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.
07:30 sharp: The bloody churchbells begin. I lie in bed, fuming. The dogs howl in distress in every street for miles around, clawing at their ears. The hadedas take fright, rise up in their dozens, and yell their alarm across the quiet suburb. Soon the whole neighbourhood descends into a cacophony (from Gk. kakophonia, from kakophonos “harsh sounding,” from kakos “bad, evil” + phone “voice”. Etymologists connect it with PIE *kakka- “to defecate”). 
