in her yard.

  When Mama Koko and André found out, there wasn’t time to grieve. The war in South Sudan was boiling over, pushing masses of refugees and militia into Dungu. The family retreated to the bush, for their first stint as refugees since the Simba situation in 1964. Still aching from the loss of Nico during their retreat in the forest, Mama Koko watched André slip further away, becoming more and more ill, talking in circles about bringing children into this world to bury their parents, not the other way around.

  “Dette?” André said one night. That’s what he still called Mama Koko, always that young, long-haired, gap-toothed beauty in his eyes. “Can you warm some water for my bath? It will be your last job for me.”

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  “I was just joking,” he laughed.

  He washed himself down, then asked Dette to bring him his best suit.

  “What do you want to get all dressed up for in the middle of nowhere?” She grumbled as she dragged out the suit. “We’re in the bush.”

  “Can you make me some tea? It will be the last thing you do for me.”

  “This is too much,” she said. “And there’s not enough sugar.”

  “I’ll share with everyone.”

  Dette made the tea. André sipped, then passed the cup around. Everyone had a drink.

  “Come, sit close to me,” he said to Dette. She leaned against his back so he could rest against her. His breathing grew strained, then slowed.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. No answer. He couldn’t speak anymore through the breathing. Within minutes, André was gone.

  How do you grieve in a forest? How do you pay respects? The notion of burying André in the bush enraged the whole family. Never, ever would they bury him there, they all agreed.

  Papa Alexander, Mama Cecelia, and the boys accompanied Mama Koko, carrying André’s body all the way back to Dungu to their parcel, which by then was swarming with Congolese soldiers.

  They didn’t ask permission. They told the officers, “Our father is dead. We’re burying him on his own property.”

  The Italian Priest

  • • • •

  Our new driver Mamba was experienced, a serious man, only recently displaced by LRA violence up north. The Procure-assigned push-start crew, who rode along with us in the Runner’s trunk space, had stayed on following Mayano’s departure. Even so, the Run
ner was more and more reluctant to start. Growing crowds of bystanders watched us become engulfed in black fumes, often jumping in themselves to help get the old bird going. Even when our spontaneous crew swelled to six or more children and Francisca and me, our beloved Runner would lurch and die after moving ten yards, twenty yards, fifty yards before again rumbling to attention.

  The irony of the Runner’s nickname—appropriate because it didn’t run, or because so many people had to run behind it to get it moving—earned plenty a chuckle. But on the outskirts of Bamokandi, next door to the new LRA campground, where we were headed again, it was a problem. If gunmen surfaced at the wrong time, the iffy getaway plan could cost us.

  Francisca pulled our new driver Mamba aside to talk it through during his first couple of days on the job. Mamba was shocked: “You think I’m going to drive you out of an LRA attack?” He told her flat out, “You’ve never lived through it. There’s no time to think. If the LRA comes, everybody runs. I’m going to run.”

  And so it goes. My rigorous safety plans were but a dream, a lark, a callow fantasy. We would have been better off with hers and hers bicycles.

  Francisca did think about telling me that my safety plans were for naught, that our only LRA escape routes would be by foot, not with the Runner. But then we had people to see, stories to collect, and she had my increasingly edgy temperament to avoid. And, of course, Francisca’s maternal instincts kicked in. I was about the same age as her daughters and she debated whether she would tell them about the risks or protect them from reality. She kept it to herself, hoping to insulate me from the unforgiving environs into which we had plunged ourselves.

  Mama Koko watched us, nervous, as we departed. She knew. We were hoping to talk with the Italian priest we’d met at the hangar. He was living at the mission out there, near the spot we saw Antoinette’s outline in the grass.

  It was already mid-afternoon as we wove our way through Bamokandi’s disorienting maze of streets that dwindled to footpaths.

  As we drove through the entrance to the mission, ancient trees with dangling roots stretched out across the ghostly quiet mission grounds, giving the place an eerie aura. The place echoed with the soft sounds of too few remaining children. The smell of cooking smoke was much thinner here than in the rest of town. African Madonnas in the chapel blessed a parish of no one.

  Father Ferruccio greeted us, equal parts warm and anxious. He led us down the mission’s whitewashed main corridor. I counted twelve bedroom doors, separated by small religious icons. Only three men had remained at the mission after the recent attacks.

  As we walked past the open rooms, Francisca again mentally charted our worst-case scenario escape plan, should there be an attack. We would dive into one of those priests’ bedrooms and hide under the beds. We’d stay there and pray.

  The hall opened onto a back veranda. Red vinyl chairs gave the place a worn, retro-tropical vibe. Stacks of books and paperwork lined the walls, which were decorated with maps, pamphlets, and faded pictures of priests and saints.

  Father Ferruccio came to Orientale Province as a young priest in the 1970s. By way of getting-to-know-you conversation, I asked, “Did you come to Africa because you were a priest, or did you become a priest so you could come to Africa?”

  He said, “I married Africa.”

  Father Ferruccio settled into his chair with a cigarette and a stack of carefully typed reports about the recent LRA attacks in front of him, his eyes darting and distracted.

  My ears were half-tuned to Ferruccio’s desperate reports as I tried to listen, over the screeching of monster flies, for the sound of cries or a gunshot. Did I hear screaming? Who was that?

  I looked to Francisca as a sanity check. Nothing. It was just the flies, circling my head in a halo of white noise.

  With the air of someone trying to stay calm in a house fire, Ferruccio read the reports aloud. He described a baby’s head smashed like peanuts in a mortar and pestle, followed by a pause to make sure that what he said had registered. A woman who was bound along with more than a hundred neighbors watched every one of them being killed, but was herself released. The gunmen told her, “It’s not your time.”

  She was left to spread the word. This is how one hundred men can maintain nearly complete control of an area the size of California: Lone survivors could tell the story of fates so bloody and ferocious that no one will come after them. So bad that just hearing about it stings and the whole world will stay away.

  Father Ferruccio was a talker. Cigarette smoke curled above him, lending grace to his staccato reports, relaying LRA massacre after massacre in graphic detail. The minutes crept toward late afternoon, into the inauspicious hours when the LRA launched attacks. We were running out of time.

  Father Ferruccio began to describe the day he got his rope scars.

  He was having lunch that afternoon at the Duru mission with two other priests, one visiting from Sudan, when they heard a knock on the door. It was the local nurse, rattled and repeating herself. “They’re coming. They’re coming. There are a lot of them.”

  They looked outside. About forty LRA gunmen were herding children tied together with a rope and carrying a solar panel they’d stolen from the hospital. More than eighty people total, Father Ferruccio estimated.

  The priest visiting from Sudan spoke the LRA’s language; he had translated for defectors before. But this time, he wanted no part of the trouble that was making its way down the road toward them. He excused himself and retreated to his bedroom, as if by shutting his door he could shut out the LRA.

  The LRA came in. “How many are you?”

  “Three,” they said.

  “Where’s the other one?” the LRA asked.

  “He’s in bed.”

  They called him. The priest emerged in his socks, but refused to translate.

  Ferruccio tried to hide his cell phone. They’d already taken one phone. Ferruccio said he had to go to the bathroom, hoping to make a distress call. But the LRA followed him and wouldn’t let him close the door. They spotted the cell phone charger on the table. “Where’s the second phone?”

  He handed over the phone. One of the priests escaped through the back and hid in the bush. Ferruccio and the other priest sat, arms tied, for five hours watching the gunmen scour the mission for goods. He prayed they wouldn’t find all the documentation about the LRA on the photocopy machine or on his computer—maps, photos, locations of camps, his work helping defectors only the week before. If they find that stuff, they’ll know I’m a spy against the LRA. I’m dead.

  He watched the children tied up, blistering in the afternoon sun, and thought about how their lives were over, the girls soon to be “wives,” the boys soon to be soldiers.

  The gunmen rolled out Ferruccio’s car and set it on fire. They burned the mission to the ground and then tied Ferruccio’s arms up behind his back, cranking the ropes into a bloody tourniquet before leading him down the road. Then, inexplicably, they stopped, untied him and a few other adults, left them in a hut, and continued down the road with the children.

  Father Ferruccio escaped to a local church deacon’s house.

  “It’s four.” Francisca brought me out of Father Ferruccio’s story and back to the reality of the day, back to the hour of our self-imposed curfew. We should have been back at the Procure by then, if not at least on our way.

  I started to contemplate: Stay and continue with Father Ferruccio’s story, or play it safe and pack up?

  Suddenly from outside: bam bam bam bam bam.

  I sat up straight: “What was that?”

  Father Ferruccio and Francisca both smiled, reading my paranoia, and waved to reassure me. The sounds of construction hammers, from a project down the road.

  I leaned back in my chair, my heart still racing, and Father Ferruccio continued his story.

  Everyone in Duru scattered in the night. There was no moon. The only light came from flames glowing around Duru: More than two hundred huts, the homes of his p
arish, were burning into embers all across the village.

  He waited at the deacon’s house. Around eleven o’clock, the moon came out, casting enough light for Father Ferruccio to see his way back to the mission. Almost every building was burned to the ground. The big cross in front of the church was broken. But the chapel was intact. He found his robes on the floor. He put them on and went back to the deacon’s place to sleep.

  In the early morning, with the village still smoldering in the dark, Father Ferruccio emerged from hiding into the utter stillness. The LRA could have been anywhere. Alone, Father Ferruccio inched his way through the dark, back to the chapel, where he prepared for Mass.

  Father Ferruccio rang the church bells.

  They sounded through the ashen air, through gunmen-pregnant bush.

  Parishioners crept from their hiding places, their dim or covered corners, and straggled into the chapel. About fifty people shuffled in, rough from shock, twigs and dirt mixed with crusted blood, ash smeared over Dutch-wax cloth that reminded them that only yesterday they were still human.

  They stood quietly through the candlelight service, a morning Mass, a good-bye Mass, a Mass for the dead. Some wept. All took communion.

  Why on earth would he ring the church bells? I wondered. Every breathing thing that night craved nothing more than a deep, dark hole to hide in and the discipline to make not a sound. That night, each villager cleaved to a singular private wish: Don’t let the LRA find me.

  But Father Ferruccio rang the church bells.

  “Wasn’t that dangerous?” I asked. “Why would you do that?”

  Father Ferruccio mumbled in his Italian-French to Francisca, then turned to me and pointed his finger firmly at the sky. He said in English, “Because victory belongs to God.”

  On our way out of the mission living quarters, something clicked. Duru. Duru … the family coffee plantation was in Duru. I turned to Ferruccio. “The church was in Duru, you said? Did you by chance know Francisca’s cousin Roger?”

  “You’re Roger’s cousin?” he asked Francisca, surprised.

  Something tightened in him, something sunk in and closed off. Something he wasn’t ready to tell us. He and Francisca spoke in a mix of Lingala and French that I couldn’t follow.