766 results in Creative Writing
Escape from Lubumbashi
- A Refugee's Journey on Foot to Reunite her Family
- Estelle Neethling
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- University of South Africa
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- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021
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This is the true story of Adolphine, a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) who was twenty-two when she had to flee her home in the war-ravaged DRC in 1996. She walked thousands of kilometres across Southern Africa to be reunited with her husband Sepano in Cape Town after two years of a desperate search. Her incredible journey to escape the ruinous rule of Mobutu Sese Seko was filled with many moments of terror and despair, every country having its own share of xenophobia. She told the writer - the retired national tracing coordinator of the International Red Cross's Restoring of Family Links programme in South Africa - "I felt as if the earth had teeth, I felt its bite when I was fleeing through Africa...". Her story is a powerful intimate account of belonging and the anguish of displacement, of settling and being uprooted and how a deeply troubled household navigates this across time and space. Her story strongly highlights the vulnerability of women and children in times of war and unrest.
2 - Happy childhood days in Lubumbashi
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
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- University of South Africa
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- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp 4-11
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Summary
Adolphine Misekabu was a sturdy, serious little girl with a childhood dream of becoming a teacher and a leader one day. She related how, as young as the age of seven, she would gather the neighbourhood children together to “play school”. “We would pretend we had a blackboard and that I was the teacher. But my beloved late father, Nkudimba, wanted me to become a journalist, just like his slain hero, the charismatic Patrice Lumumba, who was legally elected prime minister of the Congo after he helped win its independence from Belgium in June 1960.”
Adolphine was born on 24 February 1974 in Lubumbashi in the Shaba (originally Katanga) Province in the south-eastern part of what was then known as Zaire. Ever since she could remember, Nkudimba, a true humanitarian, was profoundly involved in the politics of his country and bitterly opposed to the Zairian president, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu – later known as Mobutu Sese Seko. Nkudimba and all his family from the Kasaian ethnic group (part of the Luba or Baluba group) were members of the UDPS.
From our first conversations it became clear that Adolphine had a very special place in her father's heart and that she loved to be with him and to talk to him. Her expression earnest, she told me that Nkudimba had explained to her that Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire's leader who had become increasingly despotic as his rule progressed, had taken power in a coup d’état nine years before she was born, aided by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and support from what were then called the Western Bloc countries.
Although the politics of the day cast a shadow over their lives, Adolphine described her childhood as extremely happy and her hometown as bustling and highly populated by a busy community. “There were many beautiful houses where the very rich and the poor lived mixed together. People's homes were spaced well apart. The weather was mostly hot and humid and the countryside flat but quite green. A dam and a stream ran nearby.”
Her father had himself built the large, comfortable family home where she grew up. The external wall below the windows had a stuccoed finish while the plaster of the upper section under the asbestos roof was painted cream.
1 - Flight from Lubumbashi
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
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- University of South Africa
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- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp 1-3
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Summary
Adolphine and Sepano had been living in fear for most of their two and a half years of marriage. Every day, news reached them, of friends and fellow Kasai people being killed in and around Lubumbashi where they lived.
Like most of the Kasai people, Sepano and his wife supported Étienne Tshisekedi, who led the UDPS (the French acronym for the Union for Democracy and Social Progress), and they were being cruelly persecuted by Mobutu Sese Seko's regime. Part of the young couple's daily routine was to place bottles of paraffin, matches and a metal bar at the door as protection. Children still played, carefree, outside their homes, unaffected by the growing alarm of the adults who knew they were targets in the escalating armed conflict between the UDPS and pro-Mobutu rebel groups.
All seemed peaceful on the cold and rainy night in December 1996 when they finally came. Adolphine doesn't remember the date or day of the week, but strangely enough recalls that she was wearing a blue kitenge, a type of sarong, with a floral pattern. She was chatting to Sepano whilst preparing supper. Their sixteen month old baby, Ilunga, was trying to crawl on the floor next to them.
Sudden menacing sounds outside caused husband and wife to look at each other in terror. “Oh my God, we are dead!” Adolphine uttered. Fifty or more men – rebels and Mobutu's soldiers, all dressed in combat uniform – stood cheek by jowl in the back of a truck when it screeched to a halt outside their house. Sepano knew they were after him. In a flash he ran to the back of the house and escaped through a window.
Confused and utterly afraid, Adolphine gathered her baby in her arms and called her five year old brother Joseph, who lived with them and was playing outside the back of the house. Just then some of the men burst into the couple's home. Others remained outside.
“I couldn't look in their eyes”, she recalls. “I wet myself, I was so scared that I was about to be raped and my child and brother murdered.”
PART 2
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
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- University of South Africa
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- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp 53-54
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12 - Mobutu Sese Seko tumbles – rebuilding a life in the mother city
- Estelle Neethling
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- Escape from Lubumbashi
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- University of South Africa
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- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp 67-73
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Summary
Despite what seemed like insurmountable obstacles, Adolphine carried on dealing with life as best she could. She and Sepano often discussed their homeland. Despite everything they had endured, they missed many aspects of the way of life they had been forced to leave behind. Their lives had veered dramatically away from anything they had hoped and dreamed for their future together when they had married in what seemed like a lifetime ago. The possibility of future peace and perhaps returning to the country of their birth was dashed by disturbing news of renewed political upheavals that reached them through the media and via a few acquaintances who had remained in the DRC.
Initially, after 1997, Kabila was perceived as a nationalist hero who was defending the nation's sovereignty and who, many Congolese hoped, would bring about democracy. According to reports at the beginning of 1998, Kabila accused Rwanda of exploiting the DRC's minerals. Aided by Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe he successfully drove Rwandan and Ugandan forces out of the country. By 1999 the war had reached a stalemate and had slowly become a predatory conflict over the country's vast resources. The Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement, which attempted to end hostilities between nations, was signed by Angola, the DRC, Namibia, Uganda, Rwanda and Zimbabwe on 10 July 1999. The leaders of the rebel groups involved in the DRC signed the peace accord on 31 July 1999.
In November 1999, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) established a peacekeeping force in the DRC called the United Nations Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or MONUSCO (derived from the initials of its French name Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en République Démocratique du Congo). Until 2010 it was known as the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or MONUC (French: Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies en République démocratique du Congo).
MONUSCO was tasked with supervising and implementing the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement. However, despite its efforts, continued violence in the DRC resulted in the Second Congo War which has been described, not only as the deadliest war in modern African history, but also the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II.
17 - A stout, but heavy heart
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
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- University of South Africa
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- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp 99-104
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Summary
In June of 2012, during a particularly cold and wet, often stormy, Cape winter, Adolphine became sick for many weeks on end. She found herself in a downward spiral, physically and emotionally. “I was going to work, but it took enormous effort. The doctor I visited thought I was developing ulcers. He asked me whether I drank beer and I told him I’ve never used alcohol in my life. After doing a gastrointestinal endoscopy he prescribed medication and told me to see him every month.”
Thinking back, she felt everything that had been happening in her life for the past years had “caught up” with her and manifested itself in a kind of nameless malaise of body and spirit. In particular, the outcome of the presidential elections in the DRC in 2011 had upset and disappointed her profoundly. Many Congolese in the diaspora had been hoping fervently – and voting pointed in that direction – that Joseph Kabila's main opponent, Étienne Tshisekedi, would prevail. The elections were only the second since Congo's last civil war ended in 2003, and the first that the country had organised unilaterally. Political turmoil and a great deal of controversy surrounded the elections. The UK Telegraph reported in December 2011 that ”… at least four people died as police fired on Mr Tshisekedi's supporters as they demonstrated against what they said were rigged elections on Saturday.” It also reported that Jimmy Carter – in the words of the former US president's Carter Center – “found the provisional presidential election results announced by the Independent National Election Commission … to lack credibility”.
Adolphine had never stopped yearning for the time when there would be peace in the country of her birth so that she could return to her homeland with her family. But the alarming events surrounding the elections brought the harsh reality to her: a meaningful democracy in the DRC wasn't yet to be.
“I had been ‘keeping it’ – living with all these things – and although I told myself, I am free, it was still heavy and hard inside me. I almost quit my job with the CWD.” She came to feel she could no longer deal with the emotional demands of her work with people in crisis: the grinding poverty, the hardship of people trying to survive despite immense trauma and pitiful circumstances.
Frontmatter
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
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- University of South Africa
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- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp i-iv
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19 - Tragic news – yet new found peace
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
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- University of South Africa
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- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp 111-114
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Summary
Adolphine arrived at my home bright and early on an April morning in 2014. On this cold Autumn day she was snugly dressed in a navy jumper and denims. As always she hugged and greeted me warmly, but she seemed preoccupied and I sensed she had something of huge importance on her mind.
On 28 March 2014 she had received news of Muamuya's death. Sepano had returned to Cape Town with contact numbers of people whom he’d asked to keep an eye on his wife's beloved grandmother. She was usually restrained in her recounting of so many tragic events, but this time tears of grief flowed freely during the kind of long sacred silence where words are of no consequence: Muamuya was the last link with the family Adolphine had lost.
To compound her sorrow, her firstborn, Ilunga, had been involved in a car accident on an overcast day earlier that month when a commemoration service had been held for Muamuya in Kraaifontein, as Congolese custom dictated. He was on his way back from the station where he’d taken some of the funeral-goers when the crash happened at a traffic intersection where the lights were out of order. Ilunga had slowed down to turn left, but another car slammed into the passenger side of his car at speed. The driver had lost control of his vehicle.
Ilunga, now eighteen, was unhurt, but highly traumatised and Sepano's car was written off during the accident, which leaves the family without their own transport. The driver of the other car is now demanding payment for the damage to his car by coming to the Kabangos’ home and harassing them. The children were so upset by his threats that they started locking doors at all hours and were constantly fretting about the situation. But Adolphine told them confidently: “you don't have to worry. We know the laws and the policies of this country. Just be cool and move on. Leave the door open, we will face him. The law will take its course.” They looked at her, relieved and amused, and said: “Mama, you are still the same – not afraid through all the challenges”.
Adolphine turned forty on 24 February 2014, and she will have been in South Africa for sixteen years. “Although my traumatic experiences caused desperate times when my thoughts were never far from how much I’ve lost, I’ve survived so much.
4 - Nkudimba's fallen hero and his living nemesis
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
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- University of South Africa
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- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp 17-24
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Summary
Initially, when we started our journey together, Adolphine had been reticent about the Congo's history that had affected her life and that of her entire family so profoundly, but on a winter's morning in 2012 for a while she was tranquil and lost the haunted look that often marked her features when she spoke freely about her memories and perceptions.
“My father was fourteen when the Congo gained independence in 1960. When my siblings and I were older he would tell us about the politics of the land at the time, especially about the assassination in January 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, who was such a revered freedom fighter – a leader who was to become the country's first and only democratically elected prime minister.”
Together, over cups of rooibos tea, bran rusks – and lots of water which I soon discovered Adolphine favoured above tea and coffee – she and I charted the tragic circumstances which led to the end of the life of Patrice Lumumba, the man her father had so admired, and the rise to power of his successor whom history has identified as one of the central characters in the plot to kill him.
Lumumba had only been prime minister of the Republic of the Congo for six months when his life was cruelly cut short. When they became old enough to understand, it became clear to Adolphine and her siblings that Lumumba, and all he stood for, had inspired their father in the life of integrity he chose to lead. Patrice Lumumba's assassination has been described by Ludo De Witte, the Belgian sociologist and author, as “the most important assassination of the 20th century”.
I felt compelled to unearth additional historical information about the many woeful twists and turns of the Congo's history because of Adolphine's awareness of how the political unrest that had plagued her country had been a feature, not only of the lives of her immediate family, but also of those of her parents and grandparents.
The year 1959 proved to be a crucial one in the Congo. In January there was widespread unrest; many died as a result. The Belgians could no longer ignore the tide of history and accepted the objective of independence, but they took their time about doing so.
About this book – Estelle Neethling
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
- Published by:
- University of South Africa
- Published online:
- 11 November 2021
- Print publication:
- 04 January 2021, pp xii-xiii
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Summary
How does one write an introductory word for a book that relates a pain so familiar to one's heart that it feels as if one is revisiting the demons of one's past? There were many times when I wanted to phone Estelle and tell her that I was not the right person to write this piece as her book was taking me back onto a road I never again wanted to travel. I never wanted to remember my life of an internally displaced 11 year old boy, young sister on my back, carrying a half-full gallon of water, forced to find my way where paths did not exist in the surrounding mountains of Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as we ran away from the 1996 war between president Mobutu Sese Seko and Laurent Kabila's armies in Bukavu. I never again wanted to shiver from the loud silence of fear and whispers from angels of death lurking in the shadows of gun-wielding men ready to inflict the worst kind of pain on innocent souls in my neighborhood and its surroundings. I never again wanted to be reminded of the day I left home without saying goodbye to my family as I headed south of the continent looking for refuge. The scorns in my new home in my adoptive country have left deep emotional scars on me that forgetfulness helps to soothe. Perhaps I am lucky, just like Adolphine in this book, to be a living testimony to the resilience of the human spirit to overcome the brunt of the African continent's tribalism, xenophobia, dictatorship and wars. But how much pain, trauma and loss can a human soul endure before it is completely broken down and it loses faith in humanity?
Estelle's honest account of Adolphine's story gives voice to two tragedies that have engulfed the African continent, but have not received the attention they deserve. Firstly, it is the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with its unimaginable impact on the lives of people in the country and beyond. An estimated 5.4 million people have perished and 3.9 million people displaced whilst many continue to die daily or are forcibly uprooted from their home to seek refuge elsewhere.
7 - A wave of unrest in Zaire
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
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- University of South Africa
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- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp 36-39
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Summary
Storm clouds of political instability and violence kept gathering in the Mpidewu family's area and in the country as a whole. Adolphine declares of that early part of her marriage: “I was in my space and place with Sepano and my little brother Joseph Junior and carrying my first baby, but the unrest affected all of us so badly.”
In the latter part of 1994, the war and genocide in neighbouring Rwanda had spilled over to Zaire. Rwandan Hutu militia forces – the Interahamwe – who had fled Rwanda following the ascension of a Tutsi-led government, were using Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire as bases for incursions against Rwanda. There was an exodus of over one million Hutu refugees, some of them armed, to eastern Zaire after the genocide17. Rather than disarming these exiles, Mobutu's military ignored refugee raids back into Rwanda and even sold arms to the Hutus.
Ironically, the massive influx of refugees forced an end to Mobutu's diplomatic isolation. But even as the United States called for change in Zaire, it continued to distance itself from opposition leaders such as Tshisekedi, who had considerable political support in Kinshasa, Kasai and eastern Zaire.
The genocide and the lead up to it was very distressing for the Mpidewu family and the young Kabango couple. When Mobutu's forces in eastern Zaire began seizing property and deporting Zairian Tutsis, known as the Banyamulenge, this ethnic minority rebelled.
As Adolphine indicates: “Some of the Hutus and Tutsi rebels from the East were staying in a camp near Lubumbashi. Members of the Banyamulenge who had been living in Kasai for a long time wanted to take over. Fighting started with Mobutu's government as they didn't want to go back to Rwanda. There were attacks in the province and this made the area even more unsafe for everyone living there.”
Towards the end of 1994 the UDPS and rebel groups started fighting. The UDPS wanted the position of the presidency; these demands were met. The UFERI (Federalistes et Republicains Independants), a youth group led by Nguza Karl-i-Bond, was Étienne Tshisekedi's main enemy. The attacks against the Kasai people increased, their homes burnt, their possessions destroyed.
“At about this time Father was arrested by Mobutu's security forces. It was mainly because of his Kasaian origin.
13 - Three babies born to the Kabangos
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
- Published by:
- University of South Africa
- Published online:
- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp 74-77
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Summary
At the beginning of 2000, the so-called millennium, Adolphine was six months pregnant with her second child. She attended the Hanover Clinic from time to time and there the reaction would be the same: “Ababantu! These people!”, the locals would hiss when they set eyes on anyone who looked like a foreigner. Undaunted, amazed at their ignorance, Adolphine would pipe up: “you talk about jobs being stolen. Everyone is poor! Think development.” Then the sister in charge would join the conversation in support and say: “You are like us. Jesus was a refugee, a foreigner.” Looking around the waiting room, including in her gaze those who expressed hate, she’d remind them: “this [the Western Province of South Africa] is my province. Mna ndizakuhlala apha. Nina nizo goduka.” (I am staying here, you are going to the Eastern Cape.)
Adolphine gave birth to Christine on 9 June 2000 at Hanover Park antenatal clinic. “I gave birth naturally and it was a good experience, but afterwards my temperature went high – up to forty degrees and above. The nursing staff warned that such a high fever was a sign that something was wrong and that I could die. The sister asked whether I had been tested for HIV/Aids which I had, just before the birth. Hanover Park was sending patients to Somerset Hospital in Green Point near Cape Town for tests at the time. The test was negative. The clinic wanted to refer me to a hospital, but when I didn't want to go they sent me to a doctor. Then I went home. I drank lots of cold water, used cold compresses and took the paracetamol which the doctor had prescribed. I didn't go back to the clinic. My temperature came down and a month later I was back at work. Sepano had been unemployed for some time and he looked after the children while I was at work.”
Their third child, whom they named Joseph after Adolphine's father, was born at Groote Schuur hospital in April 2002. This time around the delivery was problematic in that her labour had to be induced. Again she was tested for HIV/Aids before the baby was delivered safely by a doctor. Adolphine has high praises for the professional treatment she received from the medical staff at the hospital. “I had lost a lot of blood and felt dizzy.
Contents
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
- Published by:
- University of South Africa
- Published online:
- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp vii-vii
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16 - An deep-rooted legacy
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
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- University of South Africa
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- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp 92-98
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Summary
When you saw your father's painting through the window of the Long Street shop in 2003, didn't your hopes rise that he might be somewhere in South Africa? I dared to ask one day as the year 2012 drew to a close.
It was a clear blue December afternoon, one of the days when the starlings in the poplar tree outside my home seemed to be joyfully celebrating the sunshine with song all day. But Adolphine's gaze was dark as she looked at me steadily: “No, I didn’t”, she replied without hesitation, “because I knew all his artwork had been exported throughout other African countries when he was alive. He had good friends – many of them from Europe – who commissioned him to paint artworks. They would visit him, buy the paintings and take them home with them when they left. The shop owner in Long Street must have bought it from a dealer and when I asked where it came from, he probably thought: what does this woman want, what is she trying to do? Is she trying to get information about my sources? They don't want their business known.”
Although amazed and emotional in equal measure when she saw what she instantly recognised as Nkudimba's work, Adolphine felt emboldened enough to enter the shop and to study it up close. “I felt terribly sad when the man was so rude. I was expecting a positive response.
“My husband was also surprised that evening when I told him wat had happened. From the time my father disappeared without a trace, Sepano knew I was always hoping somehow, somewhere I would see my father again. After Sepano and I were reunited we often spoke about this, but I knew deep down that this was not to be. That is why my own family is so dear to me, the reason why I gave my little Joseph his name. My father was called Nkudimba from a young age, but Joseph is the family name and therefore part of my heritage. My husband, my children and my young brother, who was called Joseph Junior from the day he was born in Lubumbashi, are all the family I have. But still, although I will never see my father again, hardly a day goes by that I don't think of him.
8 - Journeying through the wasteland
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
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- University of South Africa
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- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp 40-46
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Summary
Adolphine was constantly in my thoughts during the days following our meeting when she again spoke about Sepano's disappearance and the harrowing events that had preceded it. Having witnessed her distress during that interview, I gave her a sedative to calm her nerves at the end of our meeting because she insisted she had to go back to work. This was against my better judgment as one never knows how another person will react to medication, however mild.
I decided that it would be unwise ever to interview her again during the morning when she had to return to her office afterwards. I worried all afternoon after dropping her off in Philippi where she worked. She spent hours per day commuting by train and minibus taxi to and from work. Also, it had been cold and rainy that morning and when I saw she didn't have a raincoat with her this increased my concern.
When next we met at the end of July 2013 and she continued her story I asked her how she had coped that afternoon. “Oh, I had to stop myself from falling asleep all through a meeting”, she laughed and then exclaimed: “but I slept so well that night!”
Adolphine described the agony and arduousness, especially of those first days and nights after Sepano's flight in December 1996 once she had left the precinct of the Lubumbashi police station, where she had spent only a couple of harrowing days and nights with many other displaced and terrified people. Only the hope of finding him on the way and the primeval urge to survive drove her inexorably on. She was walking with a group of hundreds of refugees. Sometimes the terrain was flat, but on the outskirts of Lubumbashi it was hilly and tiring to cross.
“I was scared on the way from Lubumbashi to the border of Zambia at Chililabombwe where there were warning signs of the danger of animals. We saw buffaloes and leopards and gorillas. One afternoon when I saw small groups of gorillas about twenty metres away I felt numb. Strangely, you tell yourself if you don't look at them you will be safe.
Introduction
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
- Published by:
- University of South Africa
- Published online:
- 11 November 2021
- Print publication:
- 04 January 2021, pp x-xi
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Summary
This is the true story of Adolphine, a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) who was twenty two when she had to flee her home in the war-ravaged DRC in 1996. She walked thousands of kilometres across Southern Africa to be reunited with her husband Sepano in Cape Town after two years of a desperate search. Her incredible journey to escape the ruinous rule of Mobutu Sese Seko was filled with many moments of terror and despair, every country having its own share of xenophobia. She told the writer – the then national coordinator of the international Red Cross's Restoring of Family Links programme – “I felt as if the earth had teeth, I felt its bite when I was fleeing through Africa…”.
Despite all the media attention, refugees are generally known as a faceless mass of displaced people; their lives and personal stories remain a mystery. Little is known of those desperate souls, for example, who have drowned in the Mediterranean, trying to make that perilous crossing to Europe from North Africa or the Middle East. The plight of refugees worldwide raises serious questions about the role of the United Nations in holding despotic regimes accountable for their people as well as highlight the responsibilities of host countries towards refugees.
Her story – told as far as possible in her own words – is a powerful intimate account of belonging and the anguish of displacement, of settling and being uprooted and how a household navigates this across time and space. Her story strongly highlights the vulnerability of women and children in times of war and unrest. As recognised refugees in South Africa she and her family were thrust into the vortex of the 2008 xenophobic violence against ‘foreigners’ – the first time during which “foreign nationals” were displaced within South Africa – and survived through courage and hope.
The narrative spans across the years of Adolphine's childhood in the Congo and in Zambia in the late 1970s up to 2014, five years after she and her family became integrated in their community as permanent residents in South Africa.
Adolphine's experience is by no means unique. But the telling of it is important, as it puts a ‘human face’ on a ‘humanitarian’ disaster.
PART 1
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
- Published by:
- University of South Africa
- Published online:
- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp xxi-xxii
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18 - Sepano's visit to the DRC
- Estelle Neethling
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- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
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- University of South Africa
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- 11 November 2021
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- 04 January 2021, pp 105-110
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Summary
“There is a crack, a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in.”
(from ‘Anthem’ by the late Leonard Cohen)In February 2013 Sepano was involved in a car accident. His car rolled six times. Miraculously, apart from a few injured fingers, he was not seriously hurt. Nevertheless, he was deeply affected psychologically by this near-fatal event. He told his wife and children: “I want to see my country again before I die.” Adolphine declares: “He was in a bad space. I was very uneasy about his plans, but could see my husband had made up his mind.” His mother, father and his eight siblings also died during the unrest of 1996 when Kasaians were targeted with such fanatical fervour, but he still had contact with some friends in the DRC.
His possessing South African permanent residency status made the travel arrangements much easier than if he had still been a refugee. Technically, once a person has been granted protection in the form of an asylum or refugee permit by an adoptive country, such a person cannot legally return to the country from which he or she has fled. They have to rely either on temporary UN travel documents which are not easy to come by, or travel covertly to visit their countries and face security problems, the most obvious being the possibility of being arrested without legal travel documentation.
So, four months later, on a dismal wet winter's morning in June, Sepano said goodbye to his family and departed with his South African passport and some few possessions. He travelled by bus to Johannesburg, then through Namibia and Zambia on his way to Lubumbashi.
Because there was no mobile phone connection after he left Zambia, Adolphine and the children didn't hear from Sepano for two anxiety-filled months. “It was a terrible time for us.” The thought of possible separation haunted her: “I couldn't help worrying that we might never see him again. All we could do was to pray for his safety.”
When he returned one late August evening at dusk, a few days after having contacted them from Zambia, Adolphine and her children were overcome with relief. But he looked stricken and he had lost a lot of weight. “I was shocked at what he told me. There was no joy at all for him in seeing the country of his birth again.
Acknowledgements
- Estelle Neethling
-
- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
- Published by:
- University of South Africa
- Published online:
- 11 November 2021
- Print publication:
- 04 January 2021, pp ix-ix
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5 - Life in Zambia and political turmoil
- Estelle Neethling
-
- Book:
- Escape from Lubumbashi
- Published by:
- University of South Africa
- Published online:
- 11 November 2021
- Print publication:
- 04 January 2021, pp 25-30
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
As an eleven-year-old Sixth-Grader, Adolphine resumed her primary school learning at the John Howard government girls’ school in Lusaka, when her father decided to explore the possibility of settling in Zambia during 1984. Describing those early days in Zambia she observes: “I was a quiet, calm person. I never wanted to see chaos or disaster around me.
“The principal was the wife of the prime minister of Zambia and was strong on discipline, but she was replaced when she became ill. After that discipline became a thing of the past and the bullies in school began calling other children names. I hated it. I was a model pupil and a prefect in the class. I take after my father; I can't stand injustice.
“I was very protective of my sister Marié, a sensitive child who cried easily. While we were still in primary school in Congo Marié would sometimes come and tell me that some of the big boys were harassing her. These local bullies would grab her books and run away with her schoolwork. I would become so furious that my heart would beat terribly fast. I often ended up boxing those bullies’ ears.”
Smiling mischievously, she told me of an occasion when the father of one of her sister's tormentors came to Nkudimba's house in a rage, demanding to have it out with Adolphine who had punched his son after school that day.
“I was sitting in my room, innocently busy with my homework, hearing my father defending me.” “My daughter would never do such a thing!” he shouted angrily.
In Zambia, at this tender age Adolphine had her first bitter taste of xenophobia, a concept not generally known then by that name. All so-called foreigners were lumped together and jeeringly called “bakasai”. Those who came from Tanzania were called mwachusa, vikasai, or simply also bakasai. She remarked that strangers to their country were constantly harassed by the police and made to feel appallingly unwelcome. Any excuse would do to bewilder and frighten the unwanted foreigners. Adolphine once witnessed how a young mother, who had recently given birth and was on her way to fetch water for her infant, was forced to leave her baby and taken away to prison.