The Pygmies of Tshomba

Feeling like a nineteenth century, oversized anthropologist I stoop low to squeeze into a small meeting hut in the centre of the Pygmy village of Tshomba. The village is surrounded by tea plantations and lies a couple of kilometres from the main park entrance at Tshivanga. The door is no more than three foot high.

The hut is made out of thin bamboo skilfully woven into a solid, cosy structure seven or eight feet across. We’re joined by about ten men from the village, a group of women lean in through one door and a group of teenagers through the other. Everywhere you look eyes are pressed to cracks in the bamboo.

The Batwa, more commonly known as Pygmies, have been comprehensively abused by pretty much every group they’ve had any contact with. Skilled hunter-gatherers, they lived a nomadic life deep in the forest until they were forced out by the creation of the park and hemmed in by spreading agriculture and dense population. Though their presence in the Great Lakes predates the southwards expansion of the Bantu peoples they now live on the fringes of the forest and society.

With bright eyes and sad smiles they tell us some of their story;

“Before the park we used to hunt lots of bush meat like antelope, small monkeys, birds and bush pig, but we never hunted the gorillas or the elephants. We would hunt with traps, snares and spears. We would also hunt with dogs. We would put wooden bells on them which would bring the animals towards us and we would then catch them in nets. We used to have enough meat to be healthy and strong.

[After the creation of the park] the mwami [customary chief] of Rwabika protected us and offered us a place to stay. This is where we are still. We don’t own this land – but we don’t pay any rent for it either. We can’t as we have nothing to offer. All we can offer [in rent] are our fleas (sic).

Now we cultivate some roots [taro] and hardly ever eat meat. The only meat we eat comes from moles which we trap. Is this a situation that can maintain human beings? If we go back into the park to trap bushmeat or dig for food and the park rangers catch us we’re in big trouble.

During the first war the Rwandans invaded, the park guards fled and we were happy because we thought we would get our forest back. [But] we were caught in a trap. The Rwandans mistook us for the Mai Mai and would shoot at us. And because we live close to the forest the local population thought we were helping the Interhamwe. So we had problems with the local population as well. We were in the middle and we were attacked by both sides.

There is very little work apart from the park. For most types of work you have to be able to read. It is possible to work in the tea plantations but they treat us badly. They pay 300 Congolese francs [usd0.60] for every 800 plants that we trim. If you don’t finish all 800 they pay you only 150 or 130 francs [usd0.25-0.30]. The Bashi can do this work for longer than us because they eat well each morning. But we don’t eat so well so we get tired quickly and don’t finish the 800 plants.

In future we don’t want to return to the forest. Our enemies are there. There are poachers who have firearms and also armed groups. If we left to hunt we might come back to find our women and children dead and our huts burning. Also the traps of the poachers would be dangerous for our children.

Instead we want the state to recognise they’ve done us an injustice, to give us a place of our own to settle, to help us develop and maybe raise some bush pigs. We don’t mind where we go—we’ll even go to Europe—but just don’t send us to Rwanda!

Gorillas and guns

For a moment I’m sure Chimanuka is going to charge at us. Given that he’s a fully-grown, silverback Grauer’s gorilla (the largest kind) with arms as long as my legs - this would be a bad thing.

For the past ten minutes or so he’s been contentedly stretched out in a hammock of branches chewing on leaves and doing a good impression of being the zen master of the ape world. His family—17 females, 12 babies and 1 juvenile—orbit around him.

Now he’s decided to check us out. He rises up on his back legs and starts a chest thumping roar – which has the desired effect of getting us to retreat fast – before quickly forgetting what the fuss was all about and returning to his wild banana leaves.

We’ve come up to Tshivanga, the main entrance to the high-altitude area of the park to interview the park guards on the challenges they face in their daily work. After we return from visiting Chimanuka and his family, Benjamin, the softly spoken but steely park guard in charge of anti-poaching shows us the tools of the poachers trade.

Brutal looking spring traps and snares have been laid across the park injuring or killing many gorillas. Home made blunderbusses are also popular hunting weapons. As long as the thing doesn’t blow up in your face the shot spreads out so wide that poor aim is no barrier to success.

The poachers’ latest weapon - diazepam -may look innocuous but, when dissolved and injected into bananas or other fruit, is highly effective. Poachers lay the trap with a pile of innocent looking fruit and then return at night to scoop up the drugged baby gorillas. Benjamin also shows us piles of cassiterite (a tin rich ore), tourmaline (a semi-precious stone) and coltan (used in mobile phones) both of which are found in significant quantities in the park. Together they battle for predominance with the more esoteric (and less instantly marketable) value of the park’s biodiversity.

Benjamin opens another room in the rangers’ station to show us one more legacy of the war. The room is—quite literally—waist deep in the skulls of elephants and gorillas killed during the war. As recently as a decade there were more than a thousand elephants in the high altitude part of the park. Paulin, another of the guards, estimates that only 17 are left.

Sitting down with a few of the park guards we get a sense of the challenges they’re faced with. The park is propped up by GTZ (the German Development Agency) who pay a monthly supplement of 40 dollars to each guard. GTZ, to their great credit, have stayed in Bukavu throughout the first and second wars. It is their continued support that has just about managed to keep the park together and Chimanuka and family alive.

GTZ routes the supplements through ICCN, the national parks authority, to try to maintain the illusion that the park is a still a state run operation. But it’s a tissue-thin disguise; everyone knows that ICCN can’t keep the park going alone; the guards have only received their 8 dollar a month salary twice in the eight months since the beginning of the year. They have to beg even for the money for the rations to patrol the park.

In recent years eight guards from the Tshivanga station (one of six in the park) have been killed in the line of duty. One guard who died in an ambush in 2006 left a widow and eleven children behind him. But their ICCN salary (and the GTZ supplement) is cut off by ICCN pretty much the moment they’re buried, leaving their families destitute. Unsurprisingly this isn’t a great way to generate job satisfaction among the guards.

My Mai Mai evening

Sundays in Bukavu, as far as I can tell, involve a lot of early bell ringing, long church services and not much else.

In the afternoon I go for a walk with a Chilean friend around the city. We walk past once grand colonial houses by the lake, now stained and dusty. We carry on around the busy shore past the coltan and cassiterite dealers, past crowds of porters loading boxes and spading sand into rusty boats for the trip down the lake to Goma. We stop when the city runs out and we’re covered with dust kicked up by the passing trucks.

Later on that evening we return with Robert and some of his friends to an open air restaurant on the lake shore. With frequent power cuts the ambience swings dramatically; one minute the echoed croaking of bullfrogs and the occasional Perseid meteorite overhead gives way to raucous Congolese rumba and strip lighting the next.

Etienne, the mayor of Baghera, makes a dramatic late entrance, amid much back slapping and forehead banging. A charismatic and avuncular man, he’s a childhood friend of Robert’s with salt and pepper hair and an endless stream of jokes.

He has also fought as a Mai Mai guerilla for much of the past decade. As one of the few rebels with an education he was a key adviser to General Padiri of the Sud Kivu group. Until 2003 he lived in the forest, launching guerilla attacks against the Rwandan forces and anyone allied to them. His current position as mayor is a result of the 2002 peace deal (which many of the Mai Mai boycotted) that sought to bring some of the militias into the political fold.

The Mai Mai is a general label relating to a mess of different Congolese militia groups that sprung up in the 1998-2002 Congolese war; united in opposition to Rwandan invasion and influence. They’ve been responsible for their fair share of the atrocities against the Rwandan invaders, Tutsi Congolese (the Banyamulenge) and the RCD forces supported by the Rwandans.

‘Mai’ means water – and refers to their supernatural powers that could turn bullets, they believed, into water (plenty of Mai Mai have tried this theory out – but I’ve yet to hear of it working). Apparently one way that they would reinforce this magic power is by putting a paste made from the severed penises of their enemies into a cut in their arms.

I surreptitiously look for scars on Etienne’s arms but for some reason I can’t quite work out a way of dropping a question about this into the general chit chat.

A prodigal return

Walking around Bukavu with Robert is a bit like hanging out with an A-lister. Wherever we go people come up to say hello and touch foreheads three times in the traditional Congolese greeting. They treat him like a long-lost brother – which I guess he is.

Robert was born into a well connected Bukavu family (his father was city mayor) and lived here until he was sixteen. But in 1972 his father Alphonse was assassinated and the family left for Kinshasa. From there he moved to Canada, where he’s lived for the past thirty years.

Bukavu is the regional capital of South Kivu and commands a magnificent position over Lake Kivu. Robert tells me of the old days, when beautiful colonial villas stretched down to the lake surrounded by fields of bougainvillea. Now dusty concrete and roughly built mud huts tumble down the steep slope to the still lake. The only movement on the lake is a few solitary fishermen paddling towards the hazy horizon.

We spend the morning with a group of sixteen people from the sub-province of Nindja, a 900km2 locality through which the ‘corridor’ of Kahuzi-Biega National Park runs. The corridor is one of the most contentious areas of the park. A thin strip of land provides a vital wildlife transit route between the highland eastern sector of the park (gazetted in 1970) and the western lowland sector (created in 1975). The 1975 extension of the park cut straight through Nindja – enclosing farms and villages within its boundaries.

Since then the villages have expanded, coltan and casserite mines have opened up, new farms have encroached on park land and rebel militias now control much of the area. In fact little happens without their permission. There are parts of the park, such as Lilongwe further to the west, which park rangers haven’t even visited, let alone patrolled, in 30 years.

In some areas the relationship between the park and the local population has deteriorated to such an extent that one widely held belief is that the Rasta, a rag-tag offshoot of the FDLR, have been employed by ICCN to terrorise people into leaving the park.

In the afternoon we’re interviewed by Okapi radio which is the Congolese radio station part sponsored by the MONUC peacekeeping forces. This has the unfortunate spin-off of undermining Robert’s aim to keep a low profile in Bukavu to avoid being chased by more well-wishers. He says he’s going to take to wearing a wig and glasses just to get some work done.

Bush flights in the Congo

Elie is laughing so hard he can barely stand up.

Elie Baleke works for WWF in Bukavu and is describing a disastrous bush flight he took last year. The pilot was a drunk Russian who didn’t know the area. The plane was a rusty old Antonov in worse shape than the pilot. The destination was the western lowland part of the Kahuzi Biega National Park – a 6,000km2 expanse of montane forest and near impenetrable jungle that contains one of the world’s last populations of Grauer’s gorillas.

The pilot, seemingly unaware of the small inconvenience of two 3,000m mountains (Mount Kahuzi and Mount Biega) lying between Bukavu and the lowland part of the park, took off and veered west on a point-to-point GPS setting.

And, sure enough, the plane promptly hammered into the side of a mountain.

Elie picks up the story. “So there I was, looking at the jungle upside down, with a broken leg and a gashed forehead, in an area littered with Interhamwe…” he catches his breath and wipes his eyes before delivering the punch line to peals of laughter from his audience, “…and then I fell unconscious!”.

Luckily they’d crashed near a park post and nobody had been killed. Elie was evacuated back to Bukavu for a lengthy recuperation. But his ability to maintain a sense of humour amidst adversity and a sense of purpose despite overwhelming odds is typical of the people I’ve met on this trip.

We’re into the second day of a two day workshop on integrating conflict-sensitivity into conservation management in the Albertine Rift. The challenges faced daily by the national parks authority and the other conservation and development NGOs are breathtaking.

Civil war in the Congo in the last decade left an estimated four million people dead from war and disease. And, although the area has dropped out of the international headlines, vicious conflict continues. Just in June this year Interhamwe militias launched a reprisal attack on a village right on the park border in the sub-province of Nindja by locking 72 men, women and children into a building and burning them alive.

At times it amazes me that there’s anything left to conserve at all. The participants, who include representatives from the park authorities, local communities and NGOs, spend all day discussing the root causes, effects and possible solutions for some of the many problems that face the park; the presence of armed groups like the Interhamwe, the expansion of the park boundaries in 1975 without adequate local consultation that left entire villages enclosed within the park and the perception of local community that the park doesn’t benefit them. The electricity flicks on and off, rats scratch noisily in the tin roof and tempers flare.

But just when you think things are getting out of hand, someone cracks a joke and a rumble of laughter fills the room. And progress, slowly, is made.

Conserving the Peace in Congo

If I’ve learnt anything today it’s that I know nothing. Even the digested read of the politics of conservation in Congo is complicated beyond my understanding.

Our two-day workshop on integrating conflict sensitivity in conservation is encouragingly well attended. Nearly thirty people are crammed into the top floor of the Mount Kahuzi hotel near the centre of Bukavu. All of them have a stake, in some way, in the success of the Kahuzi Biega National Park, and a stake, in every way, in security in the region.

There’s the mwami (customary chief) from Nindja; the sub-province of South Kivu traversed by the wildlife corridor of the park. There’s a representative of the Batwa tribe (aka the Pygmies) whose history is a litany of abuse and desperate poverty; expelled from their ancestral hunting grounds when the park was first created in 1970, attacked by the militias, ignored by the authorities and bereft of their traditional way of life. There’s an impressive representative of WWF who keeps a two-way French-Swahili translation going throughout the workshop. Then there are the uniformed park rangers (who instinctively keep their walkie-talkies close to hand), an immaculately suited law professor from the local university and the entire park’s management committee.

With fortuitous timing we’re holding the workshop at the same time as ICCN, the Congolese Parks Authority, is developing a new management plan for the park. The hope is that the discussions during the next two days will filter into the management plan. This hope is fortified somewhat by the knowledge that my colleague and co-presenter Robert Kasisi has been asked to help develop that plan.

Robert, born in Bukavu and now a Professor of Environmental Design at the University of Montreal, has worked on biodiversity conservation in (it seems) pretty much every country in Africa. His warm chuckle and self-deprecating wit belie vast experience and a nimble mind.

Traffic noises float in from one side of the room, and a cool breeze off Lake Kivu from the other.

The discussions are long and sometimes heated – but slowly, circuitously, we reach agreement on the three most serious issues that face the park; the continued presence of armed militias in the park, lingering resentment among local communities over the unequal benefits of the park and the steady attrition of park land as refugees and farmers settle within the park, whose boundaries are unclear and rarely enforced.

We don’t produce any revolutionary ideas on how to tackle these problems; even MONUC, the UN peacekeeping force, has an unspoken policy of non-engagement with the Interhamwe militias that still pepper the western portion of the park more than a decade after the genocide in Rwanda. Previous skirmishes have resulted in swift reprisals against the local population… and MONUC doesn’t want to have their blood on its hands (a twisted, but surprisingly effective, way of exerting leverage over the blue helmets).

But we’ve at least come some way in agreeing on the most pressing problems faced by would-be protectors of the park. It certainly puts footpath erosion in the English Lake District in perspective.

The road to Congo

As the plane descends into Kigali rolling hills rise out of the flat plain. Geographically speaking they form the eastern border of the Albertine Rift. The rift itself stretches in a great swathe to the north and south and is punctuated by the great lakes of Albert, Edward, Kivu and Tanganynika. Historically speaking the region has been punctuated by some of the most brutal violence the world has seen in recent years.

We land on the crest of one the hills. Red earth and corrugated iron shanties slope steeply to either side of the crisp tarmac. It feels like the beginning of a rollercoaster ride. I spend the evening laboriously translating PowerPoint slides from decent English to my jumbled French. Robert later checks and cleans them up.

The following day we leave early for the drive southwest across Rwanda to Kamembe and then to DRC. Driving out of Kigali you realize quite how densely populated Rwanda is. Maize, manioc, sugar cane, coffee, houses and schools all jockey for place in the steep sided valleys.

After a few hours of twisting and turning on Rwanda’s perfectly tarmac’d roads we enter Nyungwe Forest Park. Here the signs of human habitation fall away temporarily as the montane forest reclaims the hills. Giant lobelias and heather forests coat the hills which themselves fade like cut-outs into the mid-horizon haze. The road worsens as we get closer to Congo.

After six hours we get to the border, pass through in less than half an hour and weave between pot holes and UN vehicles into Bukavu proper. The last time Robert was here, in April, few people were venturing out. Now the expansive city is alive with street traders and traffic. Apart from the odd UN tank and off-duty Pakistani peacekeeper you wouldn’t know the city has been the site of repeated sieges and atrocities.

We’re met by Faustin Batechi of ICCN, the Congolese National Park authority. Faustin previously worked in a national park in Katanga Province until a reprisal attack by the Mai Mai rebels in 2004 kidnapped his family and murdered his wife. Apparently the Mai Mai hadn’t liked the way he’d tried to stop them poaching in the park.

Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that his story is far from unique. Elie, a junior colleague of Faustin’s, mutters the understatement of the day: “La conservation ce n’est pas facile en tout le Congo”.