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On the muddy banks of
Outside Mbandaka, where the river trips over the
Equator, it glances up at the shell of a dictator's unfinished palace, now home
to a pair of cows.
In a hidden creek in the hard-knocks capital,
Today, as this country tries to knit itself together after a half-decade of
war that ended last year, the river is witness to
It is both symbol and substance of the country's reunification, and the life
it nurtures on its banks shows the enormousness of the task.
A power-sharing government has been installed, but the authority of the
state has yet to reach old rebel fiefs. There is no
national army to speak of, only gunmen who remain loyal to rival warlords.
Peace still eludes pockets of the nation, like the mineral-rich Ituri region. Ethnic Hutu militias, some
responsible for the killing frenzy in neighboring
Not least, most everything has stopped working. Schools, hospitals and a
functioning legal system are but a memory. Roads, train tracks and turbines
must be rebuilt. Today the river, coursing 2,700 miles, is the country's
principal highway.
Mighty and mythic, it carries everyone and everything: hyacinths, memories,
traders, the dead.
Once, people here called it the Nzere, or the
river that swallows all rivers. It could be called the river that swallows all
stories. A long legacy of greed and suffering is inscribed on its back, from
the brutal rubber empire of a Belgian king in the late 19th century to
That war killed an estimated 3.3 million people, mostly through disease and
starvation. It sliced the country into pieces as three major factions, along
with an array of militias and foreign sponsors, scrambled for
Last July, on the heels of the peace accord, the river reopened and the
first commercial barge crawled up, loaded with cement, fuel and hope. Villagers
lined the shore. They scrambled up the tributaries to have a look.
"I tell you, it was a grand welcome, like it was Jesus coming!"
recalled Antoine Bawe, 48, the captain of one of
those first barges.
This evening, as dusk darkened the river at
Ndombolo and Primus. Music and beer. During
the war, those two things defied partition. They unified the Congolese, all
along the river.
A Slow Current
Today the barges that crawl up and down the
Even so, his journey upriver to
The tugboat engine broke down twice. The barge got banged up on sand reefs.
At least Mr. Mutuku, 63, was lucky not to suffer the
fate of so many others, on so many other crumbling barges, that capsize and
dump their passengers into the mouths of crocodiles.
For a moment, on the glorious Sunday of Mr. Mutuku's
arrival, it seemed almost worth it. No sooner had he stepped ashore in
Early last century, men made ivory fortunes in this trading town. Trucks
rumbled into the market, ferrying potatoes and rice from the interior. Trains
departed from an elegant riverside railroad station to get around the
impassable rapids upriver.
About the only way to bring goods to the river now is by bicycle. They cut
through the bush with sacks of rice on the back, bananas on the handlebars,
pedaled by porters who drip sweat from their eyelids like giant raindrops on
the dry dirt paths.
The trains have long stopped in their tracks. At the old station, ferns have
forced their way into a first-class cabin. The railroad chief, Emile S. Utshudi, has turned engine parts into a grain mill. He says
it is how he makes a living. He has not been paid in six years.
"In the minds of the population, it should be a new start, a new regime
that's just and prosperous," Mr. Utshudi said.
"Me, I too hope it's a new moment, but I have to tell you, it's the end of
our sleep, but we haven't yet woken up."
Mr. Utshudi, ever the bureaucrat, keeps a desk,
stacked high with papers enumerating the needs of his beloved railroad, inside
the stately colonial-era post office. Tucked away here, in a dank second-floor
chamber, is a memento of the country's most famous postal worker. It is a
salmon-colored copy of an employee newsletter, L'Ιcho
Postal, edited by the man who became Congo's anticolonial
leader and then in 1960, until his assassination a year later, its first and
only democratically elected prime minister Patrice E. Lumumba.
That such a thing exists at all, in a post office with no glass panes in its
windows nor any stamps, is nothing short of
astonishing except that all that remains is its cover. The pages are gone.
Like a sprawling memorial to greed,
Mr. Utshudi remembers the parade of rival armies
that pummeled his city. Mr. Mobutu's soldiers battled and lost to the rebel
forces of Laurent Kabila in 1997. Rwandan and Ugandan
armies came in 1999 and 2000. One massacre followed another. Once, Mr. Utshudi said, he saw the bodies of 15 children floating in
the river.
Today a new Congolese army is being cobbled together from the remains of the
old fighting factions. Under the tutelage of soldiers from
A unified army is a centerpiece of the peace deal, and the transitional
government has divvied up top military posts among leaders of the former
factions. Yet the chain of command is tenuous, at best, and critical questions
remain: where the soldiers will be deployed, how they will be paid, fed and equipped,
and whose command they will follow.
In recent months, gun battles have broken out between loyalists of the
government in
Each side has held onto its weapons. Each challenge is an invitation to
return to bloodletting. The war may be over, but trust has yet to be won.
With demobilization largely a dream, soldiers still prowl along the river,
still with empty bellies. Downstream from
During the war, this was the rear base of government forces. For years, with
nothing coming in from Kinshasa, villagers up in the hidden creeks had holed up
in the jungle, barefoot or, worse still, naked. Civilians abandoned their
fields and fled into the bush.
Today, cassava has been planted for the first time in years. The market, the
most reliable barometer of war and peace across the continent, bustles with
pigs and plastic flip-flops.
But the gunmen hungry, greedy, armed still hover in sufficient numbers
to intimidate the villagers, extract their hard-earned produce and keep them
quiet. "If the soldiers aren't paid, they are going to find some other
way," said one villager, Ambrose Makele.
Hazardous Conditions
Farther downriver, in the fishing village of Bikaba,
the women say they have grown accustomed to giving soldiers a portion of their
day's catch, or a basket of their day's harvest of corn or sugar cane. At least
now, they hasten to add, they can plant a little corn and cane.
During the war, they gathered roots to curb their hunger. At least now, they
say, they can row up to market and sell cassava bread or smoked monkey. On a
good week, the river sends news of a barge coming.
But the terror has not stopped. Imbombo Boleki, 22, described how only a few days before men in
uniform arrived in his village and ordered him to row their canoe upstream.
There was no pay involved, nor much choice. Had he refused, he said, he
would be beaten with a strip of hippopotamus hide, called a chicotte.
That is what happened to other men who rebuffed the soldiers' demands. That is
what has happened before.
At the turn of the last century, the rubber empire of King Leopold II of
Belgium also built itself on forced labor along the riverbanks. Those who
failed to meet the king's rubber quota were beaten with the same chicotte. Or they had their hands cut off and tossed into
the water. Adam Hochschild records this history in
his 1998 book, "King Leopold's Ghost." The river, he writes,
swallowed them, too.
"My father took me to the river," said Alfie,
who is 7. "He said I was a witch." With that, she burst into tears.
Who knows whether her father, whom she described as a soldier, wanted her
dead or simply wanted to get rid of her. All Alfie recalls is gasping for breath and being scooped out
of the river by a gang of street children outcasts like her who lived on
its banks in the capital, Kinshasa, where the river winds toward its end.
The other children brought her to an orphanage run by Maguy
Makusudi, who held her in her arms and translated her
shy, halting words from Lingala to English.
Alfie is small for her age, frequently withdrawn,
and hardly unusual among Congolese of her generation. Anecdotes from children's
advocates suggest that across the country, more and more children are accused
of sorcery, blamed for the ills that befall their kin in what remains a time of
unfathomable hardship.
The grown-ups who care for them see it as a barometer of national despair. When nothing else explains the gnawing misery of daily life, the
supernatural steps in. Sickness, death, joblessness, hunger all can be
blamed on witchcraft. Children, defenseless by definition, can be the easiest
scapegoats.
Difficult children can be the most vulnerable: the sickly, the precocious,
the retarded, the rebellious. Often, their trouble
starts when someone at home falls ill, or a mother remarries, or a breadwinner
walks out the door. Sometimes, prayers are recited for the child witches.
Sometimes, the children are beaten, forced to swallow herbs or drink gasoline.
Finally, they are left to rot on the streets.
Ms. Makusudi's orphanage, a row of rooms with
flimsy foam mattresses on the floors, is a gallery of cast-out girls. There is
a girl with tiny, shorn-off toes who remembers watching her mother put poison
in her dinner. There is a rebellious teenager whose
family turned to a revival church, seeking her exorcism. There is Alfie, whose parents cannot be found.
Struggling Upstream
It is impossible to tell how many children have been turned out, only that
they have swelled the ranks of kids who sleep under the shop awnings of
Kinshasa and pour into orphanages like Ms. Makusudi's.
Rare in decades past, the trend is attributed by social workers to the war's
economic toll and the rise of revival churches that regard the quotidian misery
of Congolese life as the work of the devil.
It does not hurt that accusing a child of sorcery helps to get rid of an
extra mouth to feed.
"For years, people don't see any hope," lamented a Catholic priest
named Zbigniew Orlikowski.
"They don't want to face reality, because it doesn't work."
The challenges that lie ahead for Congo lap against the riverbank.
When the ex-rebel leaders arrived in Kinshasa last year to take part in the
power-sharing government, they brought hordes of soldiers their own soldiers
and installed their headquarters along the river, the city's prime real
estate and its best escape route.
Jean-Pierre Bemba, the leader of the faction
called Movement for Congolese Liberation and now one of Congo's four vice
presidents, still keeps his private helicopter parked in the back garden of his
whitewashed mansion, just in case. On a steamy afternoon not long ago, his
soldiers lounged under its shade.
Farther along the river, the rebel-chief-turned-vice-president Azarias Ruberwa, of another
former militia, Rally for Congolese Democracy, also sits under the protection
of his loyalists.
Joseph Kabila Jr., an ex-major general in his late
father Laurent's rebel army and now the elusive thirtysomething
president of the transitional government, remains cloistered among his own.
Troops loyal to all three men stand accused of a horrifying list of abuses,
from mutilation to mass killings, cannibalism to widespread rape. Whether and
how justice will be sought for these crimes remains among Congo's principal
challenges.
The courts do not yet function. No truth and reconciliation process is under
way. There is talk of an inquiry by the new Hague-based International Criminal
Court, but trepidation, too, about whether it would upset the delicate balance
of peace. Besides, all three men are potential contenders in the next
presidential elections.
Under the peace deal, those elections are supposed to be held in 2005, but
one would be hard pressed to find any hint of preparations. Nationality laws
have yet to be negotiated, a potentially prickly matter in such a vast and
diverse country. There has been no effort to count eligible voters, let alone
educate citizens about their rights and obligations. Few Congolese can remember
ever going to the polls; the last elections were held in 1960.
On the shores of Kisangani, in the riverside
saloon of Mr. Bawe's barge, a young man named Coco Bombenga wondered aloud whether his country's leaders were
even interested in the business of democracy. As Ndombolo
and Primus flowed, Mr. Bombenga hectored a foreign
journalist to remind the world of his wishes.
Sure, he said, peace had reopened the river, and people could now buy and
sell fish. But what about his hunger to elect his own rulers, he demanded.
"If we can only live to eat, that's not enough," he said. "We
are not animals."