Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen

by Lisa J Shannon

  Mama Koko grumbled over the chuckles and flirtation behind us in the next seating area. After a while, Serge walked the nun out to the street and the two disappeared around the corner. Twenty or so minutes later, all eyes tracked Serge as he sauntered back into the compound. Mama Koko grunted.

  As daylight dropped into muted blues, the wind quickened. Lightning cracked and flashed in the distance. Beer cans and plastic bags whipped around the courtyard. Grit from piles of gravel and cement dust pelted my eyes.

  All of Dungu had been waiting for the first rain. Nuns ran for cover. Mama Koko and Francisca escaped inside my room. I stayed seated outside, watching for the storm, waiting. Wild plumes of dust slammed against the motorcycles and satellite dish, scraps of garbage circled the tires on a huge orange truck carrying an oil barrel from Uganda.

  But not a drop of rain. I flung open the door to find Mama Koko and Francisca covering their mouths to stop the dust storm rushing in with me. The wind slammed the door behind me.

  “We’re being mocked,” I said.

  “It’s ugly,” Francisca said.

  “Bad omen,” Mama Koko said.

  I went back out into the dust storm, which was still taunting the town with only a few misty drops. The compound had cleared out completely, except for Serge, who stood up against his window, a few feet from me, as a tinny 1980s tune leaked out of a wireless radio.

  A pea-sized chunk of hail hit the ground like a warning shot. Hail exploded on the courtyard, falling like screaming metallic scrapes on the roofs. Serge sang, while I looked back in through the picture-frame windows. A crack in the floral curtains framed Mama Koko and Francisca in my room sitting close to each other, lit by the florescent light.

  Later, as I slipped off to sleep, a country-western song played in the distance, slowly crooning about a long road home. That night, I dreamed about gunmen.

  I’m in a new ultra-modern high-rise condo with clean lines, overlooking an island in the Puget Sound. The building is deserted. The island has been evacuated, I’m alone. High-tech SWAT teams invade the island. Helicopters circle. I try to figure it through: If I could just escape the building, I could hide in the stretches of forest lining Interstate 5 to Portland. I could stay off the main roads, out of sight. I could sleep in the forest. It would take days. But the gunmen are already in the building. How do I get out? Gunshots. I have to let my people know. I have to call my people, warn them to get away … but who do I call? I go blank. I think to text an old lover. I fumble with my Blackberry, trying to get the message out. It won’t send. There’s a pounding at the door. I’m paralyzed. The men are here. I’m glassed in, fifteen floors up. The door bursts open.

  I snapped awake, back into the Procure, into my slippery skin. I ran my fingers over the sheets, pilling with wear and the buildup of road-dust grime mixed with late-night sweat. Fear stormed through my veins, welled up in my chest, and spilled out in waves of sobs.

  I wanted to curl up on the floor with Mama Koko and Francisca and spend the rest of the night listening to their Lingala mumblings to each other. Instead, I listened for gunshots. I listened for a knock at the door.

  I cried until the sun came up.

  Nonfood Items

  • • • •

  It had been a year and a half since the first attack, the day that Roger was killed and Papa Alexander was displaced. Alexander had not yet received any help: not a can of oil marked “USA,” not a plastic bucket or a sack of cornmeal. But the long-awaited day had come on which Caritas, a Catholic international aid organization, would hand out relief goods in Dungu to those affected by the LRA. Everyone in town knew about it, and everyone in town considered themselves “LRA-affected.”

  The whole family set out for Father Ferruccio’s Bamokandi mission in search of some help. Francisca and I stayed behind with the kids. I cooked peanut sauce and noodles again. Francisca watched the road.

  A bicycle rode past, piled high with loot from the giveaway. Francisca knew the woman on the bike. She was related to one of the people organizing the distribution. Seeing those who were connected get first helpings stirred Francisca to anger. She grunted out loud.

  As the day wore on, Francisca kept her eyes on the road, wondering when her family would make it home. The same first-helpings woman rode past, again, with another bike-load of loot. Francisca boiled. “Did you see that? She already rode by with stuff!”

  On the woman’s third trip past, hours had gone by and not one of Francisca’s family members had made it home yet. But this woman’s load of Caritas loot was piled as high as the first two. Francisca’s pent-up frustration and helplessness and despair rushed into her index finger, which shot straight out, pointing at Firsts-Seconds-Thirds Lady. “Thieeeeeeeef!” she screamed, leaping to her feet and tearing up the driveway toward the street, screaming as the woman peddled faster. “Thieeeeeeeef! Thieeeeeeeef!”

  By late afternoon, no one had returned.

  We decided to head to the mission ourselves. We found a thick crowd surrounding the doors of a storage garage, now organized like a factory. Serge, the sexy guy from the Procure, was among the organizers of the handout day. He pulled us past the crowd, through the heavy doors to an open space filled with an assembly line of aid: the bucket lady, the soap man, Serge’s nun friend handing out bright ladies’ cloth.

  The crowd thinned behind us. I looked back and saw that they’d closed the doors. We were to be the last people to go through that day.

  Out the other end, I scanned the people who’d been shut out, who hadn’t received any help. I spotted a familiar face in the crowd. There, in front of the dissipating crowd, was Paul. Bernard’s neighbor, sit sit, sleep sleep, who do you think you are, Superman Paul. He stayed on, as though the doors might reopen, waiting for luck that wasn’t coming.

  Paul was an actual, bona fide face-to-face LRA survivor, supporting twelve younger brothers and sisters. All day, folks had been riding off with bike-loads of goods, but now Paul was locked out, shut out, with not even a plastic cup.

  I guess that’s how it is, I thought: Push or be pushed, grasp or sink. The irony was that Paul was among the most LRA-affected precisely because he put his neighbors first. He volunteered to go into the fields, risking attack, after having already lost everything. He circled back to the meeting spot when he could have run, because that’s how you treat neighbors. Of course he was at the back of the line, locked out without even a bar of soap to show for the day.

  Francisca and I asked him, “You didn’t get anything?”

  He didn’t.

  We dragged Paul over to Serge, who seemed to be administering the giveaway.

  “Bonjour!” I said, greeting Serge with an enthusiasm for him unmatched in our four weeks as next-door neighbors. “This young man survived a massacre. He has twelve younger siblings dependent on him, but he didn’t get anything. Can you help him out?”

  Serge took Paul by the arm and guided him to the guards. A few minutes later, Paul emerged with his own stack of goods.

  That day, a year and a half after the attacks, Papa Alexander and Mama Cecelia finally collected their only consolations: a small pile of African-print fabrics, plastic cups and buckets, some bars of soap, blankets, rice seeds, a T-shirt, and a few dishes.

  Witness

  • • • •

  Raphael was the other man with Roger on the day he died. He came by Mama Koko’s to talk. We settled into Mama Koko’s living room with tea, a monster-bee circling overhead.

  Raphael was tall with a manly build, and he carried himself with confidence. I didn’t know it at the time, but Raphael was Chief Kumbawandu’s grandson. Francisca had known him since she met Roger in that elementary school. He and Roger were classmates and friends during her years there. Raphael’s dad was the school principal and Francisca’s boss. Their family was descended from a clan of chiefs, like royalty. So Francisca never talked to her boss, Raphael’s dad, partly out of respect for their family’s stature, partly to avoid drawing att
ention to herself. Chiefs at that time had a lot of wives—one in the area had sixty-five—and it wouldn’t do for a young single woman to catch his eye. But Francisca knew Raphael.

  Like his grandfather at The Bureau almost fifty years before, Raphael carried himself with the authority of a royal. He was forthright and willing to talk, but he made sure I understood that talking with me was challenging for him.

  This was not the first time he had talked to a white person. Some guy from England had already been to Dungu and videotaped him. Then somebody else from America came, interviewed him, and went away, with no further news. “It’s discouraging,” Raphael told me. “I don’t think people want to do anything. What happened to them? What are you going to do with this?”

  “So let me explain what I can and can’t promise. We can share your story. If Americans know what you’ve lived through, hopefully they’ll ask the US government to do something. But I can’t promise they will.”

  “The American government already knows what is happening here,” he said.

  “That’s why we’re here. To go back and push the US government to do more.”

  He showed me the machete scar on the back of his head, and began.

  Raphael was the chief of the area back in Duru, just as his grandfather had been. That morning, unusually early, Roger came to his place. An LRA defector had shown up at the preacher’s house next door to Roger late the previous night.

  Twenty-five people had already gathered to watch over the defector by the time Raphael arrived. The crowd mumbled among themselves about the most efficient methods for execution. But Raphael told them about the law, the authorities, the Bible, and loving your enemy. The man claimed he was abducted as a boy, after all.

  Raphael turned to Roger because he trusted him. Roger was a businessman, committed to developing the region. Someone who would give of himself, and not for money. Everyone shopped at his place for rice, peanuts, whatever they needed. Raphael and Roger served together on the Parent-Teacher Association at their kids’ school. And, of course, Roger had a motorbike.

  They knew the deal, how these things could go wrong. Raphael knew it. Roger knew it. They’d been through the exercise before: the UN taking its time, not showing up, not returning calls. The holding pattern. Roger and Raphael took the defector to the mission for the obligatory medical treatment and phone calls. Father Ferruccio called someone, who called the mayor, who called the UN unit responsible for disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration.

  The mayor phoned the mission to suggest that Roger go ahead like the last time. Bring the soldier to the UN in Dungu. The UN was unavailable.

  Otherwise occupied.

  These were not surprises, given the time with the six defectors who were never taken in. The time with the ten defectors who were never taken in. Those would-be defectors had returned to the forest.

  Father Ferruccio gave Roger twenty liters of gas. Man-of-the-law Raphael decided he’d join the escort. It was time to have a sit-down with the mayor to talk this out. Make a plan. Get the authorities to step up and deal. What were they waiting for?

  Raphael, Roger, and the defector rode away from the mission.

  About a mile into the drive, a pile of bushes and trees blocked the road. Roger and Raphael pulled around the bushes. A sea of dozens of killers’ eyes. Gunmen. Sophisticated machine guns, rockets, hand grenades, satellite phones, a megaphone. Schoolchildren, schoolteachers, tied up with rope. Supervised by soldiers, some with dreadlocks, some with short hair, some tiny boy soldiers in UN and Congolese army uniforms. More than a hundred people, mostly LRA soldiers.

  Don’t let me die. Raphael heard someone yell, unsure if it was Roger, or himself. Someone screamed. It was all so sudden. Should he turn around and drive away? They’d shoot him.

  The road was clogged with the crowd, so they stopped. The LRA defector jumped off the bike and scrambled into the bush. Gunmen went after him, and then turned to Roger and Raphael.

  Raphael thought for a brief moment, maybe the LRA would just let Roger and Raphael ride on by? But being a chief, a responsible man, a man of the law, is perhaps the last thing you want to be mid–LRA massacre. Except, perhaps, the man who was carrying an LRA defector on the back of his bike. Roger and Raphael scanned the faces. They knew the captives in the crowd. These were friends of their children, teachers with whom they worked in the PTA. Would one of them identify Roger and Raphael? Amid the weight of heavy artillery and so much ammo, some abductees would see turning them in as an opportunity to prove themselves cooperative, useful to the LRA, and win favor.

  “How far Duru?” the LRA asked in broken Lingala.

  “About three kilometers,” Raphael said.

  The group set off in a large crowd filling the road, now surrounding Roger and Raphael. First, high-ranking soldiers passed them, then the students. For that moment, Roger and Raphael thought they would make it.

  The LRA stopped a couple of kids and asked about Roger and Raphael. “Who are these guys?”

  Someone said who they were.

  Roger kicked his motorbike into gear, hoping to ride on.

  The soldiers made hand signals to each other. They stopped Roger, and then Raphael.

  They took off Raphael’s boots and pounded his bike, busting it apart, and set it on fire. They threw Raphael’s bike and battery in the river and bound his arms.

  They told Raphael to stop on the bridge over the river, next to the village cemetery.

  Raphael was not invited onward. He lingered on the bridge, tracking Roger down the road. “Why can’t I go with Roger?” he asked, hoping to at least be designated a pack mule. One of them cocked his gun, as Raphael watched the LRA push Roger and another man out of the group and hike him off the trail. That’s where they killed Roger with an axe. “Just chop, chop everywhere. And left him there.”

  Raphael watched the water, wondering if they would throw him in the river, hands bound. The gunmen told Raphael to walk into the tombstones.

  “If you’re going to kill me, kill me here.” Raphael knelt on the bridge. They tied his arms, tight.

  Whack! to the back of his head.

  Out.

  That is what it is like to be murdered by the LRA. Except Raphael faded back in as they dragged him, limp, through the cemetery.

  Back out.

  His face in dirt. Light filtering through leaves. He was in a shallow grave, palm leaves covering him, his body in screaming pain.

  I’m dying, he thought.

  He pushed to get up. Arms bound. Couldn’t.

  He struggled again. Collapsed back, limp.

  He rolled over. Sat up. Praise God.

  A jarring voice behind us pulled us back into Mama Koko’s living room.

  A Russian UN officer stood in the doorway with a plastic bag in his hand.

  “I brought you boiled eggs. They’re hard to get around here,” he said. I’d met him briefly at the general store, and practiced a few words on him from my high school Russian class. But in Mama Koko’s living room, as much as I tried to smile politely, his intrusion was thick under the weight of Raphael’s story of betrayal by the UN.

  “Oh, thanks. That’s kind of you.”

  “Don’t tell anyone, though. I’m not really supposed to do that.”

  We paused awkwardly. I did not offer the obvious invitation to come in, sit down, crack open some eggs together. He excused himself. “I can’t stay, these people will throw rocks at my car. You need to be careful in this part of town. The Congolese army, this is really their area.”

  “I’m with Francisca and her family. I’m sure we’ll be okay.”

  Turning back to Raphael, I settled back in, tape rolling. I asked again about the cemetery.

  “I’m uncomfortable with the way you ask questions. Even though I answer you, you ask again. What are you going to do with all of this?”

  The explanation I offered at the beginning landed weakly this time.

  “Don’t take it personally,”
he said. “But in ten months there is nothing. What makes me so angry is that everybody who used to be in my district is dead. Some people come and they put you through a process, talk about these LRA incidents, but they are just collecting. It makes me wonder if you are for real.

  “Maybe one of the people coming, one person will change the world, one person will change our pain for happiness… . The world knows there is a problem here. Why can’t they get together and finish it? People come, they just talk. They just come for the big show.”

  The big show. I wondered for a moment if that was all we could offer, to turn their annihilation into a big show, and if big shows help.

  Back in the cemetery, Raphael sat up. He could walk. He found the river and managed to get off his boots, hoping to jump in and swim away, but he couldn’t wrestle his arms free.

  Then he heard them. The axe men were coming back. They had two men, bound, who they threw into the river to drown. Maybe they will check for me. Maybe they’ll look for me under the palm leaves. Maybe they’d kill me for real this time.

  He ran.

  Barefoot, with a bloody axe wound to the head and bound arms, he wandered disoriented around the bush, hour after hour, through trees, bushes, underbrush, and finally, a familiar field. Maybe he would find someone there who could untie him? But nobody. Then he went to the next farm. Nobody. The next one, nobody. The next one, nobody. They were all gone. Hours passed, searching.

  Finally, he spotted a woman. She untied him and took him to the bush, where she cleaned him up. Exhausted, he slept. In the morning he woke up thinking: I’m going to die here.

  But then, a surge of determination: No, I will not die running around the bush like an animal. He found his way back to the river and got his boots. Then he went to the main road, damn it all. A mass of four or five people piled on a bike rode toward him. LRA? As they rode closer, he didn’t run. Kill me and get it over with.

  But it wasn’t the axe men. It was a teacher who had been abducted and escaped. They picked him up and took him to find the motorbike battery, which had been tossed into the river. Raphael fixed the bike, hopped on, and rode.