So we had landed in Butembo.
Standing directly to the left of the landing strip was a small one room building with and attached long shed and benches. Patrice, the flight attendant, handed me my bags and said I should come and meet Madame sa Femme, The Missus he said, who had come up from town to the airstrip to see him.I never got round to doing that. My colleague said; “Hey look who’s there”, pointing.
Next to a big, white, loggoed land cruiser complete with bully bars, stood the formidable figure of Andre, the regional head of the organisation that had recruited us for the job. Andre was Flemish, tall, in his fifties with a personality that would get him voted for preferred best friend anywhere in the world. He’d lived in the Great Lakes region for over twenty years and naturally drifted towards development from his farming background and the fact that he had lived mostly in rural communities, farming. A man madly in love with his children, his work and his outrageously pretty and curvy Ugandan girlfriend.
His job was to oversee the administration of Belgian development funds and their distribution to about 22 community organisations involved in everything from experimental farming to education. The process basically involved vetting the internal procedures of the organisations, their potential and accomplished outputs as well as the quality of their leadership. Andre had been given the mammoth task to tell one fake NGO from the next genuine one and his day involved making decisions to prioritize between roofing a primary school and distributing dairy goats. All of this in a notoriously unstable town and region that had changed hands three times between government and two different rebel groups since the beginning of the century. Andre, I was able to witness over the time I was there, went about his job with the confidence and indefatigable energy characteristic of those who REALLY love their job and understand how important it is.
Andre walked over, beaming, and gave us each one of those hugs that seemed closer to the Heimlich manoeuvre than a greeting. He spoke Swahili, Flemish-Congolese French and English interjected with the EH! MMMHH...and AAAHs... that punctuate true African conversation. “Very very Happy to see you, Bienvenue a Butembo” he said. And you could see he meant every word. After a rough journey( emotionally in this case), it feels wonderful to realise that you were expected, that there is good drink and food prepared in your anticipation. It makes you feel special. And that’s how I felt right there, looking at Butembo.
Hold on, someone’s trying to steal my bag...I knew this would happen. After all this is Congo. HELP
God. It's the driver trying to take my bags.
Why am I like this? When did I become one of those terrified white women you see clutching their bags for dear life, sending out the universal message for "I'm rich and I've got money in this bag, please come and snatch it" .
At that moment, at the thought of the insult my body language shouted, when I wheeled around to defend myself against the imagined thieving hordes, only to find a helpful, hospitable driver, I felt deep shame. Deep shame at my small little world that had managed to convince itself that it was worse out there than within. I apologized profusely and he laughed it off.
His name was Paulin and he still wanted my bag so he could put it in the 4x4.
I promised myself to enjoy Butembo, against my screaming terrorized little self, despite all I’d heard, all the statistics and all common sense. I was here and I might as well get some fun out of it.
We piled into the car and started down the hill and soon we were driving down the main road. The town looked derelict from the unpaved main road, but not a single shop was closed. In fact they were overflowing onto the pavement with their wares; electronics, home wares, tires and car parts and the ubiquitous flaming colors of the Kitenge cloth.
The unpainted, tired looking buildings with verandas extending lining the main street were occupied to full capacity by businesses and customers. There was not a single shop space left. This was the kind of human traffic you expect in Nairobi or Kampala. Andre filled us in on the status of Butembo, pretty much the economic lung of the whole Ituri region, a town whose original industrious inhabitants had been energetic pre-colonial traders, a tradition that had carried into these modern times.
Butembo is a major thoroughfare for stones, gold and the much prized Colombo Tantalite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan), a major funding source of the conflict.
I actually met a Ugandan who was a intermediary between the mines and the buyers. The boom in Coltan caused massive deforestation and bush meat hunting for the sustenance of the miners. You can find very informative pictures on the fate of our very few remaining cousins, the gorillas,
here.
Butembo is also the main regional entry point for imports, and extremely agriculturally fertile .
This was not inner Sahel. It was a town bustling with activity from within and out.
Paulin drove to the end of the main road then took a left uphill. After a few more turns, we turned into a lane that made me understand the need for the big 4x4.
See, I have always felt deeply uncomfortable the big NGO 4x4s with their logos.
They’re an affront in my experience, representing the inequality of conditions between the West and the diseased-disaster stricken hunger-mad inevitably-black receiving end of the charity. They rub in the ever-so proven true myth of the powerlessly needy African vs. the Ever-Providing white man. It does not help that a portion of the development workers have quite a mercenarial outlook on their work, with little belief in what they do, condescension to their colleagues and staff and are quite happy to live lives they could never afford in Europe. What with the help and the sun. Sadly, this has made a lot of development work a “joke” on the continent and the symbol of that joke “par excellence” could well be the white loggoed land cruiser. And speaking of mercenaries, some african development workers are even worse. In this line of work, I wish more were like Andre, with heart. But that is my own personal rant.
Negotiating our way up the hill lane was hard, considering most of it had been washed away by the rains. Thank God for the big car.
We got into a gate and Andre said this is where we would be staying, a guesthouse run by a friend of his. As we got into the guesthouse, Andre’s friend emerged from the kitchen.
Mama Sandra or Mama, as I immediately started addressing her as, was one of those matriarchs who take over your life if you are within a 15 metre radius of them. She was of medium height, round everywhere, fast moving, and eyes that looked like they could tell if you were lying. Everyone working at the guesthouse called her Patronne. After the customary hellos, she briefed us on the etiquette of the house:
• No sex in the premises( or possibly and preferably ever in our lives, she implied.)
• No late night drinking outside (HA, fat chance considering the paranoia I still had to work on throwing off), if you want drink, we have drink here.
• Everyone must, she said emphasizing must, order their dinner in the morning before nine so the needful can be bought from the market. You don’t order, you don’t eat.
Next, we went to the rooms and dropped our bags. The rooms were basic, bed, small desk, chair, cupboard with extra blankets, red bucket in the shower and toilet. I sat on the bed taking in the place.
Getting into a hotel room where I will spend more than two days is always an exciting experience for me. I’m looking for the pros and cons, the chocolate on the pillow, the cockroaches in the bathroom and any signs that the previous occupant committed murder or suicide in there. For all I know, it could be a portal to another dimension and I could...
The telephone rang and it was Andre saying that considering no order had been placed that morning, there was no food for us. So Andre was taking us out for dinner.
The restaurant we went to was a bar of the type one may encounter across the region, with big outdoors covered area, fully stocked bar and meat being grilled. The floor was crushed rock with chairs and tables arranged in little clusters. The sides of the perimeter fence were full of adverts for phone companies or beer brands. It was a little after five and the place was filling up. Congolese music was playing fom the speakers. We ordered brochettes and chips, meat on sticks, a dish that has the potential to make vegans reconsider their life choice. The chips were of the thin and crackly variety, real “frites”,the mayonnaise home-made and with it came cold, magnificent, generously sized primus beer to wash the lot down.
What more could I ask for?
The conversation flew between life in Congo, the makeup of the group we were training for the week, the training style they were used to and the expected outcome of the session. Back at the hotel, we had one more drink together. As I was chatting with Paulin, he suggested I try the other beer around Turbo King, “la biere pour les vrais hommes”, a beer for real men. This is the kind of challenge you have to take up in order to establish your credentials early in any new place. So I did. Halfway through it I felt like I had been hit by a train. It is poisonous. With a 6.5% of alcohol it makes Primus look like the drink of sissies, foreign scum and the like. So of course I had one.
Waking up that morning I swore, as I do often, that I would never, ever, ever again in my entire lifetime touch Turbo King again. To date I have not. I was feeling absolutely wretched.
After a good reparative breakfast of egg and bread with confiture de fraises- strawberry Jam and butter (not blue-band margarine, which should never be mentioned in the same sentence as food) and slices of cheese, we set off at a quarter to eight. On the veranda of the guesthouse, three men were seated, drinking...Turbo King.
I almost threw up.
The group consisted of forty participants who belonged to a variety of organisations and community groups based in and around Butembo. Education, agriculture and entrepreneurship were the three main categories they belonged to. The workshop consisted in a situation analysis, problem identification and solving exercises and the elaboration of shared Best Operating Practices in coordination and networking. It was to last from Monday to Friday. Most afternoons were devoted to visiting the projects.
The first project I visited was a student’s entrepreneurship club. About ten young men and three coy young women had formed a club and they pooled money together every month and twice a year decided on a joint investment, the profits of which were saved. They had bought three bicycles already ferrying wares from one end of town to another. The aim of the session was to establish with them a system of problem identification and prioritization. Occasionally they would drop in facts about the instability but the gist of the conversation pointed out to the fact that they believed in the success of their efforts and that Congo will get better. They regaled me with stories of sleeping in the bush, running in the middle of the night fleeing town. They also kept saying that it was definitely in the past and how better off they were and that “la vie continue”-Life must and will go on. They were contagiously, ardently optimistic and I couldn’t help but start seeing why. They had simple enough aspirations, become prosperous, build a house in the upcoming area of town( a place full of unbelievably garish small castles), have a family and give their kids the best they could. They knew they were better off than most and they were seizing the opportunity to make it worth it. Heroes. I am still in touch with two of them. They’re married now and they started their own businesses with mutual financial backup. Heroes.
Later in the week, the entire group of participants went to visit a project that was hailed to be the best of the network. It was an agricultural project, a model farm, in the outskirts of the town. We had piled into three minibuses that were skidding their way onto one of the worst roads I’ve ever seen. The houses grew fewer and we were soon into a valley that should have its picture in Wikipedia next to the words luxuriant, lush and dense. Imagine towering trees with moss and ferns on them, thick undergrowth and colossal palms by the hundreds which one of the participants pointed out to me as the source of the much prized Palm wine. Must try that, I told myself. This is the one beverage that features in most African textbooks as the drink of choice of West African pre-colonial times, if there was a party; there was palm wine to be had.
Although we cannot have been more than ten kilometres out of town, it took a good hour to reach our destination; a converted leper colony, a leprosarium. A fact I was only made aware of upon arrival.
My ever-so scientific and atheist father had always dismissed as first ignorant, then Christian, the notion of Leprosy as an extremely dangerous and contagious. He told me the Jewish people, to whom we owe the Bible, equated it to a proportional punishment of Sin committed. That understanding, according to Dad, was very successfully passed on in Africa and where a leper might have been seen before as someone who had been bewitched and as such a PASSIVE being, leprosy came to be equated to something a self inflicted injury, they became ACTIVE.
I don’t think lepers ever enjoyed first class treatment before colonization, but things did not get better when God suddenly made it their fault that they were sick. No matter what my father said, the sight of a leper, gets me recoiling. There is something in the way they are twisted, in the way they are tortured which makes me run away lest their aura of suffering engulfs me. I am powerless in their presence I just want to cowardly go away. They are what I could become. Irreparably damaged, disfigured, unloved, untouchablet and feared. Stigma it’s called.
The rationale behind leprosariums was to isolate, to quarantine the diseased. One could be in a leprosarium for decades before death ensued. I can only assume that in the beautiful way humans adapt, life must have gone on in this place and it seemed to have indeed. They must have made friends, laughed, cried, quarrelled and mourned for each other.
And I could swear, tricks of imagination or not, as we entered the gate, there was a feeling that one was entering in a special place, a place with a history of pain but also a place where people lived.
The gate was halfway up a hill split in half by a small straight road that climbed up to a row of cottages. There, to meet us, was Jonas, the farm manager in a thick blue jacket, brown pants and gumboots. He was part of the group of participants and as such, was ecstatic to be hosting us at his model farm. As we walked in, I looked around and couldn’t believe the beauty of the place. The place smelt of freshly tilled wet soil, cow dung and eucalyptus, a very pleasant combination. I heard a cow moo. Along the road lay in neat patterns the most glorious vegetable garden I had ever seen. Dozens of species of tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, zucchini, tubers, maize, and beans in various stages of growth surrounded us. And all of it organic. The project was a seed dissemination project where seeds from the world over were tested for viability then distributed to the local population. Farmers brought their goats to be mounted by the improved breed goat stallions (whatever the goat equivalent is, the top dog, The HE-GOAT I think it is) and bulls. There was a fish pond full of tilapia and further down the valley, hives. There were chicken and ducks and rabbits and pigs. The Garden of Eden in its full glory.
The cottages were little brick two room jobs with a small window and a small fire place, the old lepers’ quarters. There were about twenty of them and across on the hill opposite, twenty more. I said a silent prayer, saying sorry. Sorry to the people who had passed through. Sorry for the suffering they endured, the loneliness and sorry for still being afraid.
The tour continued until we got around the hill into the valley close to a clear little stream with thick grass around it. Jonas had some drinks and nibbles for us.
I was standing in the wet grass, my pants soaking up the water, my Next shoes muddy and unrecognizable, a finger in a pot of thick white honey that had just been passed, trying to take it all in. This was one of those times when I had an inkling of what heaven must be. A beautiful place where people earnestly celebrate each other, are laughing, bantering and passing burning cobs of roasted maize.
I remember a famous aerial picture of a lone tree in Tsavo National park, in Kenya. It’s the sole piece of shade for a mile or so around, and all manner of animals trek to it to rest, seek shade, leaving tracks as testimony. A very impressive picture.
The farm was playing the same role, providing sustenance, shelter, the opportunity to gather and nurturing a future in an otherwise bleak and unstable environment. I was honoured, humbled and happy to be part of it. After a drink and more maize, Jonas stood and launched into the inevitable speech to thank all and talk about the network and what its significance to him, the farm and the population had been. I knew he meant every word.
Does Aid money work? It bloody well does. Not always but here it did.
That evening, I took back fresh lettuce to the guesthouse and gave it to Mama Sandra. She made us a salad with tomatoes, hard boiled egges, onions and garlic and what has got to be the best vinaigrette in the world (after my Mum's that is). The salad came with Rice, plantain and Sombe-pounded cassava leaves in palm oil-, with fish fillets. I stuffed my face.
I heard someone call for Turbo King, I looked outside and the three Turbo King men were still there, same table. Real men.
There is a hotel in Butembo called "L'Auberge de Butembo". A very odd, impressive place.In total contrast with the dereliction of some buildings and the newer buildings, L'Auberge is old, well maintained, set in expansive grounds, with magnificent old trees and a manicured lawn. It's main building is big, white with a high red clay tiles roof and black beams and black wooden framed windows. It is surrounded by smaller versions of itself. The main building seves as bar-restaurant and reception area.
The beauty of the place had guaranteed that it was never out of business as whoever owned the town wanted to stay there. A high profile murder had taken place there. Most deals, good or bad for Butembo, happenned at l'Auberge. It had a secret, dignified air about it with the waiters standing at the corners of the outdoors area in their crisp white shirts, bow ties and black pants, second guessing the next drink . The evening mist was creeping in and big cars were driving in and out, meetings were happening.
Three days later we were standing on the air strip of Butembo, with Andre and Paulin saying goodbye, we embraced and promised to make this happen again sometime. We embraced, Andre dislodged a few of my ribs in the process and Paulin said "Bon voyage, mon frere".
I realised I would miss Butembo for its spirit of resilience. I truly felt I could do anything because I was surrounded by people who believed that if it doesn’t work once, you get it together and try again. I shook hands with my partner as we always do after a job well done. "I think we did well there" he said, "really well." We taxied and took off.
I had my head pressed to the window the whole way back, this time not trying to spot incoming missiles, but marvelling at the sights and missing the things I had felt and the people I had met. Same place, different perspective.
Four years later, I was at the beach with my brother, his wife and their four Children. Bujumbura's has the Mitumba mounts of Congoas a backdrop, a vista worth beholding.
My niece was playing in the sand with her brothers. A Chinese man strolled past and and went into the water. My niece, 6 years old then, told her brothers: “See that man there; he is Congolese. He is swimming back home to Congo." She pointed: "Over there, to the mountains” My brother, his wife and I were dumb-struck.That was not funny at all. The child had obviously construed in her mind, from our daily conversations, that everything Congolese was different, so different it couldn’t even be black and most of all, shame on us, that it did NOT belong. As we scrambled, outdoing each other to deconstruct, draw the poison out, I realised I had been part of the problem in Congo.
By settling for comfy prejudice, by being the arrogant-ignorant arse bourgeois kid versus the struggling broken-French speaking Congolese, I had perpetuated what had become an easy truth to accept; Congo is dark, Congo is savage, and Congolese are poor and Congo is rich but worthy only of use and exploitation. I was Tintin in the Congo. I believed Congo was the Heart of Darkness.
And carelessly, casually, I had passed on the lies to the next generation. Until I saw it for my own eyes, I would never have believed the beauty and potential of the place and the people. I also saw enough of its ugliness and poverty to balance out the Garden of Eden.
Now I know I can never do justice to the 3rd largest country of Africa (after Sudan and Algeria) with just one visit, to a remote eastern town. But I would like to believe that for every quagmire, every rape, every murder, every shot fired, there is a family getting the kids ready for school, a business opening, a meal put on the table and people falling in love. Congo is just another place. It’s like everywhere else. Really it is.
Congo has suffered at the hands its own people as much as it has suffered at the hand of the world. It is like a battered wife that the neighbourhood expects to die any day the abuse any day but she seems to press on and get better or just enough until the next battering occurs. Like a battered wife, everyone talks about it, few take action and most think it is weak feeble and somewhat deserving of its fate. But press on it does.
Congo is a marvel, the kind of place you cannot BUT fall in love with. Mind you, it can be a very bad relationship, the kind that makes you hate the other so hard because you love them. Nothing in the world could have prepared me for the Heart of Darkness, for Congo.
And it was just as well.
We survive because we can get around obstacles and not obstinately through them. We adapt or we die. Call it arrogance but I felt the responsibility to inform her of life’s little glitches (the pachyderm poop she seemed to have NO IDEA about) befell me. First, I went easy. I tried explaining that our ability to cope with a change of plans defines much of our success. 
