One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [15]
The Mayi Mayi is a name given to a number of militias and local defense forces fighting to push foreign invaders out of the Congo or even out of whatever area a particular militia calls home, though they were often no more than violent groups of local thugs taking what they wanted from the people with the barrel of a gun. Mayi comes from the Swahili word “magi,” which means “water.” Local medicine men would encourage youths to join the post-colonial militias, blessing them so that any bullets fired at them would turn to water. Their chant evolved to Mayi Mayi, and the popularity of this belief spread. The power to turn bullets to water proved not to be within the various commanders’ and warlords’ power, but the name stuck. The Mayi Mayi are notoriously fierce, and their command structure is loose. They are feared and often blamed for a lot of the massacres in the eastern part of the Congo. Most factions are organized along ethnic lines, and their violence is directed toward other ethnic groups whom they see as invaders, specifically the Tutsi from Rwanda and their ethnic counterparts in the Congo.
When I met Paul in the winter of 2002, the war was still tearing the eastern Congo apart, and the rebel group RCD-Goma controlled much of the region, with the backing of neighboring Rwanda. Two Rwandan soldiers stood about 100 yards down the road from where Paul was staying, watching the children come and go, ready to take some of them back into the army. They passed the hot days using their pickup truck for shade. The threat of a kidnapping raid loomed over the center.
I told Paul that I would change his name in anything I wrote down so that he could not get in trouble for what he said to me. We could pick his pretend name together, and he could say anything he wanted without being afraid.
He looked at me with wide brown eyes and an expression of confidence on his face, a smile, because I did not seem to understand anything and he would help clear things up for me.
“It’s okay. I am a soldier,” he said. “I can’t be afraid.” I think he would be disappointed to learn that I changed his name anyway, as I did for all the children in the interest of their own safety.
Paul was thoughtful and eager to help the other children.
“There were twenty children fighting with me. They wanted to escape from the army too, but only five of us decided to try. The others said, ‘If you arrive safe, let us know, so we can escape too.’ I have not been able to send them the message yet.” It was his “yet” that struck me. He had plans to help his peers, which he intended to carry out.
Paul had been kidnapped into the army; he was not a volunteer, he said. One night, the interhamwe entered his village. The interhamwe, roughly meaning “those who attack together,” were the militia in Rwanda primarily responsible for the killing of nearly 800,000 people in the three months of genocidal fever that swept the country in April 1994. They were police officers and soldiers, farmers and businessmen, teachers and students, nuns and priests and nurses, driven mad by ethnic hatred and manipulated by their leaders. Most of the murders of Tutsis and moderate Hutus who refused to go along with the killing were committed with machetes and garden hoes. After the war, the interhamwe fled Rwanda into the jungles of the Congo where, still manipulated by the former leaders of the Hutu Power government, they continued to stage attacks against Rwanda, continued to avoid punishment for their crimes, and continued to profit from the resource rich land of the eastern Congo for over ten years.
In Paul’s village, everyone was sleeping as the interhamwe crept in through the jungle. They burst upon the village, ripping the night open with machine-gun