The Incredible True Story of Blondy Baruti Read online

  Discretion was vital to the success of such an arrangement. Vast, sprawling homes filled with people related to one another either through blood or marriage were not uncommon, and unless you were to ask the women involved about their relationships, you never would have known that they were all wives. Indeed, they might have been sisters or cousins, so peaceful was their coexistence. The bickering and contention that could easily have ensued (and did, in many African households similarly structured) was mitigated also by my grandfather’s own tactfulness, as well as his wealth, which naturally alleviated some of the complexities of such a diverse family arrangement. He had the means to provide everyone with a comfortable existence. It is a simple truth: poverty exacerbates all manner of problems, while money helps heal otherwise festering wounds. Baruti made sure that his children and wives were cared for; additionally, when any of the other wives gave birth, my grandmother would liberally expend her own resources to celebrate the arrival of a new family member. This was the type of woman she was: unfiltered and exceedingly giving of herself. Thus, while my grandfather may have been viewed as the head of the family, my grandmother was in a very real sense the lifeblood that pulsated through the organism and made it not just functional, but healthy.

  AND THEN, BEFORE MY mother even reached her teenage years, my grandfather disappeared. Slowly at first, and then altogether. As the story is told, he aligned himself with a team of business colleagues and left the Congo for greener pastures in Ghana. His Ghana adventure, undertaken as a way to expand his business empire and care for his family, became long and unwieldy, and veiled in secrecy. Communication with his family in the Congo all but ceased; the once surging river of financial resources slowed to a trickle, and then dried up entirely. To say this threw the family into chaos would be an understatement. With not enough money to go around, and with many mouths to feed, the household fell apart, bit by bit. The wives Baruti had brought into the big home soon left, along with their children, and remarried. My grandmother, however, steadfastly refused to leave or to find another husband. Instead, she focused her efforts on taking care of her children and ensuring that they would have a loving and stable home, even in the absence of their father.

  Many years later, while researching my family’s story, I asked my grandmother about this period in her life. A dignified and private woman, she at first demurred, unwilling for whatever reason to discuss the inner workings of her heart. Like many grandmothers, though, she had a soft spot for her grandchildren, and I was not easily dissuaded. Why did you not leave? I asked. Why did you not move on with your life, away from the huge home with five bedrooms, most of them now sad and empty? Why did you not find another man to take the place of Baruti . . . a man who could have eased your financial and emotional burden? No one would have judged you harshly. Not even your own children, who by this point barely knew their own father.

  My grandmother merely smiled and shook her head. And then, in a tone that somehow managed to reflect both the sweetness of a grandmother and the sternness of an army general, she offered an explanation.

  “I did not marry your grandfather because of the lure of fame or money, but because of the love I felt for him. And that love was extended to our family and our home. Why would I leave? Just because the rains came and washed everything downhill? It was still my home and he was still my husband. And we still had children who needed me there. No, no, no. There was no reason to leave. None at all.”

  And so, when it was all said and done, when the brightness had faded away, only the first and legitimate wife, my grandmother, remained vigilant to the very end. She lives to this day in the home her husband built for her, the home in which her children, including my mother, were raised.

  In 1990, word reached our family that Baruti had died in Ghana, leaving behind twelve children—seven males and five females—that we knew of. Later my grandmother discovered that while he was working in Ghana, my grandfather had also had at least two other children.

  There is a West African proverb that seems appropriate to this situation: “Matters within the house are only known to mice.” I do not know how my grandfather died, whether through sickness or accident or retribution from a wronged business associate or lover. Any of these possibilities seem plausible. But I would like to believe that in his final moments on this planet, perhaps he may have reflected upon the life he had lived, and in those moments, as darkness fell for the last time, he saluted with the firmness of a strong and determined hand the wife and woman he left behind: my grandmother, Christine Lofo, who did not wilt in the face of adversity, and who never vacillated in her loyalty to family and faith. Her roots were deep and firm, providing stability for generations.

  And I am a limb that has branched from that tree.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  While the Congo is a place of great and undeniable natural beauty, it is also a harsh and unforgiving place that demands courage of its citizenry; only the strong survive.

  I was barely two years old when my tiny body was ravaged by a mysterious virus. My mother watched helplessly as the fever soared and I lapsed into a state of delirium. I was rushed to the closest hospital, where doctors conducted a battery of tests and determined that I had contracted some sort of disease that was siphoning off my blood supply, preventing healthy cells from replacing dead ones, as is the normal physiological way of things. I do not remember this, of course, and I do not know the official diagnosis. I know only that my mother and grandmother told me repeatedly that they did not expect me to survive the devastation. Nor did anyone on the hospital staff.

  But I did survive! To this day, there are pictures of me at the hospital—before-and-after photos of an emaciated toddler, alongside another photo of a healthy and smiling little boy. The photos are marked with the words: “Miracle Baby.” And so it has been through much of my life—sadness juxtaposed with joy, survival beating back death.

  I was born in Kinshasa. Like much of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it is, on one hand, a bountiful city surrounded by river basins and magnificent vegetation rooted in dark fertile soil. But it is also a land of staggering heartbreak and unfathomable cruelty.

  Even today, the drumbeat of horrifying news continues—dismal headlines about a country ripped apart by a seemingly endless civil war and the repeated encroachment of brutal and venal outside forces. A country where roadsides are littered with rotting, mutilated corpses; where the horrors of rape and torture go beyond the merely criminal to the outright inhuman (do some research, if you dare, and behold the nearly incomprehensible savagery of teenage boys violating elderly women with knives and guns and other instruments of mayhem; of disemboweling pregnant mothers and forcing them to eat their own fetuses). This is the stuff of horror movies. And it is utterly, shockingly real.

  Indeed, the Congo often seems like some post-apocalyptic nightmare of death and desolation plaguing a region that has never known peace or prosperity—at least not in my lifetime. This is the Africa that I grew up in—the epicenter of some of the most appalling episodes of human mutilation within the last half century.

  But while there is great poverty and violence in the Congo, there is also wealth, and my father, like my grandfather, was in fact a wealthy man. However, Francois Nseka, a banker and government official, was not a very good man, or at least not much of a father.

  By the time I was three years old (and my sister ten), my father had officially and completely disappeared from our lives, and our family had relocated to Goma, a city in the far eastern portion of the country, on the Rwandan border. Goma is a city that has been largely shaped by violence, in particular the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s that resulted in millions of refugees flooding across the border. And yet, my early childhood was relatively uneventful. We scraped by as best we could. It wasn’t easy, but neither was it unsafe. At least not in the early years of my life. My earliest memories are probably no different than those of most children. I was outdoors from sunrise to sundown. Like
many in my community, I had dreams of becoming a professional soccer player. The absence of a father notwithstanding, it seemed like a normal childhood; I did not realize the enormous effort my mother expended in making sure that I felt safe and secure, and above all else, loved.

  Like my grandmother, she talked often of the importance of education and hard work, and of making an honorable living. As testament to my grandmother’s sturdy guidance, one of my uncles had become a successful attorney, and another had become a judge. My mother worked long hours in a local market selling goods, while at the same time raising her children, a burden that began when she was quite young, and that effectively prevented her from obtaining a high school diploma. She never complained, but she did make it quite clear that she wanted something better for her own children.

  “Dream big,” my mother used to say. “Anything is possible.”

  While a photograph is merely a glimpse of a particular time and place, and thus only a small piece of the story, there is undeniable truth in the image. Peruse the tattered and dusty pages of an old photo album of my family, and you will see a gorgeous young woman in her adolescent years. This is Annie Baruti. In these pictures, she is slender and erect, with deep-brown, confident eyes perfectly imprinted on a smooth mahogany face. Perhaps she is looking to the future with the same enthusiasm and promise as her male siblings, unaware of the harshness that lay ahead.

  Regardless, my mother was, quite simply, a strikingly beautiful young woman, and not surprisingly the target of an endless stream of suitors. No doubt the absence of a reliably watchful father in her own life created a void wherein she’d later crave attention from an older and presumably strong male figure. I was born out of an illegitimate promise that started a chain reaction of oaths left unfulfilled by Francois Nseka. As he left when I was a toddler, I never knew my father nor his family. My mother, to the best of her ability and with the unfailing support of my grandmother, raised us amid a myriad of difficulties. She was a single mother who never gave up on her children, persevering mightily within a cultural environment that shunned women who bore children out of wedlock, and treated as second-class citizens the innocent and unfortunate offspring of these ill-advised unions.

  My mother’s resilience notwithstanding, our lives were unrelentingly difficult. Without the financial support and stability of a father, money was scarce. Most, if not all, of my birthdays as a toddler and youngster were spent in the corrosive seclusion of need and want. I can recall on several occasions witnessing my mother trying to make something special out of nothing in the weeks and days leading up to my birthday; or, worse, selling her own meager possessions—her clothes or furniture—to pay for some type of present. Her face, bowed down by the sheer weight of the needs of her children, couldn’t mask the burden she carried. Her naturally erect posture would devolve into a defeated slump, as though to hide her face. Having nothing for my birthday was commonplace to the point that I barely even noticed. If anything, I felt for my mother, and the obvious stress that the impending day would bring. I wanted only for her to be happy, and on some level, I knew that my birthday provoked feelings of sadness, and so I wanted it merely to pass quickly.

  If poverty is harsh, though, it is nothing compared to the grim reality of life during wartime, and war has sadly shaped the Congo for much of its existence. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 began with a brutal and determined effort by the ruling Hutu tribe to exterminate the Tutsi, a minority tribe, but one that wielded considerable wealth and power. In a little more than three months the marauding Hutu forces, armed with machetes, hacked their way across the country, invading villages and slaughtering more than 800,000 Tutsis, along with more moderate Hutus who refused to cooperate with the genocidal madness. Eventually, Tutsi forces who had been exiled to neighboring Uganda regrouped and pushed the Hutus out of Rwanda, ending the slaughter but prompting the mass exodus of an estimated two million refugees, most of whom settled in the eastern Congo. Refugee camps became de facto military training grounds for the exiled Hutus, who terrorized the local population, in particular Congolese nationals who were of Tutsi descent. In essence, the people of my country were subjected to ethnic cleansing as a fallout of the Rwandan genocide.

  But as is often the case, tribalism was little more than an excuse to obtain power and wealth. In 1996 military forces from Rwanda and neighboring Uganda allied in an effort to invade the Congo and expel or destroy the Hutu forces that had been responsible for the Rwandan genocide, and in the process overthrow the government of President Joseph Mobutu. Also at stake were the vast natural resources and untapped mineral reserves of the Congo. So you see this was a practical war, as well as one born of nationalism and vengeance. With the help of Congolese oppositional forces led by Laurent Desire Kabila, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo marched into Kinshasa. Mobutu fled the country and Kabila anointed himself president.

  Kabila was hardly a man of great intellect or patience, but rather an impulsive drunk who quickly turned on his allies; in 1998 he enlisted help from Zimbabwe, Angola, and other neighboring countries to expel Rwandan and Ugandan forces from the Congo, which led to the First Congo Civil War, which in turn gave way almost immediately to the Second Congo Civil War, a massive and multinational confrontation involving multiple countries—indeed, it is with good reason that the first and second Congo wars are often referred to as “Africa’s World War.” Together these conflicts involved nine nations and resulted in the deaths of some five million people. At the dawn of a new century, war, that most evil of man’s creations, was raging like wildfire across the continent on a scale and brutality not seen since Hitler’s extermination of six million Jews more than a half century earlier. In the Congo, neighbors became adversaries; friends and relatives took up arms against each other as chaos and bloodshed engulfed the region.

  In January of 2001, Kabila was assassinated—by one of his own bodyguards, no less—and succeeded by his son, Joseph, who despite being only thirty years of age and having spent most of his formative years in Tanzania and Zimbabwe, was better suited temperamentally to the job. By late 2002 he engineered a cease-fire and by 2003 the Second Congo Civil War had come to an end; four years after that, Kabila was elected president following the first democratic elections held in the Congo in more than four decades. The Congo has continued to be plagued by political and economic unrest and remains one of the most unstable regions in the world. But it was in the late 1990s and the early 2000s that the bloodshed and violence reached a peak.

  I WASN’T QUITE TEN years old when the war finally reached my backyard; when rebel soldiers spilled over the border and made their way into Goma, and our lives instantly devolved into chaos and a nightmarish exodus into the jungle, where survival was the only goal. There was little warning or preparation. In the preceding months, my mother had become more cautious about making sure we did not stray far from the home, especially at night, but if she was expecting some sort of attack, she did not share her concern. Indeed, this day was much like any other. I had come from school and played soccer with some friends from the neighborhood; my sister and I were both doing homework when my mother came into the house and began screaming.

  “We have to leave now!” She offered no further explanation, but it was clear from her tone that something was very wrong. I had never seen her in such a state.

  I tried to pack up some clothes, but my mother said there wasn’t time. Instead, I took my sister by the hand and ran out into the street, where panic reigned. People were running everywhere. I could hear the sound of bullets echoing in the distance. And then something louder, more ominous: the rumble of rocket-propelled grenades.

  Though I was just a child the day we left Goma, I remember it vividly—the look of fear on my mother’s face, the way my sister’s hand felt in mine, so clammy and tight, the way the whole world seemed to be falling apart in front of me. Instinctively, almost as if she had anticipated such an act and therefore had an escape plan in mind, my mo
ther hurriedly led us to the outskirts of town, away from where the fighting was heaviest. I remember her pushing me to the ground, driving my face into the brush, and holding a finger to her lips.

  Quiet . . .

  For several hours we stayed there, silent and practically motionless, like prairie rabbits frozen by fear and self-preservation, until darkness fell and the crackling of automatic gunfire began to ebb. I realize now we were more fortunate than clever, but of course there is no small measure of luck involved in surviving the indiscriminate whims of war.

  When the moon rose high in the sky, my mother pulled me and my sister from the ground and with a simple nod of her head implored us to begin walking. In an instant, she had been compelled to choose between two ghastly outcomes: remain in Goma and face the likelihood—if not certainty—of being overrun by rebel forces; or disappear into the dark, immeasurable jungle. What I knew at the time was only fear—crippling and unexplainable; fear of pain and death in that rudimentary way of childhood. I knew what guns could do. I knew that bombs and grenades could destroy homes and families.

  But my mother? She was driven by more than just the possibility of death, or even the maternal instinct that compels a mother to do anything to protect her children. My mother knew there were worse things than death, and it was this possibility—of witnessing her children subjected to torture or rape—that led us out of Goma and into the jungle. She heard the gunfire and grenades and recognized the inevitable outcome: Not merely a bullet to the head or a machete blade cleaving her children before her eyes. More likely, she knew that my sister would be raped and mutilated before being left to die. And me, her only son? The soldiers might have been quick and callous in their snuffing of my life; or, more likely, they would have conscripted me into their ranks, put a gun in my hand, and ordered me to fight, or even to kill my own friends and family. Facing this Hobson’s choice, which was really no choice at all, my mother opted to flee, and to take her chances with the jungle.