173 results in Unisa Press
3 - Mulumba Joseph wa Nkudimba, “man of 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 12-16
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Summary
Although the process was clearly difficult for Adolphine, her commitment to telling her story never wavered and her innate courage sustained her in revisiting painful memories. Yet it was only after she and I had spent many hours in deep conversation that I felt emboldened enough to question her in more detail about her father who had died so tragically in 1996: regarding his roots and what, to her knowledge, had shaped his character. I was particularly cautious because her profound love for him had shone through all our previous interactions. When she told me Nkudimba's full name meant “man of peace”, she added that the name had fitted him like a glove.
Nkudimba had started life as an orphan. He was only four when his parents had been killed in 1950 during the colonial rule of the Congo by the Belgians, in brutal civil unrest which had been ongoing sporadically in the years that preceded the country's independence. He was the youngest of nine children who were all born in Mbuji-Mayi, the capital of the Kasai-Oriental Province in south-central Congo. After being orphaned, he and his siblings were protected by the Catholic Church. His parents had been rich cattle-owners with large vegetable plantations. When people began stealing livestock and various flourishing crops left behind by Nkudimba's parents, the Church took control of the family's considerable assets.
I had to set aside my “Western” ways of thinking when Adolphine explained: “People were jealous and used witchcraft whereby seven of Papa's siblings died mysteriously, one after the other, without becoming sick. My father also became sick but survived by the grace of God. He left the area to stay with his elder sister who lived nearby and he studied at a school run by the Catholic Church. He was very clever academically, but the Church also recognised his artistic talent and saw to it that he learnt artwork. After secondary school they sent him to the University of Kinshasa to study medicine. His sister looked after him, but only until she got married and had to start supporting her father-in-law.
“When his sister died, Nkudimba was in his late teens. From there on he had to find his own way in the world. I suppose, because he grew up without a father figure and because he was idealistic by nature, he wanted to mould his life in a positive way.
15 - Refugee life in Cape Town post 2008
- 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 86-91
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In the wake of the closing of the camps or safety shelters, refugees and asylum seekers who couldn't return to their countries of origin for safety reasons were expected to reintegrate into the communities after the worst violence had abated.
But Adolphine found that, after 2008, coloured people, who had previously been fairly accepting of the “otherness” of foreigners, were under pressure to become xenophobic as well. The xenophobes’ gripe was that this group of people was “hiding” them. We are not getting services from the government, therefore we will attack you, was their argument. As a result of these threats, fear infused the areas where the coloured communities lived. Therefore there was no end to the continuum of animosity – not as overt as before, but smouldering nonetheless – and most refugees and migrants who could afford it gravitated towards the suburbs where more diversity and enlightened attitudes were to be found.
For Adolphine and her family peace became a pipedream as xenophobia cut a swath across the psyche of this nation. Her view of the xenophobic violence was that government exercised a great deal of power through the community leaders in the areas where foreigners were living. “People were divided: some said these are our brothers, others spread rumours against the foreigners. We say we are ‘developed’ in South Africa, but the people in authority cannot handle the poorest of the poor. They are crying for jobs. People are right to criticise authority. When the local people don't have houses, they blame the foreigners. Whenever the government talks about integration, people in the local communities say ‘we have our own problems’. Mostly they react through violence. There is such a lack of knowledge; that is the poorest thing in humanity. Even if you don't have a job, knowledge is like power, a bonus. It makes a positive life possible. My fellow African people should stand together with us. To be understood and embraced by the communities within which I live and move, will make it possible for me to feel part of society. When I see someone who needs help, I help. To make a contribution is how I feel at home. I don't want to be judged for how I look, how I speak, or where I come from.”
How Adolphine's story came to me - Estelle Neethling
- 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 xiv-xvii
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I am Adolphine Misekabu, the daughter of Nkudimba Mpidewu. I am from the Katanga (Shaba) Province in the south-eastern part of what was then known as Zaire.
I had to flee my homeland in 1996 when I was twenty two, during the reign of Mobutu Sese Seko, just before the start of the civil war in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The first time I saw Adolphine Misekabu she was sitting on the floor of a makeshift classroom amongst a group of small children at Bonne Esperance refugee shelter for women and children in Philippi on the outskirts of Cape Town. I was the national tracing coordinator of the international Red Cross, based at The South African Red Cross Society (SARCS), at the time and I was visiting Bonne Esperance with other members of refugee service provider organisations. I was also handing out Red Cross T-shirts to the children that day. Adolphine later told me her son Ilunga also received a T-shirt.
It was during the winter of 2004 – halfway through my ten year tenure at the Red Cross – when NGOs were inundated with the desperate needs of thousands of asylum seekers, mainly from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda and Burundi, most of them clamouring for recognised refugee status in South Africa under extremely difficult circumstances. We were paying a rather rushed visit to the facility, but I recall resisting a strong urge to break away from the group to talk to the noble-looking woman, probably I thought in her early thirties. In that brief encounter, as she looked up at the visitors earnestly but fleetingly, I sensed a poignant mix of strength and vulnerability. I learnt later that Adolphine was a refugee from the DRC, a trained teacher, which explained her obvious ease in interacting with the diverse group of children, clearly vulnerable due to their parents or caregivers’ refugee plight.
The children also interested me very much because of my commitment to the Restoring of Family Links Programme of the international Red Cross. The conflict in many parts of Africa had caused thousands of people to be displaced and families to be separated in the process and part of my job as tracing coordinator was to try and reunite family members.
Dedication
- 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 v-vi
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6 - An arranged marriage becomes a love match
- 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 31-35
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Having faced challenges in her young life that would have withered a lesser person, Adolphine had acquired an equanimity that belied her youthful age. But she admits: “I was a late developer. Unlike my girlfriends I’d never had a boyfriend and I only started menstruating at seventeen. Although we were taught about human reproductive organs at school, sex education was unknown in Zaire, except when a girl came of marriageable age, which was very young in many cases. The subject of birth control, even for adults, was and probably still is taboo.
“But I was raised well and I appreciated how important it was for girls to protect their virginity. Those discussions my father had had with us during our gatherings in the family home when I was very young had stayed with me. He used to warn against teenage pregnancy: either the grandparents had to look after the baby, he’d say, or the girl would be a single mother, ‘because the boys are afraid to take responsibility’, he used to add. His warnings didn't stop me from dreaming about marrying one day and having two – at the most four – children. But when I turned nineteen and was old enough to get married, somehow reality didn't fit the dream. Part of my ambition had been to finish my education before getting married.”
Young men came to court the astute young woman with the forthright amber-eyed gaze and deep, calm speaking voice, but in their hurry to tie her down they scared her off. She chuckled at the memory: “After a while they would give up and go away.”
Adolphine first met Sepano after months of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring of which she was unaware. Sepano's family knew it would be difficult to be accepted into Nkudimba's family which included five attractive, healthy, well brought up young women. Nkudimba was a man of influence in the community, not only in Lubumbashi, but further afield as well. According to Adolphine he was respected, even considered noble by many for his political and humanitarian activities, but also feared to some extent because of his strong personality. Adolphine explained that culture also dictated rules concerning young unmarried girls in the family: “Generally Kasaians undermined girls, excluded them from discussions about important issues. The kitchen was your place, was how they felt”, she added wryly.
Adolphine's voice - Adolphine Misekabu
- 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 xviii-xx
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I am Adolphine Misekabu, the daughter of Nkudimba Mpidewu. I come from the Katanga (Shaba) Province in the south-eastern part of what was then known as Zaire.
I had to flee my homeland in 1996 when I was twenty two, during the reign of Mobutu Sese Seko, just before the start of the civil war in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
I want to tell the story of my journey through Africa to Cape Town with my sixteen month old baby, and the hardships I experienced from the time that I lost almost my entire family. Even before that period, I needed to express my experiences of when I was a young girl in the care of my mother and my father. My father was a wonderful man, an educated man, a respected community leader and a gifted artist.
About five years ago, after having lived in Cape Town as a refugee for eight years, I saw an artwork in a shop in Long Street, Cape Town. I couldn't believe my eyes. The sketch was of an old man with white hair, in rags, smoking a pipe. I recognised it as my father's work even before I saw the signature “NM”. I was shocked; I stood there shedding tears.
I asked the shop owner: “Where did you buy this?” He asked, “why do you want to know?” He became very rude. He cut me off and there was nothing left to do, but to leave the shop.
At home that evening my husband asked me why I didn't insist on knowing. I told him I couldn’t; my heart was too full. I passed by the shop again another day, but the drawing was gone.
I have been swallowing all of my memories for so long, thinking, where do I begin? Who is going to listen and understand? To voice out my life gives me relief.
I want people to know what refugees suffer – especially through xenophobia. I have known this scourge from the time that I went to school in Zambia as a child. My family and I knew it when Mobutu Sese Seko targeted the Kasai people. I felt as if the earth had teeth; I felt its bite when I was fleeing through Africa after my husband disappeared.
10 - Fall of a tyrant
- 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 55-57
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It was during the relatively peaceful period in Malawi that Adolphine learnt how Joseph Mobutu had been overthrown less than a year after her flight from Lubumbashi. Ironically, in May 1997 it was Mobutu Sese Seko's turn to flee for his life. But it took almost another year, at the end of 1998, for her to hear of the dramatic events that preceded the end of his rule.
Suffering from cancer, Mobutu had returned to Zaire in December 1996 from Switzerland where he had been receiving medical treatment for four months. Although he had remained nominally in control, his prolonged absence had led to a significant decline in his authority. But the already fragile situation in Zaire was further weakened by the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 when in October 1996 dissident groups, led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, one of Joseph Mobutu's arch opponents, strongly supported mainly by Rwanda and Uganda and later by Angola, rose in revolt.
By March 1997, the insurgents and their allies, called the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL), had taken Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville) in the north-east. The ADFL's advance in central and western Zaire accelerated after the fall of Kisangani. In early May the alliance was about one hundred and sixty kilometres away from Kinshasa. It appeared inevitable that the ADFL would conquer the capital. Fears that Mobutu would refuse to leave Zaire and would fight to the death, or that he would have his prominent adversaries killed before taking flight, sparked the need for diplomatic intervention at the highest level to try and bring about a peaceful transition.
The late former South African President Nelson Mandela and his Vice-President, Thabo Mbeki, together with Special American Presidential Envoy, Bill Richardson, formed part of the diplomatic team. Attempts to set up a meeting for Mobutu and Kabila to negotiate included frantic shuttle diplomacy by Mr Richardson as Joseph Mobutu had retreated to Gabon. Mr Mbeki was tasked to convince Mr Kabila to come to the negotiating table.
Under pressure, Mobutu and Kabila met for the first time aboard the SAS Outeniqua, the South African Navy's largest combat support / ice-breaking vessel, on May 4, 1997, off the coast of Pointe-Noire. Joseph Mobutu sat at Nelson Mandela side as the late President Mandela presided over what became unsuccessful peace talks. This important but short-lived meeting achieved nothing of significance.
11 - A star-crossed family reunited
- 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 58-66
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When the train carrying Adolphine and her two boys pulled into the Cape Town station at two on a blustery, unseasonably chilly Sunday afternoon in November 1998 they were exhausted and hungry. For Adolphine the prospect of seeing Sepano again still felt like an impossible dream. Despite her excitement, her heart was in her mouth. Would he be there waiting? What if he hadn't received the message informing him of their arrival?
“When we stepped off the train, my eyes were everywhere, but I didn't see him”, she recalls. She took in the strange, rather inhospitable surroundings. “I had his pastor's landline telephone number.” With trembling hands she scrabbled for the coins Sepano had sent her for a public telephone. “I used them all, but there was no answer. The boys and I went up and down along platform 24 – I’ll always remember that's where the train stopped – and searched other platforms, but there was no sign of the person I most longed to see. Eventually it was four o’clock and it was getting colder. I spread a wrap on the cold concrete and told the children to sleep a little.”
Again she walked up and down one platform after the other. Looking at her watch, she saw it was 5 pm and the station, which had been busy until then, was becoming gradually almost deserted. “I found a place that was quite warm with more protection from the wind that was starting to cut through the clothes I had been wearing ever since I left Lilongwe. I asked passers-by if there was a rest house somewhere.”
Dejected, she returned to where she’d left the children, but found them gone. Panic gripped her; Ilunga was only three and Joseph was eight and she had heard about the high crime rate in South Africa. “I sat on my haunches, holding my head in my hands, too anxious even to cry.
“My heart skipped a beat when I looked up and saw a tall man, gaunt but smiling, walking towards me. The children were with him. Sepano was so thin that he was in many ways a shadow of the man I had last seen in December 1996, but I still would have recognised the husband I loved anywhere. Although I was exhausted I jumped up like a child.
Preface
- 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 viii-viii
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The trials and tribulations of stateless Africans fleeing civil wars continue to drain international humanitarian funds. The push factors that cause people to flee are almost always equaled by the pull factors in the country of choice, South Africa, for many of the refugees. The ceaseless struggles for survival, but also courage, hope and tenacity in the face of immense adversity, are revealed in this story of Adolphine Misekabu. Her narrative echoes the experiences of many young women who fled the then Zaire at the height of Mobutu Sese Seko's despotism. Devoid of a sense of belonging and constant harassment through ‘othering’ by her host community, Adolphine poured her heart out to Estelle Neethling, who conscientiously pieced together the disjointed and fractured life history of this young woman who endured many hardships in the quest to be reunited with her husband. The heartbreaking experiences of a young mother expose how healing the broken lives of refugees has not been part of humanitarian interventions, and for South Africa where violence has been normalised, local refugee support groups have not focused on the psycho-social help needed by migrants. Adolphine's story is kaleidoscopic in that it shows the many sides of her life: the horrors she fled from Zaire, the captivating physical beauty of Cape Town, the disturbing township shacks of mostly poor blacks, and the cosmopolitan nature of the city's culture which masks the hidden anger and intense intolerance for black foreigners. The ruptures in Adolphine's life are divulged by the many derogatory names black foreigners are called all over South Africa. Estelle tells Adolphine's heart wrenching story in a way that beckons human rights defenders and humanitarian aid providers to attach a human face, a woman's life to Africa's refugee crisis.
Escape from Lubumbashi
- A Refugee's Journey on Foot to Reunite her Family
- Estelle Neethling
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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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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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- 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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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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- 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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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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- 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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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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- 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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- 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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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
- Published by:
- University of South Africa
- Published online:
- 11 November 2021
- Print publication:
- 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
- Published by:
- University of South Africa
- Published online:
- 11 November 2021
- Print publication:
- 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.