Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (36 page)

I headed out almost immediately for the nearby camp. Within a few minutes I was sweating heavily as I made my way along a trail, but soon enough I came upon the little Hutu refugee city that I was looking for. The camp was draped across an expanse of hillocks and lush green vales, and was spacious and orderly—a world apart from the besieged settlements I had seen in Tingi-Tingi and Ubundu. But just as in those forsaken places, in an instant I was surrounded by young camp denizens who wanted to know who I was and what I had come for.

We enacted a little impromptu skit that on my part conveyed, “Take me to your leader,” and in no time, I was introduced to a man who enjoyed some kind of special standing in the camp. He agreed to give me a tour. As we descended a hill into a little depression where women were washing clothes in a stream, someone yelled out, “French! Monsieur French!” I turned to see a man running toward me with a broad grin and a look of disbelief that matched the one that was now on my face.

It was Camille, the doctor who had accompanied me so enthusiastically as I strolled through the camp at Tingi-Tingi during my visit there with Sadako Ogata of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He grabbed me by both hands and shook me, disbelieving his eyes, wanting to confirm that this was for real. I too felt as if I had stepped into a dream. How had he survived the string of massacres that had laid a trail of blood, tears and bones across Zaire? How had he ever survived the walk—more than a thousand miles had it been in a straight line but certainly far more since the route had wound through some of the world’s densest rain forest?

This was no surprise reunion of old friends, but the improbable way that fate had linked us made the experience just as powerful. We stood there in the deathly mid-afternoon heat and exchanged pleasantries. Finally he got around to asking me why I had come, and I told him I had come for the same reason that had brought me to Tingi-Tingi months before: to see what had become of these people.

I was beginning to feel unbearably hot, and became aware that I was sweating profusely. I toted it up to the fact that I had risen so early to get to the airport, and had not had a real meal yet that day. Camille brought me to the camp’s medical clinic, where he said I could sit in the shade and interview people who came for care, or simply passersby.

The first person to come along was a twenty-year-old woman named Odette Mporayonzi, who said that on May 13, 1997, she had been in Wendji, the scene of some of the worst massacres from the end of the war, judging from the stories that were being told. “My husband had gone to fetch firewood, so I was all alone when it began,” said Odette, who was seven months pregnant and had come to the little clinic—nothing more than a clapboard shack, really—for a checkup. “The bullets were falling on us like the rain in a storm. I ran until I fell, and then I just watched what happened.

“Two soldiers summoned me to halt. They grabbed me, and I just pretended I was deaf and mute, and when they let go of me, I just continued walking. The soldiers kept shooting and shooting, and so many people were dying. When a Zairian soldier stopped to rummage through the belongings of people who had been killed, an officer shouted to him in our language, ‘That stuff can wait until our mission has been accomplished.’ ”

Odette never saw her husband again. She wandered the forests after the gunfire finally died down, and was eventually taken in by a Zairian family, who told her that she looked enough like the local people not to arouse too much suspicion. They told her to wear a white bandana, just as the local townsfolk were doing, in a show of support for Kabila and his rebellion. And they warned her not to talk to strangers.

The next day, while she stood outside the house where she had taken refuge, Odette said a truckload of troops rumbled up and stopped nearby. This, she thought, would surely be the end of her, but instead the soldiers grabbed a teenage Hutu boy who happened to be walking by. As they began beating him, Odette said the soldiers yelled, “Here is another son of Habyarimana,” invoking the name of the former Hutu president of Rwanda. “Right there in the road the soldiers swung the boy by his feet and beat his head against a tree trunk until he was dead. I had to squeeze my eyes shut to keep from screaming.”

As Odette spoke I began to feel ill. My stomach was queasy. I felt faint. Her story was one of the most disturbing I had ever heard, and yet by now I was struggling to keep my eyes open. Although I was sitting in the shade, the air felt as if it was coming straight from a furnace, only it was dead still. Sweat cascaded down my brow as if poured from a cup, and yet my skin felt incredibly clammy.

Camille asked me if I was okay. He offered me a Coke, which I gladly drank as Odette’s story continued, thinking that the sugar would give me a lift. “A couple of days later, a sergeant and a young man from town came to eat dinner at the house where I was staying. They had just participated in a mass burial, and one of them said, ‘Ah, Kabila has really killed a lot of people here, hasn’t he?’ The other man replied, ‘Yeah, but the worst thing is that they are burying people twenty to a grave, and all they can think to tell us is to work faster.’ ”

I did a few more interviews in the camp, but soon I felt too ill to work. Camille offered to escort me back to the UN workers’ encampment, but I excused myself and trod back through the heat alone. “I’ll be back for more interviews tomorrow, early, before it gets so hot,” I told him, though I knew I was falling seriously ill. I already suspected malaria and wondered if I would ever make it back there at all.

I retired immediately to the tent I had been assigned, and took a triple dose of Fansidar, one of the strongest medications available for acute malaria. I had already been taking daily doses of a prophylactic drug, but I knew it was not 100 percent effective in Central Africa, and I counted myself lucky for never having come down with the disease before.

Dinner was still a couple of hours off, and I felt too sick to do anything but lie down on my cot and listen to the radio. There was a small fan, but as soon as I turned it on I went from boiling heat to maddening chills. I joined the UN folks for dinner and tried to force some food down, but had to excuse myself halfway into the meal. I wanted to call my father in Virginia on the satellite phone, since he is a doctor with extensive experience in Africa. When I called, it was comforting to hear from him that I had already done all that I could.

As the night wore on, though, it became apparent that my health was getting far worse. I could not stop shaking, even with the fan off. I went through fits of violent vomiting and diarrhea. My cot was soaked through with sweat. At dawn, I crawled out of my tent and summoned the UN staff. I was too weak to walk, and my vision had gone blurry. “There’s no doctor here,” someone said. “The nearest medical help is the Médecins sans Frontières doctor who is working a few villages away from here. We’ll try to get her on the radio.”

My teeth chattered as I lay on a cot outdoors in the morning sun, trying to get warm. I overheard someone say that fighting in the area had prevented the doctor from coming. Later, I could hear the sound of gunfire. Then, when I had all but given up hope, the doctor appeared, like a vision in a dream, a beautiful Colombian woman, and we spoke in a mixture of Spanish and French. She told me that I probably had cerebral malaria. “Your condition is very dangerous,” she said, injecting me with a dose of morphine to settle me down. Then she gave me a fistful of quinine tablets, which she said I should chew until they were gone. “They are going to make you feel even sicker, but it is the only thing that can break your infection.”

The doctor said I should be near a hospital, if not in one, and urged the UN people to call in an airplane to fly me to Kinshasa, and then she was off. Her warning about the quinine proved right, but she had told me only half of the story. Soon, my ears were ringing as if I were trapped in a belfry. The medicine, which was originally derived by Native Americans from the bark of the cinchona tree, was the most bitter thing I had ever tasted, and although my stomach was empty, it made me retch even more violently than I had the night before.

I ducked miserably in and out of consciousness for the next few hours. In fact, the passage of time completely escaped me. Eventually someone from the UN encampment roused me to say that a small plane had arrived to pick me up.

I reached the Intercontinental Hotel late that afternoon and saw my Reuters colleague and friend William Wallis exiting the huge copper-trimmed doors of the reception area as I arrived. Why had I mysteriously disappeared for a couple of days? Where had I been? he asked. Perhaps he suspected I had a big scoop. But as he took a closer look at me, the banter quickly ended, and he helped me into the elevator.

William must have called the UN offices to tell them I was gravely ill, because as another equatorial sunset exploded gaudily over the Congo River, my phone began ringing with inquiries from concerned officials and friends. In the morning, the United Nations sent someone to take me to its Kinshasa clinic, where a blood test was ordered to see if I had been cured or not. The UN doctor looked at me in shock as he took my history, when I told him the dosage of quinine the Colombian doctor had given me in the field.

“Are you sure of that?” he asked. I produced the little white envelope upon which she had written her instructions. “That is enough quinine to stop someone’s heart,” he said. It was apparently not enough to kill the parasites still circulating in my bloodstream, however. When the test results came back, the infection still rated a three out of four on the simple scale used to measure the presence of falciparum malaria, meaning that I was still in serious condition.

The doctor gave me a new drug, Malarone, and ordered me to stay in bed. I promised to stay put in my hotel room and call him if I felt any worse.

After years of bad roads and horrible flights, separation from family, arrests, unsafe water and contaminated food, and finally now malaria, I began to conclude that Africa was starting to kill me. So many loves had kept me going here: the beauty and the unfussy grace of the people, the amazing food—yes, the food—music rich beyond comparison, the sheer immediacy of human contact, the pleasure of living by my wits. But the grim truth was that a single mosquito bite had contained enough deadly force to lay me very low indeed, and left me feeling seriously weakened and vulnerable as never before.

I had decided to return to Africa as a journalist in 1994 because I wanted to dig into the kinds of stories about African people and culture that do not often get told. In the beginning of my tour I had done a fair bit of that, but then Nigeria exploded, followed by Liberia and Ebola and the Kabila invasion, and too many smaller crises to recount. In short, I became something of a glorified fireman, despite my best intentions. In the process, though, I came to appreciate more than ever why it is wrong for us to push African news—and not just the riotously colorful features that one editor once described to me as the continent’s “oogah-boogah”—to the margins.

The chances for the kind of pure discovery that had lured me back to Africa had dwindled, as had my energy. But I did make it a point to get to Cameroon as soon as I had recovered sufficiently from my illness. The subject was pure magic, a mountain kingdom that dated back over six hundred years, whose king, Ibrahim, a renaissance man who reigned early in the twentieth century, had commissioned an original, indigenous written script called Shumom in order to modernize his culture. Ibrahim designed his own printing presses and built one of sub-Saharan Africa’s first museums. He wrote a poetic treatise on esthetics, which included nearly two hundred criteria for the appreciation of feminine beauty. He produced an elaborate written history of his kingdom, and he commissioned a pharmacopoeia of local plants and traditional medicines.

Then, with the advent of World War I and the takeover by the French of a zone that had been a loosely administered German protectorate, French was imposed as the official tongue, and Ibrahim, suspected of harboring sympathies for the British, who ruled in Nigeria next door, was sent into exile.

The Congo dragged me back down to earth from my Cameroonian idyll soon enough. Madeleine Albright was coming to town, and I had to get to Kinshasa. There had been a last-minute invitation from the State Department to join her on her inaugural trip to the continent as secretary of state.

I was immediately struck by the itinerary, which I fancied as the “renaissance tour,” because it included most of the gang the Clinton administration was touting as Africa’s new leaders. The choices filled me with skepticism and even chagrin, but my reasons for declining to travel with Albright were rather more practical. The notice was simply too short. Physically, I could not countenance another zigzagging marathon around the continent, and deep down, I felt I had seen far too much hypocrisy and wrongheaded diplomacy in Africa already, too much suffering and neglect, and too many hollow slogans and broken promises to be cooped up in a small airplane and slathered in spin.

It grated on me how thoroughly we had come full circle, renouncing an old guard of “Big Men” only to embrace a brand-new crop of them. The renaissance leaders Albright was visiting were Africa’s new soldier princes, men who had come to power not through the ballot box but at gunpoint. The Clinton administration was, in effect, endorsing a supposedly enlightened authoritarianism as just what Africa needed to close some of the yawning gap that separated it from the rest of the world.

Albright made a formulaic stab at promoting democratic values before leaving for Africa, saying that “in our efforts to help postconflict societies, we should always bear in mind that democracy provides the best route to long-term reconciliation.” The message, delivered as a statement rather than in a high-profile speech, made her words seem more like a fig leaf than a heartfelt declaration.