Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
“
Je m'appelle
André Tusumba. I was born the twenty-sixth of January, 1962. My father was also
Tusumba André. I am his homonym. He died a year ago, on the fourteenth of November, 2011.”
So André Tusumba began his story, placing himself with names and numbers, his own and his
father's, then his mother's, who died on April 10, 2001. He was one of fifteen, his father having had
two wives. His mother had seven children, his
marâtre
—his father's second wife—eight.
We were in Kinshasa, before my departure with BCI to Mbandaka, in Evelyn Samu's dining
room, at a table that seated a dozen. Her granddaughter and niece, both two, played outside. The
maids watched over them, occasionally calling out. On Matadi Road, a vehicle with a broken
muffler passed, the reverberations of its engine banging off the walls.
André was hard to read, his posture somewhat military, his eyes still and unrevealing as he
spoke. I had run across his name in articles about the creation of the Sankuru Nature Reserve, and I
had heard Sally and Michael describe his conviction and incessant work. He was dressed modestly,
in jeans and a button-down shirt, a baseball cap in his hands. Occasionally, when he emphasized a
word, the strength in his features came to the surface, his cheekbones broad and high.
“As a child, I had two loves,” he told me, “soccer and goats. Each day after Catholic school,
around three o'clock, I would take our goats to graze. We had 117 goats.”
This was the first image he shared, a ten-year-old André climbing the hills of Kivu, not far from
the border with Rwanda, a thousand miles east of where we sat.
As he spoke of the goats, he dropped his gaze, smiling faintly, the military aspect gone. I got the
sense of a man whose heart is close to the surface, who gives himself entirely when he cares about
something.
“I knew the goats,” he said, “and they knew me. And so sometimes, in the evening, I let them
be and went to play soccer.” He described his friends arriving, making goalposts by jabbing sticks
into the flat surface of a dirt road. They saw the dust cloud to the east before they heard the ham-
mering of the big truck's engine, and they played until it was almost upon them. Then they grabbed
the sticks, kicked the ball into the sloping pasture, and jumped off the road. The ball was made of
bunched plastic bags that André had sewed together and wrapped with a piece cut from his moth-
er's house-dress, an act for which his father beat him with a belt.
Sunset spread along the horizon, the mist golden over the dark blue curves of distant hills. André
scored one last goal, grabbed the ball, and ran off. The other boys were used to seeing this. The
goats knew their daily schedule and had returned home.
“Though I grew up in North Kivu,” he told me, “my origins are in the province of Kasai-Ori-
ental, in the district of Sankuru, the territory of Katako-Kombe, from the same village as Patrice
Émery Lumumba. We are from the same
groupement
as Patrice Émery Lumumba. In our family we
are all relatives with him. But we did not have the chance to get to know him because my father
was a soldier. Around 1952, he did his military training in Kivu.”
