Last evening, as we drove home to Rochester from Chicago in
a snowstorm, our conversation touched on where we each were at the moment the
tragedy of 9/11 began unfolding. We each remembered, of course. We each
remembered the horror of watching the Towers collapse, a scene on television
that seemed unbelievable for having been imagined so often as a special effect
in TV dramas. Even in a snowstorm, watching out for slippery stretches of
highway and the mini-whiteouts created by semis and snowplows, we were
comfortable in our heated car. It has heated seats, to help ensure the comfort.
It took us a bit longer than usual to make the trip, but our safety was never
seriously in doubt.
Try as I might, it is difficult for me to imagine what it is
like to live in a place where comfort is impossible and where terror, fear,
violence, and death so haunt daily life that safety is at best momentary and
temporary. Yet some live in such a place.
In his New York Times’
column yesterday, “The World Capital of Killing,” (which you can read here),
Nicholas Kristoff reports from one such place: the Congo.
It’s easy to wonder
how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked
the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s
even easier to assume that we’d do better.
But so far the brutal
war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but
also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo
war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month.
That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.
What those numbers
don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture
and mutilation, in ways that sear survivors like Jeanne Mukuninwa, a beautiful,
cheerful young woman of 19 who somehow musters the courage to giggle. Her
parents disappeared in the fighting when she had just turned 14—perhaps they
were massacred, but their bodies never turned up—so she moved in with her
uncle.
Kristoff goes on to tell Jeanne’s story, to date, a story of
watching relatives be mutilated, herself kidnapped, and repeatedly gang raped.
Left for dead by her abductors, she was taken to a hospital where surgeons
pieced together her torn body. Three days after being released, soldiers from
one of the rampaging militias in the countryside abducted her again. Once again
she endured gang rape, and once again she somehow found her way to the
hospital. The surgeons think there is too intact tissue left to effect full
repairs.
Kristoff ends his piece not with a conclusion, but with
questions—questions that must be answered by those of us who are comfortable
and safe.
Unless we see some
leadership here, the fighting in Congo—fueled by profits from mineral
exports—will continue indefinitely. So if we don’t act now, when will we? When
the toll reaches 10 million deaths? When Jeanne is kidnapped and raped for a
third time?
I realize the United States cannot be the world’s police. I
understand the rest of the world also bears responsibility. I know that
American young men and women stand in harm’s way in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I
am aware that we have our own concerns for safety, especially in light of
threats made by people and organizations that have struck before.
My question is this: Is it possible that our own concerns
for safety can make us hesitate to act when horror unfolds in a part of the
world where we have no national interest? That’s what happened as the Holocaust
unfolded. May we be a people so committed to justice that we not allow it to
happen again.
Alexandra Fuller grew up in Africa, in Rhodesia until that nation’s savage civil war forced most white families to flee the land that was renamed Zimbabwe. Years later she returns to travel from Zambia, where her hardscrabble parents still live, across Zimbabwe into Mozambique with K, a soldier who had fought in the bush in Rhodesia’s army. He is half-mad from his memories, by the atrocities perpetrated by both sides, and by the unspeakable loss inflicted not only on his soul but on the blood-soaked land and its displaced, poverty-stricken tribal peoples.
Fuller’s book, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier (Penguin, 2004) is a memoir of a shared humanity and great poignancy, of tragedy and loyalty, of God’s presence in lives haunted by demons.
“And this,” said K as he stepped into the roofless house, “is where we’ll live one day. I’ll finish building it soon. I have to get the farm going a bit more first, though. But what do you think?”
I wondered who “we” was, but I didn’t ask. Instead I said, “It’s lovely.”
“Look,” said K, “it’s all set up for books. Shelves here, and here. Maybe you could put ornaments on this shelf. This is the kitchen. See? A view of the mountain out the window.” He turned to me and I can describe the look on his face only as transported. “I don’t think,” he said, “that God is going to have me make this journey alone. He will send me a woman when the time is right.”
A blue-headed lizard scampered up the wall where the larder shelves would be one day and one of the dogs darted after it, barely catching the end of its tail, which sloughed off and wiggled hysterically on the cement-dusted floor.
“She’ll have to be a very special woman,” said K, softly and looking at me.
“Yes,” I said.
And then, maybe it was a trick of the rain-softened light, but I saw K’s face fold with such exquisite torment that my heart turned over for him.
He said, “There’s been so much destruction. But I’ve learned so much now. I’ve really learned about love.” K’s lips grew fleshy. “I would nurture a woman. She would be the head of the family now. I wouldn’t have to dominate her. I would put everyone else first. I would come last in the family. This is the order: first God, then my wife, then my children, the dogs, the servants… I would be last. I just want to share this”—he gestured to the house, the garden, the slow-churning river—“with someone.”
I looked away from the house and saw that three fishermen had paddled their canoes around the bend in the river. The evening had brought a kind of careless, extravagant beauty to the world. The sky was rinsed various shades of blue and pink and was scattered with ripped, high clouds. The sun, catching, itself in the trees on the far bank, bled red and gold across the water. Peace Mountain and the distant escarpment were softened in a dying light. From the village opposite K’s farm, blue clouds of smoke from cooking fires tugged into the evening sky. It was the time of day when the confusion of color, the churn of cooler air supplanting the heat of the day, the miracle of the journeying river—everything about being alive—seemed more improbable and fleeting and precious than usual. [pp. 62-63]
In northern Uganda a rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army has waged war against the Ugandan army from bases across the border in the Sudan. The LRA’s chief, Joseph Kony, claims his goal is to overthrow the Ugandan regime in order to establish a government based on the Ten Commandments. The rebels’ methods are brutal, and they have gained infamy by sweeping through the countryside kidnapping thousands of children, raping and slaughtering the adults. The children are made to commit atrocities, the boys forced to become soldiers, the girls made into sex slaves. In 1998 alone, more than 6,000 children were abducted by the LRA. More than half a million people have been displaced by the violence, many now living in sprawling camps guarded by government troops. The LRA regularly targets NGOs and humanitarian convoys for attack, increasing the terror felt by civilians.
Each year Uganda holds a national music and traditional dance competition. War Dance follows the students from a primary school in one of the large refugee camps in the north, Patongo, as they train and travel under armed escort to take part in the competition in the capital city, Kampala.
Along the way a few of them, Dominic, Rose, and Nancy, tell us their stories. Of how they were abducted, brutalized, and then somehow escaped the clutches of the LRA to make their way to Patongo. “It’s difficult for people to believe our story,” one says, “but if we don’t tell you, you won’t know.”
In the music and dance—lovingly rendered on the screen—they find beauty and we are reminded that art is not a luxury but an essential part of life for those created in the image of God. War Dance is a simple film, a documentary that tells a story that must be heard and seen, and not forgotten.