Goodwill visit to Central Africa

Sue Segar spent a week trav­el­ling with senior mem­bers of the South African National Defence Force on the annual good­will visit to sol­diers deployed in the Cen­tral African Repub­lic, Burundi and Demo­c­ra­tic Repub­lic of Congo.

We exit the air­port build­ing and walk into smoul­der­ing heat and a throng of beg­gars car­ry­ing dangly-legged beg­gars on their backs. We are told to keep walk­ing and not to engage. Go straight to the vehi­cle, we do not want any diplo­matic inci­dents says the gen­eral in charge.

We know that we can be glad we have come through the diplo­matic entrance — peo­ple have been known to part with hun­dreds of dol­lars just to make it through the crooked bureacracy from air­plane to taxi.

Wel­come to Kin­shasa, cap­i­tal city of the Demo­c­ra­tic Repub­lic of Congo, for­merly Leopoldville, once nick­named ”Kin la Belle” (Kin­shasa The Beau­ti­ful), and now known as ”Kin la Poubelle” (Kin­shasa the dustbin.)

What­ever you do, do not take any pho­tographs of air­ports, sol­diers, police­men. And, if you think the Parisiens are hos­tile and unfriendly, try the Kin­shasans for attitude.

We climb into the wait­ing vehi­cle which pro­ceeds slowly through the boil­ing cacoph­ony of traf­fic, towards the city cen­tre. It stinks every­where. We drive past trucks so over­loaded it’s a mir­a­cle they haven’t keeled over. Some have goats and other live­stock tied tightly to the top of the cargo. We drive past fields and fields of lit­ter, with pools of green, slimy water in between the piles of rot.

At times we strain through the black mud track which the road some­times becomes. We mar­vel at the fact that we haven’t skid­ded into the other cars veer­ing from all direc­tions into our lane.

We drive past rows of delap­i­dated, unpainted build­ings with a far brigher past, where rows of cloth­ing hang out to dry. Small brown rivers chok­ing with lit­ter flow down the side streets between the rows of build­ings, mak­ing their way into the Congo, a river with a flow so strong it could cover the energy needs of the whole of cen­tral Africa.

”This place is like … Hill­brow,” says someone.

”Eish, you can’t say that about Hill­brow, says some­one else.

We are in Kin­shasa as part of the South African National Defence Force’s annual good­will visit to the SANDF troops who are deployed in Burundi, Cen­tral African Repub­lic and DRC.

Every year, senior mem­bers of the force, accom­pa­nied by key busi­ness and civil soci­ety spon­sors, take a trip to some of the remotest spots on the con­ti­nent to bring a lit­tle fes­tive cheer to the sol­diers and to show appre­ci­a­tion for the role they are play­ing in peace-making in Africa.

Our first stop was the Kam­ina Air Force base, in the south of DRC and a three-day drive from the near­est inter­na­tional air­port. Here, about 50 South African sol­diers assist the United Nations with peace­keep­ing oper­a­tions. Inside the remote hangar, where sol­diers sleep in Weath­er­haven tents, the home­sick sol­diers received gifts of rechar­gable lights and head­lamps, as well as cam­ou­flage Bibles from the Bible Society.

With the muf­fled sounds of Come All You Faith­ful in the back­ground, the army’s Chaplain-General, Brigadier-General Mar­ius Cor­nelis­sen deliv­ered a sim­ple ser­mon, based on verses from Eccle­si­astes, about a man look­ing for answers to the mean­ing of life — and feels that he is just ”chas­ing the wind”.

Then Lt Gen Rinus Janse van Rens­burg, the for­mer SANDF Sur­geon Gen­eral moti­vated the troops, say­ing they have been described as ”depend­able friends” by their host coun­tries in Africa.”You have given hope to locals. You have helped to bring DRC from civil war to scease­fire to demo­c­ra­tic elec­tions and towards recon­struc­tion,” he said. He told them the army has arranged to have Christ­mas packs deliv­ered to their fam­i­lies back home. The sol­diers beamed and, over lunch of fried chicken from home, shared anec­dotes and pho­tographs of their expe­ri­ences in Congo.

At Kam­ina, Major Louis Van Heer­den of Hoed­spruit described how, in the evenings after work, she lis­tens to Con­golese music. At week­ends, they visit a creek not far from the base for relief from the relent­less heat.

One thing you notice in the South African mil­i­tary forces is the fact that they com­prise mainly black and Afrikaans South Africans. You won’t come across many Eng­lish sol­diers in Bujum­bura, Ban­gui or Goma.

There is some­thing deeply mov­ing about hear­ing a senior sol­dier — Sergeant-Major Scheep­ers — telling a room full of black sol­diers in a deep rural spot in Africa that ”I love my sol­diers and I will do any­thing for them.”

South Africa has nearly 3000 sol­diers deployed in some of Africa’s most strife-torn areas. SA troops have been In Cen­tral African Repub­lic since 2007 at the request of the pres­i­dent, to help with mil­i­tary train­ing, refur­bish­ment of mil­i­tary bases and upgrad­ing of the fight­ing capa­bil­ity of the CAR Armed Forces (FACA). In Burundi — a coun­try which is mov­ing for­ward since a suc­cess­ful elec­tion — the SANDF is largely engaged in a peace­keep­ing mis­sion with the African Union. In the DRC, where gov­ern­ment and rebel forces are engaged in con­tin­u­ous fight­ing, the SANDF is, among other things, on an ongo­ing mis­sion to dis­arm, demo­bilise, repa­tri­ate rebel troops, before help­ing to reset­tle and re-integrate them.

Re-integration is some­thing the SANDF had to deal with after 1994, when for­mer com­bat­ants had to amal­ga­mate into the national defence force. We don’t hear much about that process, but, accord­ing to Cor­nelis­sen, it was a pro­found and almost mirac­u­lous process, involv­ing white sol­diers wash­ing the feet of their black com­pa­tri­ots and long ses­sions dur­ing which sol­diers from across the pre­vi­ous polit­i­cal divide shared sto­ries and wept at long rec­on­cil­i­a­tion ses­sions facil­i­tated by the force’s reli­gious leaders.

Here in Congo, the re-integration process is still a for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge. While we were there, the talks to end the fight­ing in east­ern DRC col­lapsed after rebel and gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives failed to reach a cease­fire agree­ment after three days of talks in Nairobi.

Fight­ing since late August between gov­ern­ment troops and the rebel group National Con­gress for the Defence of the Peo­ple (CNDP) under the Tutsi gen­eral Lau­rent Nkunda has dis­placed more than 250 000 peo­ple in east­ern North-Kivu province. Nkunda claims that his four-year-old rebel­lion is defend­ing Con­golese Tut­sis from attack by Rwan­dan Hutu rebels and local mili­tias linked with the DRC army.

The North Kivu con­flict has its ori­gins in the 1994 Rwan­dan geno­cide, when Hutus mas­sa­cred 800,000 Tut­sis, spilling refugees and rival fight­ers into the DRC.

It is said that the aver­age Con­golese per­son has a meal only every three days, a result of war, appalling deliv­ery of ser­vices and gen­eral cor­rup­tion in the coun­try. Some lobby groups blame the war in DRC on influ­en­tial fig­ures in the indus­tri­alised world want­ing to access the rich min­eral resources of the Congo. A UN expert panel has accused Rwanda and the Con­golese gov­ern­ments of back­ing rebels in east­ern DRC.

In Goma, a place which makes Kin­shasa look pos­i­tively civilised, SA’s Colonel Bar­ney Klaasin described how South Africa’s 725 troops in the rebel area below the Nyi­ragongo vol­cano have had to deal with a range of war time atroc­i­ties, from res­cu­ing child sol­diers to see­ing people’s heads being cut off and to deal­ing with women who have been raped and then had sticks poked inside them until they have died.

”We sur­vive by dia­logue,” Klaasin said, adding that he has an excel­lent rela­tion­ship with both the gov­ern­ment forces and Nkunda’s people.

We learn that South Africa has helped to reg­is­ter at least 170 000 for­mer sol­diers for the DRC defence force.

”Our peo­ple travel for days to remote places to set up demo­bil­is­ing cen­tres for rebels. They some­times work in very dan­ger­ous con­di­tions,” said Cap­tain Son­ica Van Rooyen, a sea­soned Congo hand, who has worked closely with demo­bil­i­sa­tion efforts. ”One team was trav­el­ling in the river in a boat which started sink­ing. They had to swim to the other side in the mid­dle of the night. I received an SMS in Kin­shasa from the one guy say­ing, ”nou moet jy vir my bid”. (”Now you must pray for me.”)

Gen­eral Ray­mond Mdut­wana, chief of South Africa’s advi­sory group to the DRC’s army, described the almost insur­mount­able task faced by those tasked with dis­arm­ing and re-integrating rebel sol­diers. The Forces Armees de la Republique Democ­ra­tique du Congo (FARDC) is known as one of the most unsta­ble and impo­tent defence forces in the world, com­prised as it is, after years of war and a seri­ous lack of fund­ing, it com­prises var­i­ous dis­parate mil­i­tary units.

”What we wished for has failed,” he said of the most recent nego­ti­a­tions deba­cle. He adds: ”The sit­u­a­tion in the east is keep­ing us busy, so we can­not focus on train­ing. The most dif­fi­cult aspect of this is the effect it has on civil­ians. When two bulls fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

We hear, repeat­edly how, as some rebels are demo­bilised and re-integrated, new rebels group­ings are formed and new rebels recruited. A vicious cir­cle if ever there was one.

But Gen­eral Van Rens­burg per­sists, from base to base, with his moti­va­tional mes­sage to the SA troops. ”Blessed are the peace­mak­ers for they shall be called the sons of God,” he tells the troops in Kinshasa.

I am reminded of the Chaplain-General’s ear­lier ser­mon about chas­ing the wind. ”Then I saw all the works which my hands had made, and every­thing I had been work­ing to do; and I saw that all was to no purpose …”

Now, in Kin­shasa, we are dri­ving four vehi­cles to a sin­gle lane, as the dri­ver wends his way along. A police­man, stand­ing pre­car­i­ously in the mid­dle of the chaos, blows shrilly on an orange whis­tle and bangs loudly on the vehi­cle, with a baton. I won­der out loud why these cops even bother to try to con­trol the chaos and what can they achieve with those batons? A Congo reg­u­lar replies: ”I have seen them crack wind­screens with those batons.”

We pass the Stade des Mar­tyrs, a stately spec­ta­cle among the mess, which is best known for host­ing the ”Rum­ble in the Jun­gle between Mohammed Ali and George For­man, and which can hold 80 000 people.

As we drive, a pair of young men in a bat­tered old car decide to dice our bus. Their blood­shot eyes lock with ours and they make hand move­ments sig­nalling pis­tols aimed at us, hand­grenades being thrown our way. One of them yanks some­thing off the back seat. With­out los­ing that eye con­tact, he holds the thing up by its tail. It is a mas­sive dead rat, with extra­or­di­nary long molars.

While his buddy accel­er­ates to keep up with us, he indi­cates by point­ing at the rat and putting his fin­gers to his mouth, that he intends eat­ing the crea­ture. Then he throws his head back and roars with laughter.

We pass the national police head­quar­ters, a tall shell of a build­ing, burnt out and non-operational, except for a few peo­ple peer­ing out from cook­ing activ­i­ties a few storeys up.

We reach the Mem­ling Hotel, where, back in the 1960’s, the mer­ce­nary Mike Hoare held meet­ings with the then Congo gov­ern­ment in a bid to get rid of the com­mu­nist rebel forces.

We walk into the air-conditioned lobby full of busi­ness­men dressed in Brussels-styled suits, and work­ers from the UN, Unicef and the World Food Pro­gramme. The sparkling Christ­mas tree and the shops sell­ing Elle Decor and exquis­ite dia­mond neck­laces from Switzer­land pro­vide great relief from the pot­holes, the heat and the beg­gars outside.

© Sue Segar 2009