Truth, by Omission Page 15

  Idi had fired his gun in the air, causing Kakengo to stop.

  “What is going on here?” Idi asked.

  “Your little fucker stole my tobacco,” Kakengo replied.

  “He’s a baby, Kakengo. You’re whipping him like a grown man.”

  “If he was a grown man, I’d have cut off his hands, Idi.”

  Idi lowered his gun and pointed it directly at Kakengo’s face. This was in front of a large crowd of their own men. “Kakengo,” he said, “if you ever touch that boy again I will kill you.”

  As Idi turned to walk away, Kakengo pulled his own revolver from his belt and raised it to Idi’s back.

  “I was sure the fat man was going to shoot him,” Mamba reported to me. “I was sure of it.”

  But Idi swung around and marched right back to Kakengo, straight up to him with the gun coming closer and closer to his face, until it touched his nose. Stalemated like this for a few moments, Idi finally broke the tension, laughed, and slapped Kakengo on the shoulder saying, “Partner.”

  I didn’t think I could hate Kakengo any more than I already did until he nearly killed me with that whipping, scarring my back and rump for the rest of my life with deeply cut wounds. But now I hated him with every speck of my being. I pledged to get my revenge someday, and I thought of myself, even at that young age, as a man for making such a vow. On the other hand, I was impressed that Idi had stuck up for me, and in such a public way, right in front of their men. And he had come to check on me while I was recovering. As much as I resented him for having been part of the killing of Uncle Dzigbote and Auntie Nyaka, at that point in time, I was developing a perverse allegiance to him.

  This incident didn’t move just me toward a closer commitment to Idi. Several of the other men, especially Mamba, elevated their respect for him. They already followed him and Kakengo with the sad naïveté of the uneducated and the desperate—those caught in the circumstances of life from which they saw no way out, no way ahead, other than blindly following the leadership of the semicharismatic despots offering them short-term gratification. Our two oppressors jousted for their little slice of power in the world, taking advantage of us by offering a wage, food, camaraderie, and immunity from justice.

  The men recognized that while both Idi and Kakengo were vicious leaders, Idi was less likely to turn that brutality on them. That extra bit of security inspired all but the most depraved to favor Idi over Kakengo. Idi sensed the newfound respect from many of the troops, and he began to carry himself with a slightly different air. Of course, Kakengo sensed the same thing and his response, the only one he knew, was to react with even more intimidating barbarity.

  Mamba’s misguided loyalty to Idi was further inflated when he watched the tyrant stand up to Kakengo. He was rewarded for it by Idi entrusting him with increasingly more sensitive duties. This, in turn, cemented the follower to the leader even more tightly. And I am as guilty as any of the rest of them for succumbing to the same entanglement. Mamba was the closest thing I had to a friend in the world. He was eight years older than me, a man in my eyes. And I followed his lead, gravitating along with him, placing my blind trust in Idi.

  Even after I had seen both Mamba and Idi, several times, mounting from behind the woman who was nursing my flogging wounds, it didn’t occur to me that there were ulterior motives to their many visits to me. I believed what I wanted to believe, that someone, anyone, these two men, cared about me. Just as all humans do, I needed to be needed, and I desperately craved any affection I could find. Looking back, I suppose even that woman, whom I thought at the time was caring for me out of the goodness of her heart, was just doing whatever she needed to do to survive. Whether the sexual satisfaction was necessary to her or not, I don’t know, but in giving it to Mamba and Idi she raised her own stature ever so modestly. In the situation we were all in, every little bit counted toward surviving. No one could begrudge her since even her tending to me bought her some extra bit of relevance in the camp, particularly in Idi’s regard.

  After a month, I was well enough to get up and move around again, but several of the slashes into my back remained infected and festered for many more months, taking more than a year before I could say that I was totally healed. As soon as I was able, the pet monkey I was, I became ever more securely attached to my master, closely tethered to Idi nearly all the time. Mamba became his most trusted lieutenant and, thanks to this, he and I ended up spending even more time together. I was able to pick up the dialect that was Mamba’s first language, and while many of the slaves spoke it, none of Idi’s other men did, so it gave us an advantage in being able to converse together safely. Idi took note of this and, seeing an opportunity for himself, encouraged me to learn the dialects of his other men. One of the original reasons he had kept me alive after he killed Uncle Dzigbote and Auntie Nyaka was because I spoke Kinyarwanda; he assumed that he might need me as a translator between him and Major Ntagura. That ended up not being the case when Ntagura spoke Swahili, but Idi saw how easily I picked up Mamba’s dialect and knew that if I could speak the languages of the other men, he would have a spy in their midst that would keep them all on their toes.

  This area of Central Africa contained almost as many languages as villages, each of them having some variations from the languages of the greater neighborhood. When Idi first encouraged me to learn the tongues of the others in our motley band, I was unaware of his use of me as his ears among the others. I took up the challenge with vigor, both to give myself something to do and to impress him, but equally important, it gave me license to circulate and socialize with the others. This became my schooling, and my intrinsic curiosity provoked questions, stimulating speech, allowing me to learn the languages, but also allowing me to learn about the world around me. The men we were dealing with were not stupid. They were uneducated and desperate, but not stupid. They had all sorts of knowledge about all sorts of things that might not be important to getting ahead in Western society, but they were vital to survive in our African environment. My inquisitiveness and willingness to converse in their own languages and dialects inspired a sense of trust and acceptance of me, even though I was the youngest by far. Another curious thing happened—it gave the men a feeling of self-importance to be able to impart their knowledge to me. Suddenly they were satisfying their own need to be needed, and they enjoyed the respect I gave them and the feeling of extra worth that they suddenly had. As small as it might have been, it was probably more than they’d ever experienced before. I might even say that this whole dynamic contributed to the group developing a cohesiveness that would serve us well when, several months later, we split away from the mining camp as a misguided militia.

  All this is not to imply that there was any nobility to our little society, because there is no way that we could have been described as civil. We were a despicable lot of misled creatures, following a despicable leader down a dead-end path.

  Once my back was healed enough and Idi began keeping me closer, he also started taking me with him on his bimonthly deliveries of Gobeni’s coltan to Major Ntagura. Kakengo always went with us, as well as four or five others, who were charged with providing protection for the valuable shipment. Instead of taking the four-day trip upriver and then back again, we were able to go downriver by boat for a short distance, and then make the complete trip by road in an open-back truck within a day. We had the guarantee of safe passage from Ntagura, and mention of his name allowed us to cross the border checkpoint between Zaire and Rwanda without problems, and then safely navigate the several other army checkpoints along the way. We seldom did it in a single day though, almost always making a stop overnight on our way back to purchase supplies and gather new workers for the mine and recruits for Idi and Kakengo’s band.

  We constantly needed new people for the mine and for the security group. Once the arrangement with Ntagura had been worked out, the mine was continually expanding, and it took more and more workers to ope
rate it, not to mention replacing the ones who succumbed to starvation, overwork, and illness. And as the slave contingent grew, Idi and Kakengo needed more and more men to guard the mine and keep the slaves under control. The eighty or so workers who were at the mine when I arrived grew to at least a hundred and twenty by the time a year passed, and Idi’s group had grown from twelve to twenty-five.

  The trips to sell Gobeni’s coltan to Ntagura also included time for the men to drink and purchase sex from local women willing to earn a bit of extra money. It was on one of these trips that we stopped and picked up four young men to take back to the mine with us. That was when I was baptized into a role that I would forever regret. We traveled with the four men for a few more hours to a large town along the Walunga road. It was one of Idi’s favorite places to stop. He paid each of the new men a small amount in US dollars and instructed them to be back at the truck by dusk. Mamba and I were left at the truck to watch over our supplies while Idi, Kakengo, and the others went into town looking for their favorite women, but not before leaving us some orders.

  “Azi,” Idi said, “make sure that the new men don’t leave the truck after dark. The two big ones are for Kakengo and me, not Gobeni. Do you understand? And don’t let Mamba get so drunk that he can’t watch our things.”

  Eager to impress, I nodded and made a show of gripping my machete firmly.

  As dusk was settling Mamba and I made a fire beside the truck, which we’d use to heat our food and to keep us warm through the night. None of the four new recruits had yet returned and I began to fret, but Mamba was unconcerned.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “They’ll be back soon. They always come back because they want the jobs. Take some of this.” He handed me his jar of cane whiskey, and we sat down by the fire for a smoke, taking frequent gulps of the homemade liquor. It didn’t take much of the alcohol for it to have an effect on me. I was nine and a half, couldn’t have weighed more than thirty kilos, and wasn’t used to drinking alcohol. When the four men eventually returned to our truck, themselves clearly under the influence, I took it upon myself to exert my authority.

  “You two … you big ones … Idi wants you for himself. Sit here,” I stammered.

  “Fuck off, you punk, we don’t need to stay here,” one of them replied. He could have swatted me away as easily as a fly. I was less than half his weight and more affected by the alcohol than he, but Mamba came to my aid.

  “Azi says to sit here. You sit here.” He cocked his revolver, pointing it at the one who had spoken.

  Feeling emboldened I grabbed my machete and brandished it as if I knew what I was doing. “Kneel here, you two pricks. Face the fire.”

  “You heard Azi. Kneel in front of the fire, you pricks,” Mamba drunkenly parroted.

  Since Mamba was the one with the gun, the other two did as they were told.

  “Don’t think you’ll leave here when Idi has put me in charge,” I said, and then, as deftly as if I had been stone sober, I smoothly drew my machete across the backs of both of their ankles causing them to scream in agony. They rolled onto their sides beside the fire, writhing in their own blood, which spurted and ran freely from their partially severed limbs. The screeching wails had an instant effect on all of us. The other two recruits ran away as quickly as they could, fearing my machete more than Mamba’s gun. Mamba himself just stared incredulously at the brutal mess I had caused. And I, both queasy and goaded from the booze, passed into a trancelike state, aware of what I had done, but feeling no remorse. In fact, I proceeded in the exact opposite fashion by laying my machete across the throat of one of the men while reminding him, “You won’t leave here when Idi has put me in charge.”

  The two men lay on the ground trying to hold their feet to the bottom of their legs in a useless attempt to stop the bleeding. They implored us to go for help, but neither Mamba nor I was about leave. After a few more hours, Kakengo returned to find the two injured men delirious by the fireside, and Mamba and I even more inebriated after having further stoked our courage with more booze. But it wasn’t nearly enough to douse the fear that we felt when Kakengo began yelling at us, demanding to know what had happened.

  “These two were going to leave,” I slurred. “Idi told me to keep them here and that’s what I did.”

  “You bratty little fucker.” Kakengo grabbed me by the same ankle he had grabbed on the boat a year and a half earlier, and lifted me upside down the same way. But this time, instead of burning my foot with a cigarette, he pulled his hunting knife from his belt and sliced it across the sole of my foot. The blood spouted profusely, and the pain rivaled the beating he had given me on my back the year before. He dropped me on my head, and I crumpled into a mass, a third bloody body by the campfire.

  Mamba cowered back, not willing to make any move to help me for at least an hour. By that time Kakengo had drunk himself into his own stupor and Mamba felt safe enough to wrap my foot in a rag. As I lay there sobering up, I watched Kakengo get more and more drunk, until he eventually slumped against a wheel of the truck and passed out. Still under the effects of the alcohol, and fueled by my total hatred for him, I crawled over to where Kakengo snored like a wild boar. He wore no shirt, and his fat belly gathered up and spilled out over his legs. Sweat pooled in his navel and ran in a stream from it. I looked with disgust at the great mass of black blubber, sharply coiled black hairs matted to the wet skin. Carefully withdrawing from his belt the same knife that he had sliced my sole with, I gripped its ivory hilt with both hands, raised it over my head, and at the last minute changed my mind about plunging it into his fat belly, and instead made a hacking slash across his throat.

  The wound was neither deep nor clean, but it was sufficient to tear a hole in his windpipe. I knew this because the air in his lungs expelled out the hole in a single large puff. His hands came up reflexively to the laceration and his body spasmed as it futilely tried to suck in another breath. There was remarkably little blood since I had missed the main artery and only a few small trickles ran over his hands. I sat myself on his fat stomach and pried his hands away from his throat, holding them helpless as the life left him. When I thought he was dead, I beat on his face with my small fists until I was too tired to hit anymore. Mamba came and lifted me off the dead body, and I cried in Mamba’s embrace like he was my mother.

  One by one, through the night, the rest of our men returned to the camp and found the carnage. The last to arrive was Idi, showing up just as dawn was breaking. “What happened?”

  Mamba spoke up for us. “Those two were going to leave and Kakengo gave them the slash of the elephant hunters. Azi argued with Kakengo and at first he threatened to do the same to Azi, but instead sliced the bottom of his foot.”

  “And Kakengo?” he asked. “What happened to him?”

  Fearing Mamba might get the blame I spoke up. “I killed him.”

  “You?”

  I nodded.

  “How could you kill Kakengo?”

  “I slit his throat with his own knife.” I was terrified at my punishment to come from Idi for having killed his partner.

  “You did?” He knelt down by Kakengo’s dead body and pulled the head back exposing the hole in the larynx.

  “Well done, Azi. Well done.” He nodded affirmatively, and then smiled at me. “Well done.”

  Reaching into Kakengo’s pockets, Idi took out what money there was, threw the identification papers into the fire, and then picked up the eight-inch ivory-handled knife from beside the body. “This is yours, Azi. Keep it.”

  To the others he ordered, “Kill the two with the elephant slash. They’re no good to us now. Put them all in the bush.”

  I remained wary of Idi’s simmering wrath for several days, but it never came. On the contrary, Idi demonstrated joviality to me and kept me close by his side. It took an explanation from Mamba before I was finally able to relax. “Azi, you did Idi a favor. He had no lo
ve for that fat bastard. He was probably looking for the chance to kill Kakengo himself. You saved him the trouble.”

  I had no regrets whatsoever about killing Kakengo. Any morals that Uncle Dzigbote and Auntie Nyaka might have instilled in me seemed long lost by that time. I’d witnessed so much misery and death in the mining camp that my killing of Kakengo just seemed the logical thing to do to survive my situation. Similarly, that I had maimed those other two young men, leading to their deaths, bothered me not a bit. My actions on that day, and Idi’s tolerance of them, further emboldened me to puff out my tiny chest and seek even more ways to prove my worth to Idi.

  Kakengo’s knife, which Idi had given me as a sort of reward for my actions, became for me an honored symbol of my manhood. I cherished it as one of my few possessions and carried it proudly. I was never without it for the next years of my life. It was my weapon and tool, and I displayed it prominently whenever I was around Idi, letting him know that I cherished the gift, and hoped he would see it as a sign of my conviction and loyalty to him. I spent many hours over the course of several evenings sitting by the fire and using Mamba’s knife, carefully and clearly chiseling my name, “Azi O,” into the ivory handle.

  * * *

  Several months later I was with Idi when he confronted Gregoire Gobeni in the gardens at the mining camp. “Gregoire, your last shipment of coltan that we delivered to Ntagura didn’t even bring enough for me to cover the expenses of my men,” Idi said. “I’ll take them elsewhere if you can’t keep up your payments to me.”

  “Where would you go?” Gobeni mocked Idi as he sucked on his large cigar. “What could you possibly do with a shoddy band like this? You’re lucky I pay you anything.”