Sometimes one can’t help wondering if the continent of Africa is not forever cursed. A few days ago, television screens worldwide were awash with pictures of columns of wretched Congolese refugees trekking to only-God-knows-where.

In a country that is bursting at the seams with all sorts of wealth, some Congolese, with the assistance of those accursed Interahamwe, are up in arms to deny their fellow citizens the right to live on their shared land. In the process, many innocent Congolese are dying in the resultant war, if not the attendant hunger and disease.

In Somalia, clans are pitted against one another; in Sudan, the light-skinned are at the throats of the dark-skinned. There is the Djibouti-Eritrea eminent flare-up, the Ethiopia-Eritrea threat of a repeat, the Zimbabwe impasse, the Niger delta and Maghreb problems, etc.

In Rwanda here, we all remember only too well how this riches-for-self syndrome led to the near-extinction of Rwandans. That’s how we lost over a million compatriots in 1994, while over two million had languished in exile for almost four decades, before that.

Even much earlier, that same syndrome in the same Kivu region, of eastern D. R. Congo, almost confined many of us to an early death. But for having more than the proverbial nine lives of a cat, we wouldn’t be here with you today!

It was 1964 and we were in our second year of settling in as refugees. We had been hounded out of Rwanda four years prior to that, at the hands of bloodthirsty Parmehutu adherents who claimed a privileged monopoly of newly-independent Rwanda. 

In Kivu as refugees, we did not wish to claim any of the Congolese wealth, since ours was a temporary sojourn, yet some Congolese people saw us as a threat. That is why that year they descended upon us with all manner of implements of death.

Our group included two Rwandan warriors who could have given a thorough thrashing to an entire army of spear-wielding ‘Ba-Congoman’, as Congolese men were known. One of the warriors was known as Nyarwaya (RIP) and the other, Kanyafu (RIP).

Nyarwaya was a giant of a man who towered over other men like a mountain. As for Kanyafu, he was a tiny man, as his name indicates. In his hands, however, two sticks were a formidable weapon.

When the attackers came brandishing killer weapons and chanting war cries, Nyarwaya and Kanyafu advised us to pick stones and stand behind them. Then the two asked the attackers what they wanted.

In place of an answer, the ‘Ba-Kongoman’ threw spears. Without flinching, Nyarwaya clutched them in mid-air and threw them aside as the two marched forward. Meanwhile, Kanyafu was hitting and breaking any of the spears that came his way.

Where we stood, we broke out in laugher as Nyarwaya picked two fully grown men and knocked their heads together, then discarded them like a pair of rags and picked the next pair!

Kanyafu also put his sticks to work, whipping the ears, knocking the noses or the ankles, but always avoiding to hit the temples (nyiramivumbi), not wanting to kill anybody!

When they saw this, the ‘Ba-Kongoman’ dropped their sticks and spears and took to their heels. We could hear their ‘yelps’ as our stones caught them, and continued to laugh as we continued to rain a hail of stones on their fleeing backs.

Unfortunately, armed soldiers intervened and shot dead a number of our people. After that, we were shown the way to the Uganda border and told to vamoose.

We formed columns of wretched refugees trekking to the border, as the ‘Ba-Kongoman’ are doing today.
What a cruel twist of fate!

Contact: ingina2@yahoo.co.uk