The Incredible True Story of Blondy Baruti Read online

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  This book is dedicated to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and to my hero: my mother, Annie Baruti, who protected me and never left my side while going through some of the worst moments of my life.

  PROLOGUE

  “And you may ask yourself . . . How did I get here?”—Talking Heads

  APRIL 19, 2017—

  HOLLYWOOD—

  Did you know that the red carpet is not always red? Sometimes, like tonight, at the Dolby Theatre, it is purple. I had no idea! Then again, I had never attended a world premiere of a Hollywood movie. Not even as a spectator. So please forgive both my ignorance and enchantment; this is all a bit overwhelming.

  Lights are flashing, stars are dazzling as the crowd outside the theater gasps and applauds at the seemingly endless parade of limousines that stretches before the theater, disgorging one celebrity after another. Chris Pratt, Sylvester Stallone, Vin Diesel, Kurt Russell and his partner, Goldie Hawn, just to name a few. They are all here to celebrate the premiere of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the latest blockbuster in the Marvel Comics cinema franchise. And I am here with them, as part of the team, which in itself is something of a miracle.

  As with all Marvel movies, the production was shrouded in secrecy and heavily laden with special effects, and I have yet to see a final print. So I do not even know how much screen time will be devoted to my character, a villain named Huhtar. Frankly, it does not matter in the least. It is enough to have earned a role in one of the year’s biggest movies; it is, in fact, more than enough. As the movie unspools for the audience and I get the first glimpse of Huhtar, I must stifle the urge to shout, but I hear it in my head.

  “I made the cut!”

  Yes, that is me up on the screen. Blondy Baruti.

  A 6-FOOT-8 FORMER REFUGEE from the Democratic Republic of the Congo; a basketball-player-turned-actor whose life story is only marginally less fantastic than a Marvel film. Not only shouldn’t I be here, in Hollywood, I shouldn’t be anywhere at all. I could have died many times over—as a child living in poverty in the Congo, or especially as a young boy fleeing the violence of a nation ravaged by war on a harrowing five-hundred-mile odyssey for survival.

  Imprinted on my brain are images impossible to erase, and memories I cannot shake, and do not want to shake, for they have shaped me into the man I am today, a man of unwavering faith and hope. I will carry scars for the rest of my days, residual damage from the sheer volume of violence I encountered; the odor of death that burns the nostrils and seeps into your lungs; the screeching of machetes and unmistakable cocking of AK-47 rifles; the whistling of bullets as they cut through the jungle. My God, the savageness of it all. I can still feel the driving rain—only in the tropics is it so ceaseless and loud, and hear the harsh rustling of wind through the tall mahogany trees, a sound I could never differentiate from the sound of soldiers walking through the high grass.

  Is it a cliché to say that children are resilient? I don’t believe so. I believe it is true in the most fundamental sense of the word. What the boy lacks in physical strength—in size and musculature—he compensates for with a purity of spirit, and the blessedness of naïveté. Surrounded by cruelty and violence, the child is still capable of happiness and love. He can smell the rotting flesh all around him; he can hear the anguished cries of his mother; he can suffer for days on end with dysentery and fever, and emerge from it with a smile and an eagerness to play with his friends as if he doesn’t have a care in the world.

  Even when surrounded by death and confronted daily by the inescapable reality of the depths to which mankind can sink, the boy remains filled with life and light, his heart capable of feeling goodness and optimism in even the bleakest of situations.

  Sometimes, the memories of the ordeals of my childhood come back to me at the strangest of times: not just in the early morning fog of a terrifyingly vivid dream, but when I least expect it. The hot, sticky smell that follows a summer rain will fill my nostrils, and suddenly I am back in the jungle, crawling on all fours, listening to my mother’s urgent whisper:

  Keep down, Blondy. Stay low. Stay quiet. They are close.

  A car that backfires or a firecracker tossed casually on the Fourth of July—a joyous holiday that reminds me of the great fortune I have to now call America my home—can easily trigger an episode of post-traumatic stress, and I have to fight the urge to drop to the ground and seek cover from the crackling gunfire. In that moment, I am catapulted back in time. I can feel the jungle all around me. I can hear the cries of friends and loved ones. I can sense the danger deep in my marrow; it feels almost more real now than it did then.

  But then I am back. As quickly as it comes, the anxiety dissipates, and I remember where I am, and that all of this happened a very long time ago, in another part of the world. A place of both uncommon beauty and brutality. A place I once called home.

  I don’t know what it is that allows some of us to survive the worst of horrors with our souls intact—with an ability to still see the innate goodness in our fellow man when experience shouts at us to be wary and cynical. But I am one of those people, and I thank God that he has made me this way.

  I was raised Christian, but I believe wholeheartedly in karma. I have experienced violence and bloodshed on an epic scale. I have seen the worst that humans can do to each other. But I have also been touched repeatedly by the warmth of human generosity, and I choose to embrace this side of my species. Unlike so many of my friends, I survived the horrors of war. I got out of the Congo and came to America, a country so miraculous that it once seemed to exist only in my dreams. And along the way I made countless new friends and was welcomed into homes by families that had no reason to open their doors. I have lived when I should have died; I have succeeded against profound odds.

  So you see, I am the luckiest man on earth.

  My name is Blondy Baruti . . . and this is my story.

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  The Africa of my ancestors, I am told by the elders in whose footsteps I follow, was a glorious and magnificent place. And the Congo, in particular, was as beautiful and bountiful as any region shaped by God’s hand, as lush as Eden itself. A description of my homeland makes it sound like nothing less than paradise. Rich, fertile soil capable of sustaining vast and varied farmlands; geological richness producing thick veins of precious minerals and metals—copper, cobalt, gold, and diamonds, to name just a few; verdant forests and sub-Saharan plains sustaining a vast array of wildlife; jungle canopies so dense and fruitful one could simply raise a hand and pluck a veritable buffet of sweet sustenance. A land of brotherhood and peace.

  This was the Congo of my people . . . the Congo shared wistfully in stories handed down from generation to generation.

  The Congo of my dreams.

  Alas, it is not the Congo I call home. The Congo of my youth was (and sadly remains today) a place of pestilence and poverty; of vengeance and violence so indiscriminate as to be almost beyond comprehension. How do you reconcile the tales of beauty and innocence I heard with the things that actually happened? How did the supposed Utopia of my ancestors become a land riven by chaos and bloodshed? A
land where preteen boys are conscripted into military gangs and become drug-fueled killers; a land where rape is so ubiquitous that it is barely noticed as a crime; a land in which more than five million people have died since the outbreak of civil war in the mid-1990s. There is a reason the Congo is sometimes referred to as the “Trigger of Africa,” and it is not simply because of geographic appearance.

  There are no easy answers or explanations. But I can tell you the story as I know it, and my place in it. This, too, is in my blood, the tradition of finding one’s place and identity through oral history. There is, among my people, an unwritten burden of responsibility to disclose one’s past by discharging the truth with unflinching honesty and candor. A journey anywhere—whether across the village or to a distant land—must necessarily commence with a single step forward. And rarely is that journey made alone. There is an African proverb that says, “An ox’s hind hoof treads where the front hoof has stepped.” I stand and walk today where I am because my kin once stood and walked before me. Ugly or pretty. For better or worse. I am a product of the Congo, and of the people it has reared.

  The family structure of any African society is blatantly and indisputably patriarchal. The man—the father and husband—is the head of the household. No one debates this hierarchy, and no one attempts to enforce upon it modern Western philosophies of equality and partnership. The man is the king of his castle, no matter how humble it might be. It has been that way from time immemorial.

  My maternal grandfather, as the custom of the day dictated, was named Baruti Batilangani Boto Leyande. He was born in the Yangambi region of the Congo on May 28, 1939, when much of the world was being drawn into the vortex of World War II. This was a period well documented as one of the most turbulent in the annals of Congolese history, as the country continued to wrestle with the devastating consequences of the twenty-three-year reign of Belgium’s King Leopold II, and his iron-fisted colonial oppression of Africans. Following the Conference of Berlin in 1885, Leopold acquired the rights to the territory of the Congo, and in a gesture of stunning grandiosity, took it as his personal property. As a result, Leopold personally “owned” a region that today is the second largest country in Africa and the eleventh largest nation in the world, a region nearly ninety times larger than Belgium itself. (This, too, was a sign of things to come, for the Congo remains even today a nation bullied and exploited by smaller and crueler neighbors and occupiers.) Leopold renamed the territory the Congo Free State. This was a cruel and oxymoronic name, as there was nothing “free” about it.

  For every horror story captured by the media outlets of the West, untold tribulations were being perpetrated with vicious and unchecked recklessness in the Congo: epic construction and infrastructure projects undertaken with ferocious commitment, ostensibly designed to enhance and modernize life in the Free State, but in reality undertaken for purely venal purposes—to expand the wealth of Leopold himself. Railroad lines and roads were carved out of the jungle with breathtaking speed; rubber was extracted to help meet a rapidly expanding global market spurred by the burgeoning popularity of the automobile. Had the Congolese people profited in some way from this industrial movement, perhaps history might view Leopold differently. But in the land of my people he is rightfully considered an exploitative tyrant who viewed them as merely tools to be used in the procuring of resources, and then cast aside like rubbish. Natives who resisted the colonists’ orders were beaten or butchered, their limbs hacked off by bloodthirsty soldiers in a terrifying and unforgettable show of might.

  Untold millions of my people died during this period, the victims of violence or sickness or starvation. And so it became a part of Congo lore to accept with stoicism the cruelty of invaders, to understand that freedom was not our birthright.

  The Congress of Berlin marked the germination point of the turmoil that later enveloped the continent, where European powers carved up Africa like a jigsaw puzzle, and divided it among themselves for their own profit and glory. When 1939 rolled around, and the world became embroiled in a war that affected every part of Africa, the Congo was among those nations pillaged to its core. Its young men were enlisted to fight enemies they didn’t know. Family structures were permanently disrupted. The sixty years before my grandfather’s birth was the incubation period for the harrowing unrest and violence that would plague the Congo from then on.

  This was the world into which my grandfather was born. He was originally from Yawenda, a city in the territory of Isangi, not far from the Congo River. He was the son of Baruti Boyoma and Banzanza Sophie. In stark contrast to the expectations of the period, my grandfather was fortunate to receive a Western-styled formal education. Erudite and accomplished, he eventually graduated with a degree in law from what was then known as the University of Lovanium (the school later merged with other institutions of higher learning under the moniker of the University of Zaire; it subsequently became known as the University of Kinshasa). Through a combination of diligence, ambition, intelligence, and guile, my grandfather developed a lucrative business enterprise in the Congo, the fruits of which provided him the leverage and latitude to travel extensively.

  As his accomplishments ballooned (along with his ego), Baruti bestowed upon himself the two last names and middle name, Batilangandi Boto Leyande, which in the vernacular means Bazali na maw ate moto na moto na oyo yaye. There is no direct English translation for this phrase, but the closest approximation is as follows: “They do not have sympathy (No mercy); every man for himself.” It is a survivor’s credo, befitting not only the spirit of the war-ravaged Congo, but of a man who endured and ultimately thrived in spite of a series of betrayals at the hands of friends and family members and business associates. Baruti was unique among his siblings in etching out a sustainable and successful business enterprise. While the fierce individuality of his name might suggest a coldness of the heart, for a time Baruti’s generosity appeared to know no bounds. It was commonly known that he would readily disburse his massive wealth to anyone in need. I have been told that he spread his good fortune among both friends and strangers in virtually equal allotment. To his core, Baruti was apparently a good-hearted man who preferred to share rather than shun; a man who was charitable, compassionate, and sympathetic. I would like to believe so, anyway.

  Baruti had left his hometown as a young man to go to Kisangani, before ending up in the capital, Kinshasa. There, he procured a sizable plot of land and erected a house for his sister Albertine Basasa. The house, which was affectionately referred to as “The Huge House,” was a central and unifying locale for not only family, but for folks from all walks of life. True to tradition, Baruti’s parents, my great-grandparents, found him a worthy wife, Christine Lofo Boyale. She was sixteen years old when they married in 1962, seven years younger than Baruti. While this age difference might raise eyebrows in Western culture, it was at the time normal in Africa. Indeed, tradition dictated that the woman in a marriage should be at least five years younger than her partner; a gap of as much as fifteen years was not uncommon. The purpose was primarily to demonstrate power and control on the part of the man, and to prolong and maximize the child-bearing years of his wife. If a young man fell in love with a young woman his own age, the two would undoubtedly face resistance from their families if they wanted to marry. This was no small thing, as parental blessing and approval is crucial to African marriages.

  Cultural norms vary wildly from place to place, and are sometimes lost in translation. What is perfectly acceptable in one culture is deemed outrageous or even perverse in another, like polygamy, which was and remains commonplace in my homeland. And so it was that Baruti, following a long and protracted period of monogamous marriage with my grandmother, took a second wife. Like most African men, my grandfather had dreamed of raising a large family. (And by large, I mean very large!) Unfortunately, my grandmother was unable to fulfill this desire. Stemming from endless battles with health issues and periodic fertility complications, Christine did her best, but only
(only?) managed to birth three children: my mother, Annie, as the firstborn, and then my uncles, Desire and Joseph Baruti.

  My grandmother was the personification of a selfless African wife, driven by love for her husband and an unwavering commitment to family and tradition. It was in this spirit of generosity and cultural acceptance that she allowed my grandfather to take other women. I should point out that none of this occurred in a vacuum. Baruti consulted with family elders, as well as with his wife. Difficult as it might be for Westerners to understand, all agreed that my grandfather should wed a second time. Does this make my grandmother a fool or a saint? Perhaps neither: she was merely a product of her time and culture, and she did what she felt was in the best interests of her family. Christine’s magnanimous presence and generous spirit opened the doors for her husband to bring his second and third wives into her house, under her roof, and accommodate them with their own rooms. While my grandfather went on to multiple marriages thereafter, these other new women lived in different parts of the city largely because, as my grandmother would later say, “The ‘Huge House’ only had five bedrooms!”

  If the family dynamics were amicable and cordial (and from what I have been told, this was mostly the case), it was primarily because of my grandmother’s munificence, and the warm and loving environment she cultivated as the first wife. She was inclusive and loving, but sensible in establishing boundaries. Christine slept with her children, my mother and uncles, in one part of the house, while the other wives shared sleeping quarters with their children. My grandfather, meanwhile, grazed nomadically, as befitting his stature as head of the household. His job was to sire children and to provide for them and their mothers financially. The spiritual and emotional care was left to the women, and my grandmother, true to form, embraced this role with all her heart. She took care of all the children as if they were her own, and the wives as if they were her sisters. They lived lovingly among each other as though they were biologically linked. Not surprisingly, the other women developed genuine admiration and respect for my grandmother, their natural trepidation and jealousy giving way to something like love as the years wore on.