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Land of Plenty, Lives of Desperation - Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum Land of Plenty, Lives of Desperation
Congo Is Transformed by Hunger After Years of Devastating War
By Emily Wax
Washington Post
November 2, 2003
The gunmen raced through the dense forest with their rusty AK-47 rifles, their footsteps and voices mixing with the jungle's hum of insects and birds. Under a thick canopy of branches and leaves, Fadia Wakengela hid, clutching her family's last bundle of food: cassava and bananas. But her babies kept crying. In just a few minutes, the ragtag soldiers from the Mai-Mai rebel group found them. They fired their guns in the air. They told her to lie on her belly. The fighters demanded her food. As a mother with five children, all crying, all cold, all hungry and all clinging to her legs, she refused. "Then, they beat me with sticks and guns," said Wakengela. "They took the food and left."
She and her children ran the other way that June day. Little Gertrude, 9, with hair braided in a dozen prongs that jut out like a porcupine, carried her 2 ½ -year-old sister, Yuma, on her back. Muscular Sumailie, 10, held Mary, just five months. And their mother carried two children, Raphael, 5, and the new life growing inside her. Wakengela was nine months pregnant. For weeks, she recounted, they roamed the forest searching for the path that would return them safely to their village in eastern Maniema province. Her husband had fled the fighters not long before she did. He was also wandering in the forest, and she hoped she might find him. But instead, on a bed of wet leaves, mud and branches, two of her babies died, just days apart. Yuma and Mary didn't lose their lives to gunshot wounds or to disease, but to starvation.
In Congo, one of Africa's most fertile nations, people are starving to death. The majority of the approximately 3.5 million deaths during five years of fighting were not due to combat. They were slower deaths, like those of Yuma and Mary, that have made the Congo war the costliest human conflict since World War II. Since a peace deal was reached last April, a new government has been taking hold in the capital, Kinshasa, in theory uniting the vast country. Observers say it is an important moment in Congo's sad history. Yet, a week spent in the region around Kalima, a town at the epicenter of the conflict about 800 miles east of the capital and reachable only by bush plane, revealed suffering in every home.
When Wakengela made it back to the village of Kagelya in August, she found it transformed by hunger. Nursing women were so malnourished that their breasts no longer produced milk, and children with bloated bodies and yellowing hair were lying in the dirt. The entire village was on the verge of starvation, although Congo is a land of abundant rainfall and rich soil, a place with the right growing conditions for some of the world's most prized crops -- coffee, rice and corn. Rice used to be exported to African neighbors; the coffee was once hailed as being as good as Kenya's.
The Mai-Mai -- a group that has been fighting for control of eastern Congo -- is the main reason why there's no food in this fertile village, which used to feed others around it. Unpaid fighters pilfered vegetables from the woven baskets of women who picked their crops in the lush jungle clearings that have fed generations of Congolese. They nabbed chickens, pigs and goats as if they were shopping in a free-for-all market, grabbing whatever they wanted. Roaming the countryside, they kidnapped and raped women who were going out into the fields each day. Soon the fields were empty. "We are still in the emergency phase even though the war is over," said Robert Dekker, the eastern Congo director for the U.N. food agency. "You still have rebel groups living on top of the population trying to get part of the harvest and take all of the animals. The frightening part is that there are huge areas that we don't know about because of insecurity that still exists." Humanitarian groups estimate that despite the peace agreement, 70 percent of eastern Congo, the nucleus of this country's war, is still not secure enough for people to farm.
Legacy of Suffering
Congo's history is rich in human suffering. This is where a slave trade began in the early 15th century, where European explorers first laid eyes on the African jungle, where Belgium's King Leopold II extracted diamonds, timber, rubber and gold, and where Cold War politics backed the extravagant dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. After Mobutu's death in 1997, the country spiraled further into devastation. War broke out in 1998 between the Kinshasa government and rebel forces, which included armies backed by Rwanda and Uganda. Rebels took control of eastern Congo, while the Kinshasa army maintained its hold on the west.
The country's colonial legacy compounded the food problem, health workers said. For decades, villagers supplied many towns with fresh vegetables and livestock. Residents of those towns lost farming knowledge years ago when they went to work for Congo's many mining companies that were set up at the turn of the century by Europeans. Many people in Kalima gave up farming when a Belgian mining company called Symaf built a town of brick houses, health centers, schools and volleyball courts for 12,000 miners in 1930. The workers mined a mineral called cassiterite, which is the main ore element of tin, most commonly alloyed with copper to form bronze. It is used for machine parts.
During the company's boom years in the 1940s and '50s, the workers were paid low salaries, but the benefits were generous -- housing, health care, primary education and food. The company flew in smoked fish, rice, peanut butter and cheese, exotic groceries for the African bush. People left their farms to work in the mines. Former president Laurent Kabila nationalized the company in 1998; today it is under the control of the country's largest rebel group, the Rally for Congolese Democracy. Production at the mines plunged during the war, and the company stopped doling out benefits. People couldn't feed themselves or pay for health care, said Francois Kitenbele, the mayor of Kalima. And by that time, most of the people living in Kalima had lost their farming know-how.
Food that used to come in from outlying villages, such as Kagelya, stopped, since it was too dangerous to farm. Because of the Mai-Mai attacks, many people in those villages sought the safety of larger towns such as Kalima and the price of food skyrocketed. For the first time that anyone here can remember, people began dying of starvation. Kitenbele, with the help of Merlin, the only humanitarian agency in the Kalima region, is teaching people basic farming techniques again. But he's advising them to abandon the traditional farms in one- or two-acre jungle clearings outside the village and to cultivate small plots near the center of town, away from the forests where the rebels roam. He helps them select vegetables to fit the composition of the soil. His hope is to have a surplus of food within the next year. "It's pitiful to see what happened here," he said.
In places as poverty-stricken as Kagelya, people are willing to trade the gold they find in the streams near their homes for bags of salt. The salt is more valuable to them. But these days, the forests are too dangerous to look for gold. A man came in a jeep not too long ago looking to trade for gold, but, finding little business to transact here, ventured into the jungle. He has been missing for three weeks now. People say the Mai-Mai kidnapped him.
A Bone Hunger
A thunderous rain beat down on the town. It was a Thursday, much like any other, and Njiaki Machozi, a 50-year-old woman, died of malnutrition. The hospital workers covered her corpse with a white sheet. She died alone in a ward of Kalima's General Hospital called Phase One, for the most severe cases of starvation. Her legs had swelled with water retention. She had been wandering in the forest for weeks trying to escape the Mai-Mai. She arrived at the feeding center too late. Her family was missing. Medical workers would have to figure out a way to give her a burial.
Outside the hospital, swarms of children played and giggled. Some of their faces and stomachs were so bloated the children had taken on the appearance of tadpoles, with their puffy cheeks and stomachs, thin legs and bloated feet. According to handwritten logbooks kept in the town's General Hospital, 27 people -- mostly children -- have died because of malnutrition since June. The U.N. World Food Program has given food to a feeding center here and four others operated by Merlin. Without this program in Kalima, health workers said, hundreds of children would die. "I have never seen anything this bad," said Jane Opiyo, a Kenyan nurse and nutrition coordinator for Merlin who works with the feeding center. "They depend on cassava and leaves and they wind up living for months without any protein." In Africa, there is an understanding between people about what it means to suffer from something known as hunger of the bones, a feeling far more desperate than hunger of the stomach. Medical workers here call it kwashiorkor, severe protein deficiency. It's a hunger that can make you feel as if you are going insane, Opiyo said.
Inside Wakengela's hut, her five-month-old baby, Genevita, was crying. Her husband, Gerald, came in from the rain and asked if there was food, and she said there wasn't. Then he asked what he should do. She said she did not know. He had tried to hunt. But he said the Mai-Mai have taken all of the animals: chickens, monkeys, antelopes, pigs, bush meat and even snakes. All gone. With what is known here as Congolese coping, his wife fed him less than a spoonful of porridge left in her washing bucket and wrapped a leaf around it to make it a version of a sandwich. The family crowded around some warming charcoal as thunder and lightning made the hut seem cozy. They laughed. They told stories about an earlier, easier life before the war.
With a warm smile and big eyes, Wakengela explained that this is not the life she planned. Her father worked for a mining company as a guard. She even attended school for a few years. At her church, she is one of the only members who can read and write. She had planned to become a teacher. "I wanted a simple life. Maybe I could have taught in a church or school. My dowry was so big," she said, laughing as she recalled the memory of the payment her husband had to give to her family, a symbol of her worth as a bride and future mother. "Yes," her husband said. "She was costing three goats and 50 U.S. dollars."
Her husband said he has heard talk from leaders in town that peace is coming. But he doesn't believe that will change life much for his family. He looked over at his sister, who stood quietly in the doorway, and explained: "Four of her children are still kidnapped by Mai-Mai. If they are starving to death in the forest we may never be able to see them again." He recited the Congolese proverb about how a problem can persist: "Maybe the elephant is dead. But its tusks and hair remain."
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