14
The excursion with Bahati had made me more comfortable in the area, and with traveling on my own. Previously I had assumed that I would leave on the next barge with Bobby, but now I became curious about the city on the equator to our north, called Mbandaka. It was the capital of Équateur province, founded in the nineteenth century by the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley. I decided to discuss going there with l’Américain.
I reclined beside him in the hut without walls, before the log that warmed our feet. To the fire he held a bamboo tube with herbs stuck inside; it smoked; he sucked on it. When the downpour lulled crickets started to chirp, and the birds, the monkeys and the trees came alive. An armored caterpillar crawled with its hundred feet, trying to reach a puddle. The town was dark. The land in its immediate vicinity had been cleared for agriculture, and beyond that there was only forest. I told l’Américain about the Pygmy village. He said the logging was worse near Mbandaka, and that he should take the Pygmy chief to see. I asked how many hours it was to Mbandaka, by motorbike. He grimaced, as if strained by the thinking. “Between eight and twelve,” he said, twisting his hand. It depended on the condition of the roads. “Have you heard of red mercury?” I said. Mercure rouge.
His face showed no recognition.
“Mercure.”
“Mercure.”
“Rouge.”
“Rouge.”
“Mercure rouge.”
It didn’t register. L’Américain stared and then said, “Wendji Secret.”
“Secret?”
“Wendji Secret,” he said definitively. It was an area the government had cordoned off. There used to be soldiers there, but people claimed to have recently visited it. No one would say what they had found—perhaps it was a mine, he thought, known only to the locals. It was worth a look, and it lay on our route.
Not long after, I strolled out of the hut. L’Américain appeared to have fallen asleep with the bamboo in his mouth. Muddy rivers ran around my shoes. I was quickly drenched. I returned to the tent and lay with damp hair against the sleeping bag. The blackness weighed on me like a cushion. Bobby slept shirtless. His rolls of fat glinted. Rut-rut, a night bird hammered against the wood of l’Américain’s house.
Our failure had so far been masked beneath the nostalgia of the end of our journey. And it was as if we were saying good-bye without actually uttering the words when we stayed out late each night, for no reason, and the conversation turned ludic. There was some reminiscing about the journey itself: how many miles, days, mosquitoes. Bobby grumbled about his land. He told us about the 1970s, when Congo flourished and “the ferryboats from Kinshasa went all the way up the river.” There had been working railways, public works, tourist agencies, and enterprises from India, Greece, Portugal. Mobutu, Bobby said, had restored a sense of pride in being Congolese. He had seemed to have all the right ideas, before everything suddenly came apart. L’Américain concurred. He told us about the day he brought the first VCR to the district—and the sense of magic as he pushed in the cassette and the images appeared. “One thousand, two thousand, ten thousand,” he said. The wealthiest men in the province had tried to buy him off. The cousin said he too had possessed a valuable once that he would not sell: a bonobo. “She was like my child,” he said. The bonobo would use his toilet and eat at their table. She even had a bed with blanket and pillow. For five years he had lived with the ape, taking her with him whenever he moved. But one day, during the war, he was forced to flee. He thought the bonobo was probably dead. “Those were the good days. When will we enjoy like that? Maybe in fifty years Congo could be stable.”
Bobby said, “Remember the Rumble in the Jungle?” The cousin spread his arms above his head to make himself large: “The Greatest.” It was an unforgettable moment in the history of Zaire—even the cousin, who had only been a boy, remembered how in 1974 Muhammad Ali had brought down George Foreman by inventing the rope-a-dope. The bout had made Kinshasa known to the world. Bobby remembered the subsequent craze for passion-fruit juice. Ali had been spotted with a glass. And for a while, Bobby said, it was all the ladies would drink.
L’Américain’s log crackled.
It was our last night together. It ended in an ambience of remorse. We smoked the pipe and shook hands before turning in, and in the morning, as I stepped out of the room quietly so as not to wake Bobby up, I turned back to look at him; we would not meet again, though he would call once to offer me a onecarat diamond for five hundred dollars. I didn’t wait long before l’Américain skidded into the yard on a red Yamaha that roared and spewed black smoke. The pounding of pestles paused; women stood and marveled. They had made us a bowl of hot chicken. The meat was spotted red: blood clots or lean muscle, I thought. L’Américain gobbled the bird with its skin, sucking at the bone like a vacuum cleaner. And the Yamaha rumbled again, but now the vastness of the jungle belittled its roar.
The journey was laden with holes and puddles. Makeshift bridges had collapsed over waist-deep lakes and we waded through the water, walking on the shallower banks and pushing the Yamaha through the middles; sometimes the bike drowned. In the worst places we had to hoist it between us; we slipped, fell, got mud over our backs. We rode past men pushing wooden carts piled higher than their heads with green bananas. Women carried masses of honeycombs in bamboo baskets. Boys held out packets of green peas. Sacks of potatoes lined the road. And villagers shouted out to us as we passed: “L’Américain! L’Américain!” He waved at them.
Those who had heard of Wendji Secret said it was only a few miles farther. We drove through the dirt, our shoes and shins covered in splatters of mud. And finally we reached a paved road. The Yamaha screamed ahead. “Chinese make this road!” L’Américain yelled, as we passed a convoy of trucks loaded with enormous logs. A lot of Congo’s wood went to Europe, to be fashioned into tables and bookshelves and sold all over the world, even back in Congo, at exorbitant prices. IKEA got wood from here. The forest grew smaller. The paved road diverted to a jungle port for logs; again we hit the dirt. L’Américain drove us straight through a puddle of water and I lifted my legs, but it wasn’t a puddle. A cloud of butterflies rose, turning the forest effervescent: blue skimmed the grass, crept up tree trunks and flitted above; blue mixed with yellow—other butterflies. At the next village they said Wendji Secret was an hour behind us.
But we had been too careful to let it pass.
I came into Mbandaka with a feeling of sadness. The city was desolate. There wasn’t a stray cat to be seen, or even a beggar. And for two days I went hungry. The restaurants were bare and food needed to be ordered in advance; the locals drank beer for lunch and dinner. Drink was cheap. Heineken operated a brewery on the city outskirts.
For the United Nations Mbandaka was mainly a military outpost, and its garrison-like building was at the center of town, surrounded by barbed wire. Inside, at the end of a dim corridor and past a thin wooden door sat a heavyset Frenchwoman—the information officer. Her skin was sunburned, and her wide-open cotton shirt showed her red chest. I asked if the UN could help me get home.
She made a grumbling noise and asked, irritably, for what reason. I explained, in brief, my journey. “So your base is Kinshasa?” she said.
At the end of our discussion she told me to write a letter with the subject “Return to Base.” I was to write it outside her office.
A janitor was working his way down the hall. His wooden broom knocked against the cement.
The woman filed away the letter. She had me sign a contract stating the UN was not liable for my injury or death. My writing was jagged. She had verified on the internet that I was a journalist, and she asked what I was working on. I told her about the Pygmies, the trees, the loggers.
And just before leaving I thought to ask about Wendji Secret.
“Wendji Secret?” she repeated.
I told her I had tried to find it.
“It’s a fosse commune.”
I didn’t know the phrase.
“A mass grave,” she said. “Mass grave.”
Her voice had become hard again. She said that Wendji Secret was one of a series of mass graves—with names like Tingi-Tingi, Wanie Rukula and Boende—that had been refugee camps, sheltering thousands of people. The boy Bahati had lived in one of these, I realized. But in 1997 the armies of the father Kabila and Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, had decimated the refugees. The villagers, still afraid, had intentionally misled us.
It brought me head-on with the war. Here, in a remote part of the forest, almost a thousand miles from Rwanda and the center of the conflict, I had stumbled upon one arm of a network, stretching eastward, of mass graves. It was to feel the power and reach of Congo’s war.
The AP editor called me with news: the bureau was prepared to fund my travel to a limited degree. I would have to obtain permission for each journey, but they were willing to give it a test. They had been pleased with the Pygmy story, which I finally wrote up and filed from a derelict internet café in Mbandaka. I didn’t feel ready to return to Kinshasa. The mere thought was depressing. I told the editor I would like to go east. He agreed—as long as I closely followed the preparations for the elections, which were gaining pace. My gamble had paid off unexpectedly. This journey had earned me my chance.
I sent the family in Kinshasa some of the money I had earned. Nana started to list the problems at the house. I promised her more.
It took several days to find a UN aircraft, with an empty seat, going to the war. I had begun, over the days, to feel apprehensive about the conflict. Now on the verge of leaving, I was less sure of my readiness to confront it. The knowledge of the graves had also awakened this apprehension. I passed the time wandering in the city, and got an elderly cobbler to stitch together the split soles of my shoes. I tested his repairs, pulling at the stitches and jumping before his stall. The shoes felt like new.
15
Bunia, a small city in Congo’s far northeast, on a mountainous plateau near Uganda and Sudan, is one of Africa’s most mythical places. To its east is Lake Albert, a haven for smugglers, and a source of the Nile. And to its north, in a national park, is the only place in the world to see the northern white rhinoceros. But lately the animals have needed to be airlifted out: the militias have nearly killed them all, and not for the horns, but to eat.
I felt I was continuing Mossi’s work, in a way. While in Kinshasa we had discussed his investigative reports at length: about the pollution on the coast, and rebels trading weapons to fuel the conflict. But now I did not believe Mossi’s tales of adventure. He had been fantasizing, I thought. Still, he was gifted with a keen sense for the news. I felt I was covering the stories he was unable to, and carrying out some part of the undertaking he felt was necessary.
I did not come to Bunia directly. News suddenly broke: I was sent to write about an earthquake in the east that had killed some people. Then I followed Kofi Annan on a brief tour of Congo. Everywhere people seemed eager to tell stories of killing from the war; and these excursions only built a sense of anticipation for when I could travel on my own again.
I had been assigned a flight to Bunia transporting a military platoon. It was a Russian propeller craft, white and emblazoned with “UN” in black tape on both wings. The interiors were plain, cream colored. I felt I was in a bus. The soldier beside me was sleeping. No food was served; no film was screened; the only drink available was water. I spent the journey looking out the porthole, as we passed the thick of the rain forest, and the silver snaking river.
Bunia, to those familiar with this war, is best known for two UN officers who were killed three years before, grilled on metal barrels and eaten. The cannibalism is unverifiable: it allegedly happened at a remote gold mine, and the ragged man imprisoned for it does not remember the eating. He cannot be blamed: the miners were mostly drugged, and the war was then at its height. Bunia had been invaded. The Ugandan army had planted its flag in the city, lined gutters with corpses and blocked the main roads using human intestines.
Such wars are familiar to the continent. Indeed, in descriptions, from the reports in newspapers, this war can seem a repeat of others. But the crisis here is vaster: in deadliness and brutality—five and a half million dead, by the most commonly cited count. More than in any war since Hitler. And yet the daily carnage passes hardly noticed—in part because it is so singularly unspectacular, so primitive.
Fought in isolated jungles and hidden from the world, this war has only relics—machetes, knives and guns designed in 1947—for weapons. So the killing proceeds slowly, and without much noise.
Another familiarity: the war is African, but it is sustained by the world. Neighboring powers—notably Uganda and Rwanda, whose armies are trained and equipped by Western nations—feed the ambitions of Congolese warlords and sell them weapons. The warlords need the arms to control territory and valuable mines. They pay for the arms with the mines’ produce—gold, coltan, tin and other minerals—which Uganda and Rwanda export to the world, for use in computers and jewelry.
And so Congo’s war, isolated though it may seem, ebbs and flows with global consumption. The war is in fact deeply relevant to the world’s economy—if it ended today it would probably incite a panic in markets. Commodity prices would spike. Supply chains would be disrupted. The production of many electronics would likely stutter, possibly cease.
A blond Ukrainian woman came into the aisle of the aircraft. “Ve vill be landing shortly.”
The soldiers, South African, seemed to become anxious. The plane veered, and a utilitarian wheel, its shaft encased in metal, unfolded from the wing.
We came at Bunia from the south, flying over the green-capped hills of the famous Blue Mountains. Fires burned in single points, like cigarettes the hills smoked. The land was lush where cavities had not eaten into it: mines lay abandoned, as wounds in the earth. It is Africa’s El Dorado: the land around Bunia is so rich with gold that the Congolese call it moto, hot. In the distance was a green thicket, but it was encroached upon by fields; in places one could see where a forest had been felled. The wind and rain had caused erosion. Hill upon hill had been shaved of its stomach.
The runway drew closer; the approach produced a feeling of suffocation. The city lay in a long valley, a cluster of metal roofs. It was an arrival laden with expectancy, and a certain anxiety: the stories of the war had, in the mind, built up the place; and one felt the burden of experience needing to confirm the myth. The aircraft’s wheel skidded on the tarmac, then rolled. The UN airport was a structure of stacked container boxes. The few workers there looked miserable.
Arriving in such a state, without specific destination, with only an idea, one found oneself relentlessly looking: the mind was like an antenna that probed, that latched onto small emotions. And on the uncomfortable motorcycle ride into town, fifteen minutes long, I acquired the idea that people here needed proximity. The road, rising and falling, was bounded on both sides by tin houses that, like the airport workers, were huddled in groups. Now a large white tent in a field—the UN. Again the cramped tin constructions. The driver seemed to skirt the main city, taking a string of back roads to the convent guesthouse.
An attendant with a beatific face ushered me in. The convent had only one kind of room, he said—simple, square, and with a narrow bed. A netted window faced the inner garden quadrangle, in which grew some red tulips, long-stemmed. The floor and ceiling were of gray cement, so one didn’t want to look up or down. Outside, a large metal awning blocked the view of the sky. It felt like a bunker.
Just fifty yards from my room was the UN base, lit by halogen lights and guarded by tense soldiers behind sandbags, their rifles always fixed on me when I would approach. The area was secured by convoys of white Hummers that patrolled ceaselessly. All day and night they broke the silence with the abrupt static of their shortwave radios.
But my first understanding of the war would come at some distance from such instruments of violence. That weekend I was visited, at the convent
, by a curious-looking Congolese couple.
Their politeness was disarming. The man, small, wore a hat, brown with a brown ribbon. The woman, taller than he and much younger, was lipsticked and in a bright-green dress. They seemed too well dressed to be living in a war. Unknown to me, I had been watched as I arrived in Bunia. This couple knew my name, and that I was a journalist. They wanted publicity for a company they were running. The man said they were entrepreneurs, and inquired if I might have time to make a small tour. I felt it was an odd request.
The wife left us, saying we would meet later, while the man and I took Bunia’s main thoroughfare, the Boulevard de la Libération, flanked on both sides by rosebush-like barbed-wire hedges. We walked gingerly—I was wary of moving in the open. The dust in the air created a slight haze. And prominent on the side of the street were a row of old gas pumps. Defunct, their hoses in coils, they seemed to have been replaced by humans: men squatted together—the proximity again—holding shiny brown bottles and funnels. They watched us pass. At the boulevard’s end we descended a mud slope into Bunia’s poor quarter.
Only it did not seem so poor: the alleys were narrow and the houses close together, of lightweight tin, but absent was the shantytown clamor that automatically suggested poverty. The couple’s company collected garbage, it seemed. We were met by their sole employee, a dirty ex-militiaman who pushed the garbage barrow. Such men were capable of great violence. I took another look at the entrepreneur, his fine clothes. He smiled, said I should not worry.
Even the most silent homes were peopled. Sometimes I caught glimpses inside and saw, in the soft light from small, high windows, people squatting on the mud floor, still. A woman would emerge from the house with a sack of garbage and make a little conversation before returning, shutting the door on us. Lives here were interior; little noise escaped the thin walls. A few hens strutted about some of the yards, rasping.
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