Truth, by Omission Read online

  This was the first time that I had noticed that there were not just men and boys on the site but that there were also several girls and women who emerged from the small village of tents on the far side of the clearing. Like the men and boys, they too were coated in the same red-brown dried muck. Even the few clothes which they wore were similarly soiled the same color as their bare skin. None of them, not one of the males nor any of the females, had any extra flesh on their bodies. The same could not be said for Gobeni or Idi or Kakengo, or any of the men that carried weapons. In fact, Kakengo was corpulent and powerful, with a fleshiness that stood out even more when viewed beside the laborers in this place.

  The two men who had been dragged by their legs once again hunched over on their knees at Gobeni’s feet and whimpered. Gobeni had brought a machete with him and he patted the flat edge of it in the palm of one hand as he waited for everyone to gather. No one spoke a word, save the two groveling souls on the ground. Once we were assembled Gobeni nodded to Kakengo who silenced the two men by kicking them hard several times in the sides of their heads. The motor and machinery that I’d heard when we arrived had been shut down, and now even the two men turning the sluice crank stopped working. The quiet itself was frightening.

  Gobeni broke the silence by speaking to the crowd in a calm and measured tone. “It seems that, in spite of the fact that everyone here has a roof over his head and food for his belly each day, there are some who are so ungrateful they choose to leave.” Then, speaking directly to the two men at his feet, he said, “Straighten up on your knees.”

  Both men feebly obeyed but hung their heads in resignation. Gobeni walked behind the men and lifted the machete high above his head in show. My stomach churned, and I felt I might vomit as I waited for the first man’s head to be lopped off. But in a quick move Gobeni lowered the machete, and with one long swift slice he severed the tendons in the backs of all four ankles of both men. The two men screamed in agony and fell face forward into the mud. Their feet drooped limply from where they remained attached to the bottoms of their legs, and blood flowed freely from the wounds, turning black as it pooled in the mud around it.

  Gobeni blew on his whistle and the crowd began to disperse, the waterwheel started up again, and the din of the worksite began to rise to its previous clamor. A few of the other men picked up their punished comrades, removing them to the tented village. I had been so aghast at what had just happened that I didn’t realize I was the only one not moving until Kakengo swatted me on the side of the head.

  “A good lesson for you on your first day, you little fucker—the slash of the elephant hunters.”

  I later learned that the severing of the back ankle of an elephant is an ancient method used by hunters for eons to down the great beasts.

  “What’ll happen to them now?” I asked.

  “They won’t run away again, that’s for sure.” Kakengo laughed.

  “Will they die?”

  “Maybe. But probably not,” he said. “They’ll be well enough in a few days to turn this waterwheel.”

  As I started to limp away, still smarting from the cigarette burn Kakengo had put on the bottom of my foot a few days earlier, and following in the direction that Idi had gone, I heard a soft whisper from Kakengo behind me, “Azi …”

  I froze in my tracks as I felt the metal of his machete blade slide across the Achilles tendon of my trailing foot. I was afraid to look down at the damage I feared I would find, and the terror he instilled in me wouldn’t allow me to think coherently. I remained stalled in my tracks with tears running down my cheeks until he whacked me on my backside with the flat edge of his machete and laughed uproariously while warning me, “You even think about sneaking away and I’ll use the sharp edge the next time, you fucker.”

  One of those two men must have died because I never saw him again, but the other one did survive, and I saw him often in the camp. Each morning when the sun came up he crawled to his spot at the waterwheel where he sat all day, incessantly turning the crank handle until the sun went down at night, whence he crawled back to the tents. It was too much effort for him to get back and forth at the lunch break, so one of the camp women brought his gruel to him. Similarly, it was too much for him to drag himself to the latrines and several times I witnessed him simply relieving himself right where he sat at his wheel. This went on for many months until one day there was nothing left in the man and he quietly expired as the sun was coming up and he was halfway across the camp to his station. He just quit crawling and lay in the mud.

  But Kakengo was right. That was a good lesson for me that first day. It scared me into total resignation, as I’m sure it did any of the others in the camp who might have harbored any thoughts of leaving, or rather escaping. And even though I was Idi’s property, not Gobeni’s, I did not want to test the limits of any of them.

  I have no idea why Idi kept me rather than selling me to Gregoire Gobeni, but as much as I hated him then, and continue to hate him to this day, it probably saved my life. I don’t think that I could have survived in that camp alone at that age. It’s true, there were a few other younger boys who worked as slaves doing a variety of jobs, but they all had some family confined there with them. They were able to treat and feed each other and tend to the basic human needs of one another. I am sure that alone I would have perished. Indeed, there were many who did succumb to the overwork and undernourishment. I can’t count the number of pitiable bodies I saw just drop at their work stations only to be dragged away and left to slowly die in the scorching sun. And there must have been many others who died in their tents during the nights because often I noticed that someone who had been wasting away simply would stop appearing for work.

  As quickly as the emaciated workers died they were replaced by healthy, if often terrified, individuals. They came from a variety of sources. Sometimes men and older teenage boys would show up at the camp looking for work. These were never turned away. They were promised wages that never materialized and given just enough food to keep them hungry, but not starved, until eventually even these small food rations were cut. But by that time their wills had been broken, and they had become resigned to the same heartrending fate as everyone else. Sometimes, when more bodies were needed, Idi and his men went on recruiting drives to villages with promises of a better life at the camp. Whole families were sometimes lured into slavery with dreams of making a better life than they were currently eking out. And when this tactic didn’t entice enough unwitting workers to fill the constant vacancies created by death, replacements were taken by force. I saw this several times, especially with the girls and women who were brought to the camp. Constant supplies of females were required to do the household chores of cooking and tending to the sick. Looking back, I now also realize that many women were brought into the camp to satisfy the sexual desires of Gobeni, Kakengo, Idi, and their men.

  It took me several months to figure out the structure and workings of the camp, and several more before I began to understand the business of what was going on. After the fright I received on my first day in camp I rarely spoke, except when spoken to, and I made myself as useful to Idi as I could. At that young age I wasn’t all that valuable, but I was quick to learn the menial tasks he set me to. Much of what he had me do probably wasn’t even necessary, but it kept me busy. I was more like a pet monkey to Idi than anything else. I slept at the foot of his bed and hung around him constantly, waiting to be ordered to run some small errand. All the while I tried to keep as much distance as I could between Kakengo and myself. This was no easy task in the confines of the camp, and Kakengo often found opportunities to make my life difficult.

  It was a stroke of luck that Idi decided to keep me as his pet rather than sell me to Gobeni, because Idi and his men, me included, never went hungry. While dozens around us were starving, literally to death, we ate well with a regular supply of hunted meat and fresh fish. And while the workers in the camp were pa
id nothing other than subsistence food rations, Idi’s men were paid a monthly salary on top of their healthy food allotments. When I first went to the camp I was glad just to receive food to put in my belly, but gradually, over time, as I became more useful, Idi started to pay me a small allowance. I now realize that this wage was Idi’s way of cunningly winning over my allegiance to him, and the wages paid to the others were used as bribes to maintain their blind loyalty.

  When I first arrived, Idi and Kakengo seemed to control about a dozen of the armed guards, whose job it was to keep the work crews confined to the site as well as to keep possible intruders out. At times they also acted as bodyguards for Gregoire Gobeni, especially when he wanted to impress any of the guests that he hosted in his cabin. Sometimes these guests were important-looking men in suits and other times they were beautiful women who would arrive and stay for three or four days. Whenever any of these people were around, a great show of chest pounding went on, augmented by a show of Idi’s security team.

  One night, several months after my arrival, while Gobeni was entertaining two beautiful women in his cabin and Idi was away, I was able to learn the true business of the camp. Up until then I had assumed that the black pellets that Idi was shipping for Gobeni to Major Ntagura were gold. This just shows my naïveté at that age. I somehow knew that gold was a valuable commodity, but I had no idea what it looked like. In my mind there was no reason it couldn’t be black, like the nuggets in the sacks. I discovered the difference on the same night I caught one of the guards peeping through the window into Gobeni’s cabin.

  With Idi gone, and little for me to do, I walked around to the manicured side of Gregoire Gobeni’s cabin, the side with gardens and paint. It would not be uncommon to see a guard stationed at the front stoop, but this particular night I found the guard in a shadowed corner of the cabin with his pants down. He was so preoccupied peering over the windowsill into the lit room that he never heard me approach. When I looked over his shoulder and into the room I saw that Gobeni was naked with his two female guests. He was doing to them what I had seen Kakengo and the others do to Auntie Nyaka before they killed her. The guard with his pants down was himself panting and rubbing on his private parts hard and fast. This whole scene went on for several minutes until the guard finished his business with a loud grunt. I thought it was surely enough to alert Gobeni, but he was so engrossed in his own activities that he never noticed. I ventured closer to the guard. He was breathing heavily, and his pants were still at his ankles.

  “Will he kill them?” I asked. The guard, thoroughly startled, scrambled to pull up his pants before reaching for his rifle and pointing it at me.

  I don’t think he could see me very well because he had to ask, “Who’s there?” By that point, all of Idi’s men knew me.

  “It’s me, Azi,” I replied.

  “Shhh …” he whispered and motioned toward the front stoop. We crept over there and sat on the step.

  “Azi, what the fuck are you doing out here?”

  I ignored his question and repeated my own. “Will he kill the two ladies?”

  “Of course he won’t kill them. What are you talking about?”

  “After Kakengo put his man parts inside Auntie Nyaka he killed her,” I said

  The guard chuckled. “No, Master Gobeni likes these two. He wants to fuck them again. We only kill the bitches after we fuck them. These aren’t bitches.”

  This guard was somewhere between boyhood and manhood, and I could tell by his bravado that he was trying to impress me. His answer, however, was confusing because I didn’t know if Auntie Nyaka was a bitch or not, but they’d certainly killed her.

  Seeing that I wasn’t interested in playing along with his bragging he asked me again, “What are you doing out here?”

  “Idi’s gone to deliver the gold,” I replied, trying to sound important myself.

  “What gold?”

  “The gold in the sacks … to Major Ntagura.” I spoke with authority.

  The guard opened a small tin of hand-rolled cigarettes and pointed to it with his eyes. “Do you want one?”

  “Sure.” I took it and put it in my mouth, waiting for him to light it. I’d seen this done a million times, but I had never been offered one before. “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Mamba.” He held a match to the end of the cigarette which hung from my lips, but it didn’t light. “Suck in, you dumb fuck, suck in.”

  I had seen that a million times too, I just forgot to do it. I pulled in a heavy breath and watched the end glow brightly before I promptly coughed, choked, and spit it on the ground. Mamba laughed and picked it up and drew a long puff on it himself before handing it back to me. “Start with a little puff, slowly.”

  “Mamba’s a snake,” I said. “Why did your mama name you after a snake?”

  “Mama named me Antoine. Do I look like a fucking Antoine? I’m Mamba,” he stated. “What’s that about the gold? What gold are you talking about?”

  “The gold we find in the water,” I said as I tried to master a second puff.

  “There’s no gold here.” Mamba laughed again. “That’s coltan. It’s much more valuable than gold. Gold is gold—it’s yellow. Can’t you see that’s coltan? It’s black as your ass. And we don’t find it in the water, we just wash it out of the dirt with the water.”

  Now it made a bit more sense to me. That was why the workers spent all day digging the earth into baskets and carrying it to the water wheel.

  “But it just looks like black pebbles to me,” I said.

  “Them pebbles worth a lot of money. ’Mericans and Chinese pay dearly for it.”

  I didn’t know what a ’Merican or a Chinese was or what they did with it, and Mamba didn’t know either. Mamba became my first quasi friend in the mine camp. If no one else was around he would acknowledge me, and we’d sometimes sit and have a smoke together. He was my main source of information about everything for the next few years. He seemed to enjoy imparting his worldly wisdom to me, so long as none of the other guards his age knew he was doing it. In exchange for answering my questions I think that he figured he was gaining some slight advantage with Idi by treating me well.

  I later learned that the coltan we were mining was a shortened form of its real name, columbite-tantalite. Years later, through my own curious research, I discovered that coltan is a black metallic ore from which the Chinese and Americans extracted the rare element tantalum. Tantalum in turn was, and still is, used in the manufacture of components for cell phones, laptops, and other electronic devices. Back in the 1980s, it was only found in very few places in the world, primarily in our region of Zaire and Rwanda. With the explosion of consumer electronic devices at that time the prices for tantalum shot up, making it worth much more than gold. Mining operations in the remote jungle areas became very lucrative, especially with the use of slave labor. To avoid government interference with the slave camps, 90 percent of the coltan mined and sold in the world was funneled through the Rwandan army to outside sources in China, America, and Europe. None of this mattered to me at the time; back then it was all about day-to-day survival.

  One of the other reasons Mamba enjoyed my company, after he got me hooked on smoking, was that I had easy access to Kakengo’s supply of bulk tobacco, and I wasn’t beyond snitching a handful every now and then. One afternoon while Mamba and I sat at his post puffing on some of this pilfered lot, Kakengo came along and found us. I suppose he had noticed some of his stash missing—at just eight years old I wasn’t much of a crook yet—because when he saw us enjoying our smokes he knew immediately where the tobacco came from. He went straight for me, totally ignoring the fact that Mamba was puffing away along with me. It was clear that this was the excuse he had been waiting for.

  I had seen Kakengo’s temper before, and when he drew his pistol and aimed it directly at my forehead I began to shake. I wanted to be brave and star
e him down, but I couldn’t. I was too afraid to even raise my eyes to look at him.

  “Mamba, get me a cane of bamboo. Green,” Kakengo said. Mamba ran off quickly, returning moments later with the staff. A few others had seen Mamba returning with the fresh cane and followed him back, hoping to see what was happening.

  “Take off your clothes, Azi,” Kakengo said.

  I did as I was told, grateful to receive only a caning rather than a bullet. But as I stripped, Kakengo took his machete and chopped the bamboo into a three-foot length and then proceeded to split the green wood from the end. He drew his machete two-thirds the length of the cane several times until one whole end of the cane was shredded into a dozen pliable razor-sharp lashes. More of a crowd gathered, slaves and guards both.

  “Get on your hands and knees,” he ordered me.

  I had no alternative but to obey. The whip came down hard on my small back twice in succession before I collapsed, prone on the ground. I know he hit me several more times, but I was too agonized to count. When I heard a single gunshot ring out loudly, I was relieved that he was going to put me out of my misery. Blood ran around my sides and coated my whole torso, pooling in the dirt below me. The whipping had stopped, and I thought to lift myself to my knees, but my body just wouldn’t move like my mind wanted it to.

  I lay on my stomach for the next three weeks in the tent of one of the camp women, wavering between excruciating pain and unconsciousness. My back festered with infection, and I burned with fever. There were no antibiotics, and I relied completely on the poultice that the woman made from roots of reeds in the creek. Whether it helped or not, I don’t know. But I did slowly get better. I remember Idi and Mamba both coming in to see me several times during my recovery, and when I was finally able to sit upright Mamba visited and filled me in on what had happened.