The horror, the horror!

We couldn’t get across the DRC-Rwanda border fast enough, the three of us. Eric the Dreadfully Well-Read, Owen the Nut, and I just wanted to find a motorbike-taxi or three, and get through the customs to civilization as fast as we could.  We had become tired of the dark horror of Goma surprisingly quickly.  

Civilization? Rule of law? Rwanda? I hear you ask quietly.  

Yup, you’re not wrong.  Rwanda must hold the Industrial Productivity Award for Mass Murder.  Back in 1994 it took Hutu hardliners only 90 days to kill nearly a million people.  That’s quite an achievement.  They murdered about ten or eleven thousand people per day, using labour-intensive technology like machetes, clubs, stones, axes and handguns.  That’s more efficient than the industrialized death camps of Nazi Germany.  These guys are not lazy once you get them motivated.

But that was in 1994. This is 2007, and peace and the rule of law prevails in Rwanda. Apparently. They have traffic lights and traffic police in Kigali, the taxis are disciplined,  regular, and inexpensive. Nobody jay walks, ever.  People are friendly and go out of their way to help you. Everyone insists, smiling, that they are neither Hutu nor Tutsi, but just plain Rwandans.   Only the many genocide memorials and the odd amputee remain to remind you of the hell that Rwanda was. Oh, and the lorry-loads of convicted genocidaires in their gay pink uniforms. 
 

But back to the present hell of Goma, a border town in North Kivu, DRC.  It’s not even a kilometer from Rwanda,  but the difference is remarkable.  

The first thing you notice is that apparently nobody understands Kinyarwanda, the language of the region. They speak only Kiswahili on the Congolese side of the border. Now, that is odd.  I suppose it means the Belgian and German colonists planned their annexations carefully, taking into account the language and cultural transitions that existed in the area at the time. There must have been a natural division between Kinyarwanda and Kiswahili speakers, just there, where they drew the border line.  After all, the colonists were considerate. Such kindly conquerors would never have separated families and friends for selfish economic or jingoistic reasons. And those Congolese rubber-collectors didn’t really need their hands, that’s why the Belgians helped out by amputating them. They were doing them a favour, relieving them of the extra weight on their thin bodies.  

Therefore, the sharp edge between Kinyarwanda and Kiswahili can’t have anything to do with European-defined national boundaries, and the hate engendered by playing the “Hamitic’ Tutsi against the ‘more primitive’ Hutu. Can it? 

The next thing you notice about Goma is the number of 4 x 4s cruising the streets.  

“Hmm, rich people here. Lots of economic development,” you think, until you see the Save the Children Fund or OCHA stickers on the doors. Then you start to notice the blue helmets poking out of every second Jeep, and the United Nations logo everywhere. OK. Can there be some kind of crisis here?

We stop by at the Save the Children Fund offices. Children are involved as soldiers in the never ending conflict, the guy in charge tells us. He’s been negotiating with a 13 year old general, hoping to demobilize the kids, trace their families, and restore them to their childhood.  Oh, then there are the children who cause family misfortune through witchcraft, and end up in the bush, rejected by those who should love and nurture them. Something must be done. He’s trying to help, in a pale, flappy sort of way.  

The third thing you notice is the aircraft. 

Every few minutes, a jet either takes off or lands at the airport nearby. Huh? Why would anyone want to come to a business conference here?  And where are the Airport Grand Hotels, and the Caesar’s Palaces? Or is the tourist industry booming? 

Well…actually, they’re ferrying soldiers, arms, food aid, medicine, minerals, and probably contraband as well. Those planes, that is, that can take off and land while part of the runway is covered in volcanic lava.  

Volcanic lava? I did mention that Goma is hellish?  

The sharp black volcanic rock that swamps Goma is the fourth thing you notice.   

As we trudge up the endless road further into the overcrowded slums area near the airport, dogged by hordes of little children shouting “Mazungu! Mazungu!”, we notice the peculiar lack of vegetation, the burnt look of the ground.  We stumble over sharp chunks of rock, twisting our ankles. Everywhere you look, the black clinkery rock rules.  

No matter how poor they are, children have to wear shoes to stop their feet being lacerated to the bone with every step they take. Some people have managed to find sawdust or straw to spread in front of their houses.  As it gets darker, we stumble further into the slums, so that our host can show these Wazungu to his wife and children, like some kind of trophy.  

We notice a destroyed cathedral in the darkness on the way back to the hotel. Nobody’s tried to rebuild it. No point. The volcano will erupt again, and wipe it out again. In the meantime, some kind-hearted NGO has built identical wooden houses right  on the lava flow, obviously for those thousands who lost their homes when the mountain ran with fire. Like it won’t do the same again.  

That evening, in the surprisingly pleasant Hotel Volcan (ten dollars a night for a room – not the posh side of town)  we meet an ageing ex-pat South African, his bewigged young escort more conscious of her lipgloss than his conversation. He hasn’t been home to Benoni for twelve years, makes his money in some mining enterprise deep in DRC.  He tells us that there’ve been 41 aviation accidents in DRC in the past year. He’s just attended the funeral of a colleague who died in a plane crash. It’s only a matter of time for him. His security guards were shot at by Congolese soldiers last week, what can you expect, they earn like three dollars a month or something. They have to rob to survive. He shrugs, slips his hand higher up his lipglossed squeeze’s indifferent thigh, and takes another gulp of his third double brandy and coke.   

Later, after the electricity generator is switched off, Eric the Well-read tells us a story:  

Imagine Rwanda, July 1994. As a good Hutu member of the Interahamwe militia, you’ve done your duty by God and the Nation. You’ve crushed a good many Tutsi cockroaches, you’ve smashed a few skulls as they bowed down in prayer in your parish church, and you’ve even drowned a Tutsi baby or two, like the vermin they are. Can’t let them grow up, they’ll just turn into The Oppressor, taking our land, our cows, our women. Again. God is with us on this. He doesn’t want the Tutsis to win.  

But they’re advancing, they’re advancing on us.

The cockroaches are coming.  Then the unbelievable, the dreadful, happens. The Tutsi army takes over Kigali, they take over the government… God is not on your side after all.  Jesus, hear our prayer. (You’re a devout Christian) You’d better run, or the Tutsi cockroaches will do unto you what you did unto them.  

So you flee, with a million others, over the Rwandan border to Goma. The transitional government, dominated by Hutus, has already moved to Gisenyi, not two kilometres away from the border, on beautiful Lake Kivu.  Ten thousand of you pass through the border every hour of that hellish Bastille Day, 1994. No time to check your papers, just run. For Chrissake, there’s nowhere else to go.  

You took your machete with you, just in case. And you’ve needed it, by God. The Tutsi cockroaches have raided Goma more than once, killing thousands of your comrades. Things are confusing here. You never know who you can trust, who your enemy is. There are Tutsis by the thousands, waiting to annihilate you, and there are Hutu traitors too. There are gangs of soldiers, you never know who they are, they just attack, they maraud and loot. They gang rape your women, they steal your daughters. You hear rumours that Angola, Uganda, and even Zimbabwe are involved in the mess. There’s lots of riches in the DRC, and they all want a share. You hear on the crackly BBC Kiswahili radio that nearly 3,5 million people have been killed in Congo because of this crazy situation.

You’ve had to move around to avoid death a dozen times yourself.  But that’s OK. You’re still a man. You’ve raped plenty of women, your manhood isn’t in doubt.  You’ve taught your sons to do the same. They’re doing you proud, the eldest has already done a few Tutsis, and he’s only fourteen.  

You will never forgive the Tutsi cockroaches for the pain you’ve suffered here.  When you first arrived, you settled on the sides of a mountain called Nyirangongo Volcano. How could you know the dangers?  Your beloved youngest child died when he walked into a little valley full of carbon dioxide from the  volcano. He just fell over, he couldn’t breathe. The bad air is invisible to everyone but the locals. And they never warned you that there were places like that in this hellish country.  

And one night, the mountain bled fire. The smoke, the stink, the houses burning, the screams were appalling. The earth shook. You ran right back to Rwanda, trapped between the volcano to the west, and the cockroach soldiers to the east.  You crept back to Goma after a week – better a volcano than the cockroaches.  But you’re going to take Rwanda from those Tutsi cockroaches again, just as soon as you’ve settled the Congolese problem. So you drink plenty of Primus beer with the lads, wave your machete about manfully, and shout drunkenly of beating the shit out of Paul Kagame.  Genocide, war, volcanoes, hell.  Jesus wept. You’ve seen it all. 

So, you see why Eric the Dreadfully Well-read, Owen the Nut, and I were so eager to get across that bloody border into the safety of Rwanda, and from thence into South Africa, and from thence into the happy safety of our own warm beds, from whence I am posting this blog.

Orientation? Not on your life!

I’m as crabby as a hermit tonight.

 

As usual, I had set aside Sneckie my Favourite Laptop when my second favourite child came to spend his mandatory hour chatting lightly of this and that with his darling Mama.

 

I admit I was already in a foul mood. Years of falling deeper and deeper into the mad rabbit hole of NGO life occasionally reverses itself suddenly, and I find myself vomited out into the daylight. The daylight, in this case, consists of realising I DON’T want to spend Saturday and half of Sunday tapping grimly at Sneckie the Enemy Laptop to produce some impossible document that will do nobody any good.

 

And you know, don’t you, how when you’re in a temper, you soek for things to affirm your fury? You actively go out and collect more irritating information.

 

So I asked my dearest one, meaningfully, How was Life Orientation at school today? The darling brightened, scenting an entertaining parental rage coming on. He hates LO as much as I do. He fails it regularly, which is the only sensible thing to do with LO. When he passes it, I will be worried indeed. It will be a sure sign he’s gone over to the mindless enemy. Pity he has to pass it to get through Grade 12.

 

Life Orientation is crap. In theory, it’s a good idea, but in practice it’s rubbish.

LO has four posh-sounding learning outcomes that the Department of Education has concocted to bamboozle us with. The first is that learners will achieve and maintain personal well-being, whatever that is. Quite a tall order for an adolescent male, given those crazy hormones and even crazier fantasies the gutter press is always banging on about. We won’t even start with the girls and entrenched inequalities that reduce their personal wellbeing somewhat.

And I wont bore you, or myself, with the other learning outcomes. If you want to read the whole mealie-mouthed load of codswallop, go to http://www.education.gov.za. I suspect – in fact I know – that most schools treat LO like a poor relation with bad breath and no money.

But I digress. Let me get back to my satisfying fury.

My darling was entertained by two American evangelists in LO today. And as he told the tale of how they finger-wagged, harangued and lectured about Sin, Hell Fire and the One Way to avoid the Great Detention, so his gentle mother became more and more hellishly furious. Seeing this, the darling stoked the fires, telling gruesome tales about the Rapture, and the inevitable fall into Hades for the likes of his beloved parent.

And does the school plan to invite a Muslim to talk about Islam? Or a Hindu? A Buddhist? A Jew? An Animist? Or Heaven forefend, an Atheist, or even a Humanist? The sweet mother asked with gritted teeth and bloodshot eyes.

No, quoth the darling. Why should they? They know that the evangelists are right. We don’t have to listen any further to any other point of view. There IS only One Way, dearest mother of mine. Discussion is useless. The school knows the truth.

He smirked as he left the Audience Chamber, after politely passing Sneckie the Rational Laptop back to me.

Little bastard.

Rouen-ed by women

My father would have loved a son. A cricket-loving, rugger-bugger, jut-jawed, man’s boy would have suited him well. They would have camped without benefit of tents, shot at crocodiles, roared at each other with testoronic fury, and ended up getting sozzled together at the club.  

Dang me if he didn’t get three skinny red-headed girls instead. By the time I was born, he had given up all hope of an ally in the home.  

“Christ, Poppet!” he must have roared at sight of me squalling like a noisy orange in a pink blanket. “Not another goddamn fucking girl.”

My father was never shy about his language, even in front of his delicate daughters. In fact, my older sister grew up believing that Fucking Chokwe Coon was the name of a Zambian tribe, so frequently did he address the office assistant by that elegant appellation.  

My father was outnumbered by women, like an old lion teased by silly young jackals. He tolerated it well, but growled every now and then to show who was boss.  

It wouldn’t have been so bad if we girls had been able to catch balls, or run, or take an interest in the local birdlife.  But oh no, our mother had to make bloody sissies of us all.  

“Christ, Poppet! You’ll turn them into bluestockings!” he yelled one Christmas when our presents turned out to be Art History books. Mine was on the Impressionists, and I still remember each beautiful page.  

Pictures, like scents and music, can take you right back to your childhood. I just have to look at Monet’s lovely picture of the cathedral at Rouen, and I’m nine years old again, sitting on the lavatory for hours, studying each painting with the attention that only a child can command.  My father tried to counter my mother’s genteel tastes by teaching us rude poems. I taught this one, in my turn, to my own children:  

As cold as a frog on an icebound pool,

As cold as the tip of an eskimo’s tool,

As cold as the fur on a polar bear’s bum,

As cold as an iceberg, chilly and glum.

As cold as charity, and that’s pretty chilly,

But not as cold as our poor Uncle Willy.

He’s dead, poor bastard.

Like poor Uncle Willy, my father is long dead, although I should imagine it’s not cold where he is. He’s probably roaring “Fucking pansy Beelzebub” at some cowering demon.  

Father Almighty

Jesus wep’, I’m turning into my father.  

No, I’m not growing a toothbrush moustache, despite my best attempts. Not going bald, either. Pity, it would be so much quicker to slosh a bit of soap around a naked scalp than it is to carefully wash, perm, curl, colour and spray my elegant locks into rigid obedience. Heh, I don’t think.  

And I’m not marrying my mother – heaven forefend. Necrophiliac lesbian incest is not one of my interests.

Besides, she said consideringly, it would be difficult to get hitched to a handful of scattered ash. Even if I could find the bits, which I suspect have been mislaid somewhere between the death and the resurrection of the body, I’m not sure where the veil would go, not to mention the garter. Unless one could find a bit of charred femur? And then, how would one know which collection of bitty grits is the left digitus quartus?  

Besides, I wouldn’t want to be my own step-parent (which I would be if I were married to my dead mother) because, as we have agreed already, I’m turning out to be so like my father.  

Like my father, I rage at what doesn’t please me. I don’t waste my time sulking or manipulating any more, When I’m crossed I just roar with monstrous furiosity, never allowing the opposition a chance to offer a case for the defence – or the offence. Its so much easier than tact and gracious patience. Much more honest.  

Take this evening, for example. I was quietly reading a newspaper blog about a certain boys’ school which has seen fit to expel some revolting miscreants for boozing in uniform at a sports event. The conversation lightly turned to forms of punishment. Beat the little shits! Said the blog commentators. The only way to get to the brain is through the bum!  I whipped myself into a furious temper, just like Dad. This is what I wrote in response, teeth gritted, veins pulsing, and eyes popping:  

Corporal punishment is always unacceptable, at school or at home. Besides being insulting, it’s ineffective in the long run. Children learn that violence is a quick and easy way to solve problems, and that the strong triumph over the weak. This is not what we need our kids to learn. Real discipline takes far more effort, time and commitment, and is based on firm boundaries, good examples, and a great deal of patience and love. Not quite as easy as a quick and dirty beating.

As for expulsion, the Schools Act clearly says that only the Head of the Education Department (in our case, Ms Mahanjana, the Superintendent-general) may expel a child, after a fair disciplinary hearing has taken place, and allowing for an appeal process. I’m surprised that the SGB [which expelled the children] didn’t know this, particularly since the Act is now 11 years old. They must have had time to read it. If not, they can find it on www.education.gov.za.

So you see how unreasonable I’m becoming. Just like my blessed Daddy.  

I guess the law about expulsion thing MAY have something to do with the crazy idea that education is a social good, not to mention a human right. Children, no matter how well-known they are as irresponsible felons, still have a right to education.

In fact, one could argue that it is only education that will save them, since their parents have clearly abdicated the task.  Of course, whether schooling has anything to do with education is a horse of a different blog, and we wont deal with it here. But watch this space.

Meanwhile, expulsion is a very serious sanction, only to be administered by the hierarchical equivalent of Sir Humphrey Appleby, not by any delinquent-maddened school principal and his self-righteous git governing body.  

And I guess that children who booze at sports events are NOT imitating their parents. Heaven forefend that we parents should ever sink into a beer-sodden rage over the rugby.  

After all, my hard-boozing, raging old man would never do such a thing. Why should I, or my children?