Immediately the first leg of the journey, which began from the ancient Ethiopian city of Addis Ababa, ended with the aircraft landing at the Goma International Airport, the unusualness of this major city in the Democratic Republic of Congo, (DRC) struck us like a deadly punch from a prizefighter. Goma is the capital of North Kivu province in the Congo which natives of this French African country, in a rhythmically fascinating mouthful, call République Démocratique du Congo.
Congo is reputed with huge reserves of cobalt, gold, gems, copper, timber, and uranium. Its most valuable resource is its large reserve of diamonds. Indeed, the Congo has the world’s second-largest diamond reserves, at 150Mct, or 20.5% of the global total. Substantial diamond reserves can be found in Kasai Occidental and Kasai Oriental. Then known as the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908, it was the personal estate of Leopold II, who was the second King of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909. Leopold was known as the founder and sole owner of the Free State which he administered as a private estate, ran by a surrogate called Henry Morton Stanley.
Although his claim to Congo was affirmed by the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, with a caveat that he improved on the treatment of Congo people, Leopold ignored this caveat and visited a regime of brutality on his Congo estate. Not only did he make a fortune from Congo through natural rubber and ivory which he cultivated by forced labour, but he also inflicted atrocities and notorious brutality on the populace. Hands of men, women, and children were said to have been chopped off if they didn’t meet their rubber cultivation quota. In the process, his genocidal killings eliminated millions. The 1904 Casement Report established these and more, with an estimated one to 15 million murders by Leopold, his reign noted as the first genocide on the people. No wonder then that, at the time of independence in 1960, Congolese anger, disdain and hatred for Belgians was indescribable.
As I will show presently, Congo has merely substituted one foreign brutality for another. The first blow from Goma at its airport this Saturday afternoon was the unusually large number of United Nations aircraft with UN boldly embossed on them. Waiting on the hangar were also a fleet of helicopters numbering about fifteen which decorated the fairly petite airport, similarly bearing the UN insignia. A slight drizzle welcomed first-time visitors this afternoon to this ancient town in Central Africa whose airport, albeit looking rundown in terms of available infrastructure, had a tarmac that was a beautifully gleaming stretch of asphalt.
Goma, this likeable city by Lake Kivu, cannot be compared with anywhere else in DRC. It is host to an unbelievably enormous number of UN, international agencies and NGOs. With this, Goma glimmers as an unusually cosmopolitan city, equipped with all the vices of the cosmopolis. It is a town of contradictions, just like Congo herself. The city shares a contiguous border with the Rwandan city of Gisenyi.
Three things get the town its infamous renown. One: it was the city where the pastor, who got infected with the Ebola virus in mid-July 2019, claimed to have been infected. Teaser: Goma is home to mountain gorillas, said to be the infection nodules of Ebola. Second, it is home to the Nyiragongo Volcano, the most deadly volcano in the world and third, Goma was the hot spot of the 1994 Rwandan genocide narrative. In late 2012, the town was the theatre of the M23 rebellion as it was captured by the rebels. Rwanda was also implicated in the war, with Paul Kagame accused of illegally expropriating DRC mineral resources. By the time the shelling and smokes from the artillery mortals of government forces and the rebels subsided, thousands of Goma inhabitants had been dispatched into a premature embrace with their Maker.
Goma also harbours virtually all the paradoxes and trajectories of Walter Rodney about underdevelopment and the underdeveloped. It is beautifully scenic, situated in an idyllic location and grafted by nature on the leafy green shores of an equally arrestingly beautiful, salty Lake Kivu. The hilly and smoulderingly menacing mountains of Goma equally hide treasures in the form of globally scarce mineral resources which the modern world uses to accentuate its modernity. Thus, while it has been said that Goma is one of the most dangerous cities in the world, it is paradoxically home to a beehive of foreigners, a stupendous number of whom you may never encounter in any of the suffering Third World countries. It is a common sight to see a beehive of white UN soldiers in Goma, with huge epaulettes on their shoulders.
Goma is dangerous, make no mistake about it. No, not because of threats from its inhabitants, but from natural hazards. It has hidden in its belly a potentially devastating threat of its mountains which contain Africa’s most potent volcanoes. In the year 2002 for instance, over 100 people got killed when an eruption of Mount Nyiragongo swirled around Goma, even as the people dropped dead one after the other. The lava from the periphery of Nyiragongo emitted gaseous fumes down to the centre of the city and destroyed more than a fifth of it. Fires and explosions followed and by the time the wrath of Mount Nyiragongo had subsided, about 120,000 Goma inhabitants had become homeless. So, though this calamity befell the people eight years ago, they live in daily fear that the horror of molten lava eruption could be repeated any time, with scenes of people dropping dead at intervals from the emission of deadly gases. When it first started, the people attributed the odourless carbon dioxide bubbles emitted by Nyiragongo to sorcery. In fact, they called it, in their Swahili lingua franca, mazukus – the evil wind.
Experts say that the only recipe to the feared calamity of Goma is to have the city and its inhabitants relocated to safer ground, 30 kilometres away. Its inhabitants have however rebuffed such suggestions, claiming that it would create a spiritual wedge between them and their ancestors, the owners of the land. After the 2002 destruction by the Nyiragongo, people just gave it a few weeks and promptly returned to their famed city, to begin a reconstruction of their homes from the debris of the fury of the volcano. Its ruins and rebuilding by the people shows the resilience of Goma people who hold their mountain gorillas tracked by visiting tourists and the amazing climbing of Rwenzori Mountains as trophies of their ancient city.
This writer climbed the dangerous hills of Mount Nyiragongo where you can have a picturesque of the whole of Goma and even see roofs of houses in Rwanda. If you slipped, you slipped into eternity, with the result of mangled flesh scooped from the bowel of the valley. As we climbed up, we beheld shanties built for soldiers and policemen’s families which were constructed by the side of the mountain. Apart from the irruption of another war, what Goma inhabitants and indeed the international community feared most was the next eruption of the Nyiragongo. A similar volcanic eruption had happened recently in the not-too-far Mount Nyamulagira, making it the 26th in the last 70 years. While its cataclysm was about, Nyamulagira vomited lava for close to 10 kilometres in nearby vast rural district lands, poisoning the people’s drinking water.
The UN and the European Union have invested millions of dollars in what is now the Goma Volcano Observatory, located at the top of the mountain. The writer visited the observatory, with its different colour lights that indicated the stages of a possible volcanic eruption. Here, the observatory sees Nyiragongo 17 kilometres away. With seismographs and other equipment, staff monitor the volcanoes, check underground seismic activities and project emergency plans, with a siren to alert people. They also embark on education to sensitize the people on what to do when they hear the siren. Goma people are aware that, once the observatory turns red, it is an alert of the approach of Nyiragongo. If this happens, they are instructed to immediately leave Goma as the UN has a contingency plan for ferrying the people out of town.
Again, Goma is just recovering from one of the deadliest internecine in Africa. All around it, you find scars of unhealed wounds and cicatrices of hate which are taking too long to melt. That same 2012, while the Nyiragongo pelted the inhabitants with red-hot lava flows, asphyxiated them with invisible deadly emissions of carbon dioxide gases, thus making Goma the most volcano-threatened city on earth, rebels also hopped on the city and took turns to rape their women and girl children. They just sheepishly obeyed the dictates and whims of the aberrant sticks affixed by nature to their midriffs whenever the sticks went irrationally turgid. The soldiers also butchered Goma inhabitants like they do at slaughter slabs.
A walk round the city of Goma revealed so many other contradictions. Squalor is evident and brackish water surround many homes. The writer and his crew rode past the front of the residence of the Governor of North Kivu. Impassable is the least of the words to describe the road and horrible will capture its state succinctly. It is located beside Lake Kivu, with a makeshift one storey shack housing policemen who were ostensibly drafted there to keep an eye on this Very Important Person. With guns held menacingly in their grips, they survey passersby from the top.
We also drove down to the periphery of Lake Kivu, a lake that is connected to the Tanganyika Lake in Tanzania by the Ruzizi River. This lake, measuring more than 460 metres (1,500ft) at its deepest point, which straddles the border of DRC and Rwanda, is one of the chains of lakes that lace the East African Rift Valley. It is from here that the continent of Africa, in the words of geographers, is slowly pulled…
