The DRC: Blackness and Brightness

I'm going to devote the next 3 posts to the DRC. Lots of thoughts about Rwanda are brewing, but I'm going to choose to keep these on hold for a short time. The last few weeks have been filled with more thinking/researching than writing (please pardon the delay in posting), but I hope that what I have now consolidated into writing will begin to do the following: (1) Give an accurate (not dramatic or stereotyped) portrayal of the perplexities of the DRC; (2) Discuss the role and controversy of the UN Peacekeeping Operations there; (3) Probe questions that help us better understand the human condition both within and beyond the DRC; (3) Get us thinking about what can be done to improve the human condition both within and beyond the DRC.

I am convinced that exposure to a place that many have deemed the “heart of darkness,” the “black hole,” and “entirely hopeless” can teach us more than anything about ourselves, about others, about conflict, and about hope.

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I was planning to just show up at the northwestern border between Rwanda and DRC, get my visa then and there, and meet my contacts on the other side, but after receiving some appreciated words of wisdom, I took advantage of the services offered by the recently-constructed DRC Embassy in Kigali. It’s a curious building, and well-used. I had to drop in multiple times, and it was always in French-speaking frenzy, full of people. I entered one day and greeted the front desk attendant with a friendly “Mwiriwe” (“Good afternoon” in Kinyarwanda), and she told me curtly, “This is the Congolese Embassy. Why are you speaking Kinyarwanda? Bonjour.”

I’d been told, both by others who have attempted to cross the border and even by an official working in the DRC embassy, that the only way to get a visa at the border (if the officials were functioning on a good night’s sleep, had a good eggy breakfast, and happened to feel like letting me cross that day) would be to subject myself to a series of bribes. So I hear, a typical American ends up paying $260 USD for a single-entry visa at the border ($140 + a $60 “tip” to each of 2 border officials) if mercy is shown and a visa is given at all. If you get a visa in the embassy, you pay $140 USD. Either way, that is one expensive visa. The truth behind the three digits? The DRC needs the investment. They need the money.

With a few kinks, it was finished. I got the visa over the course of about 1 week. I took a bus to the border, got out, then proceeded past 4 different crossing guard stations. I don’t think I took regular breaths in the time it took me to get across. The official parked at each station questioned me, some perky, others skeptical. I was with 2 other people – one was Nina (who thank goodness speaks beautiful French), and her friend from Switzerland, Jade. The third of the four guards was a man who must’ve been in his 50s, sitting squarely on a wooden stool in the shade of a sprawling tree. Nina gave him her German passport. He looked at her, asked her a few brief questions in French, stared for a few seconds at her face, then back at her visa, then back at her face, then handed her passport back to her. It took about 1 minute. Same thing happened with Jade. When it got to me, the guy thumbed through the pages, then stared blankly at my Rwandan visa for what seemed like a half an hour. He was clearly perplexed. He asked me something in French. Nina stepped up to the plate. I had no idea what was going on, but they started bantering back and forth in a conversation that was too engaging for my own comfort. Jade said something, and that made him seem to get more on-edge. Nina then cracked some sort of joke, laughed, and seemed to put him a bit more at ease. He handed my passport to me.

I found out later that he couldn’t believe that I was a long-term resident of Rwanda. He then asked why we were all coming to DRC to help take care of its problems if our respective countries have problems of their own.

You might want to think about how you would’ve answered him.

We approached our last building. They stamped us in. I smelled alcohol. A man with bloodshot eyes was leaning against the side of the building. He pointed to the metal border-crossing gate and said to me in a stupor, “Now, you go that way.”

We were greeted by 2 Mercy Corps workers (I was so glad to have these contacts) and piled into the Mercy Corps SUV. We started driving.

There is one thing that I noticed before anything else in the DRC: the ground. The ground – it was black. Pitch black. Africa tends to be known for its reddish dirt roads – a sort of orangey-brown hue that I’ve now grown accustomed to. So it was strange to be walking and driving along black roads. Then I started noticing something else: not only was the ground black, but the walls were black. The sides of houses were black. Lining the roads were giant heaps of black rock. Fossilized into the black ground and black walls were plastic bottles and glass and pieces of paper.

It was all lava rock.

The second thing I noticed: I looked up as I stood outside of our motel, a few miles inside of the border. There was a volcano. And it wasn’t some kind of ancient artifact or picture of historic glory or mountain-like, distant panorama – it was active and impending and huge and right above our heads. There was an orangey glow sitting directly over the gaping opening at the top, and the glow became more fierce and more firey as the sun went down. Lava. Churning lava. A thick fog of gray smoke slowly seeped out of the opening, swelling across the sky, looming above the whole joint.

The DRC is known as the “black hole” for different reasons. The irony of it. The town was literally black.

The volcano we were looking at is called Mount Nyiragongo. The Congo is full of volcanoes, giving it an uneven and rugged terrain. The countless militia groups that roam its territory use this topography to their advantage. They hide at the bases and peaks of volcanoes. They camouflage themselves against black backdrops. They train in the jungles, between jagged cliffs and hedges and expanses that aren’t even identified on maps. They know their land well, and they know nothing else. They are, in a disturbing way, unreached and unstopped.

Mount Nyirangongo has erupted at least 34 times over the course of the last century and a half. Its most recent eruption in 2002, before which 400,000 people were evacuated across the Rwandan border, killed about 47 people and left 120,000 people without homes. A huge chuck of Goma, the border-town where we were staying, is buried under lava rock. This 2002 eruption is known as the most devastating volcanic eruption in modern history. The low silica content of Nyirangongo’s lava makes it extremely liquid and fast-moving, in contrast with most of the world’s volcanoes. Its lava travels at about 60 miles per hour, making it difficult for people to evacuate fast enough.

It was weird to stand underneath it. The ironies were overwhelming to me. The volcano is so unstable, so unpredictable. The speed with which it erupts is catastrophic. And here we were, in the DRC, fully aware of its instability, unpredictability, the catastrophic nature of things – things just erupting.

The second thing I noticed – and it was very, very hard to miss – was the number of white UN vehicles. They were everywhere. They were ants on a piece of food. SUVs; vans; strange antenna-clad things with caged windows, thick tires, and oddly-shaped doors; trucks. They were all white with “UN” written on the sides and tops in big, black, block letters. You see these once in awhile in Rwanda, but nothing like this. There were so many of them that they had almost become an ever-integral part of the character of the town. They were like the clothes on people’s backs.

MONUSCO (United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC, the formal name given to the UN Peacekeeping Ops there) was throwing a party that night – their notorious UN Friday night disco party in the Congo. Our Mercy Corps contacts knew some of the upper-level officials in MONUSCO, so we got in. We left our passports at the entrance, signed in, and drifted towards a large, silvery, mirage-like disco ball twirling from the ceiling of an outdoor overhang. There it was, in all its glimmering glory, spewing light into a vast abyss of blackness around the compound. Blackness as far as the eye could see. There was nothing. It was so black it was almost graying before my eyes because my eyes couldn’t make sense of the blackness. You know when your eyes start adjusting to the dark and they begin to work to make out objects? My eyes were confused because they couldn’t make out any objects. No shapes, no sign of life, no movement, no light, no distant activity. It was the darkest of dark. It was dead.

Soldiers and officials were everywhere, in casual clothes, in army garb. They were from all over the world. Some were my age, some younger, others middle-aged, others with graying hair. Many men, and not many women. White trailers oriented in parallel lines. It was a giant trailer park, painted nothing but white. The light from the disco ball illuminated what was white. Barbed wire enclosed the trailer park and the disco overhang. People were dancing, dancing in the silver light beside a watchtower looking out into black oblivion. Watchtowers are everywhere in the DRC. Everywhere. Many of them are deserted and look as if they haven’t served their purpose in years. At the top of the tower, two heavily-armed UN officials stood, totally motionless, their eyes fixed to the nothingness.

People talked, mingled, sipped their drinks, danced. People who had spent the day in darkness found themselves under the light of a disco ball. It whirled and twirled, the only light for miles and miles, a floating ball of brightness, surrounded by the darkness of the outside world. A misfit, a detached apparition. Out of place. People who had spent the day constrained in vehicles behind caged-in, bullet-proof windows, keeping watch for others’ lives – for their own lives – were moving about unconstrained, freely. People who had perhaps not smiled all day were smiling. People watching the blackness were turned away from the whiteness of what was behind them. Things were organized, safe, planned, jovial. A hub surrounded by chaos.

I remember talking to people. Words came out of my mouth, and words came out of theirs. I was not quite with it, not quite put-together. I was so on my guard during my time in the DRC – and I had to be – that I barely processed or thought about anything. All of my energy was put into being aware of my immediate surroundings. It was only after the trip that I began to actually think about what passed before my eyes. Nina and I kept telling each other, “I need to process this. I can’t think about this now.”

Photo Captions:

(1) The first exploratory walk we did around Goma.

(2) A common type of UN vehicle to see.

(3) The view from our motel porch at night. That orange glow is from the volcano's lava.

(4) Mount Nyiragongo is open for climbing - I didn't take this (found it in this gallery), but I think it does a great job of depicting the terrain in the DRC.

(5) The MONUSCO compound where the disco party took place.