Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
When he was thirty, living in Zaire had become a daily struggle, and he left his family to teach
in Rwanda, at the Collège Saint André, sending money home. He gave courses in history and geo-
graphy, and continued playing soccer. It was 1993, and Kigali was heavily militarized. Hutu sol-
diers were everywhere, even civilians were carrying clubs, and every Tutsi was a suspect. When the
collège
's Tutsi custodian was taken by the police, André spent a day at the station until he got him
back.
Some mornings, there were bodies in the street. Again the servant disappeared, and this time
André could find no trace of him. Then a friend with whom André played soccer, Janvier, was shot
and killed in front of his house. Three days later, André gave up his courses, packed his bags, and
returned to Goma in the night, realizing that he himself would be suspect for his friendships.
In Goma, one of André's friends was an advisor to the governor and offered to find André a
job as an advisor to the vice-governor. But Joseph Kanamugiri, a Tutsi friend from Rwanda, visited
and asked André if he wanted to sell veterinarian pharmaceutical products in Kivu. They traveled to
Bunia and made more than they'd expected, since local suppliers had vanished with the breakdown
of infrastructure. They then began selling throughout Zaire.
André was finally able to pay for his siblings to attend school, and he had them come to live
with him in Goma. But according to him, his wife couldn't stand the invasion of her privacy, and
she told him he had to choose between her and his family. He promised that his siblings wouldn't
be there forever, and she and André already had a two-year-old boy. But she left anyway, taking
their child, and returned to her family. He asked her to come back, but she refused and eventually
married a member of Mobutu's family.
When the genocide started in Rwanda, André was no longer able to get veterinarian supplies.
Joseph, his business partner, fled to Goma, taking refuge in André's house, and when the Rwandan
Patriotic Army (RPA), largely composed of the descendants of exiled Tutsis in Uganda, invaded
Rwanda, the entire Hutu government fled into Zaire.
“I believe that Zaire's hardship began with the genocide,” he told me. “Goma was a city of five
hundred thousand, but over a million Hutus came. They brought their government, their banks, their
police, everything. An entire civilization implanted itself in ours. The Hutus demanded all of the
food, and their military began killing Zairian Tutsis and taking their homes.” He described that this
was done with the tacit understanding of the Zairian military, who hated the local Tutsis.
“And Joseph?” I asked. “Was he killed?”
“No, he wasn't. The Hutu military had an understanding with the Congolese Army. I was well
known in Goma for soccer, so I could do more or less what I wanted.”
He described how the RPA fought all the way to the border, killing Hutu soldiers, how there
were so many bodies in Lake Kivu that no one would use the water. People died from dehydration
and diarrhea, and corpses lay in the streets, tractors coming through daily to pick them up.
One afternoon, André saw a refugee near his house. She leaned against his neighbor's wall, then
just died, falling to the ground.
Another day, after a brief rain, he found a small girl tied to her dead mother in the street, the
woman having succumbed during a cholera outbreak. He took her and raised her as his own, look-
ing through the Bible that night to find her a name.
Since André could no longer get veterinarian supplies in Rwanda, he had to find them in Kam-
pala, the capital of Uganda. He married again, had another child, and moved to Butembo, not far
from Uganda, taking his youngest siblings with him. He struggled to provide for his family, and the
