How a journalist chases a monster, Part 4
The plantation.
Read Part 1 of this series here. It will give you background on the story of the girls that this backstory is dependent upon.
We stood looking down on rolling hills that made for a truly Congolese vista: green upon green upon green, striated like malachite for farming. We’d just taken a sweaty hike. Our shoes were soggy with mud as we arrived at what felt like the silent edge of humanity.
Behind us sat a stone church with a tin roof oxidizing against a gray sky. Above its doorway was a faded, hand-painted sign: Paroisse Baptiste Lwiro. (The nearby town was called Lwiro, the main feature of which was a defunct university for the study of natural sciences. Pink and built in a Spanish-colonial style, it now housed a chimpanzee sanctuary.)
None of us spoke as we took it all in. The air was gravid, frightening. Next to me was my fixer, Jack; a Kavumu civil society leader named Felix; a friend from Coopera (the Spanish primate preservation organization housed nearby); and Inge, my Dutch friend from an international NGO. I took pictures and scribbled notes, changed lenses, wrote more. Working always has pushed away the fear a little bit.
The sunflower-strewn valley beyond the Baptist church was actually a 175-acre plantation in ruins, a lawless expanse near the village of Kavumu called Bishibiru, formerly owned by colonial Belgians, then rumored to be a squatters’ home for demobilized soldiers.
It was not safe for us to go any closer than we already were. And it wasn’t very safe for us to be perched on that hill, either.
The man who’d owned the plantation since 1965 was a German ex-pat named Walter Müller. A short man with black hair and a limp, he “blended in,” a waiter in a Bukavu restaurant told me (always talk to anyone and everyone while reporting — you never know what you’ll find). Müller spoke Swahili, Mashi and other local languages (which was rare for a foreigner), and locals liked him. In the only photo I’d seen of him he was wearing industrial-looking 1960s glasses that framed heavily lidded eyes.
As a permanent resident of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Müller raised a family at the plantation while working for Pharmakina, a Bukavu-based international pharmaceutical company that produced quinine — a long-used treatment for malaria — from the bark of cinchona, or feverfew, trees.
With some of the richest volcanic soil on Earth, DRC is home to the one of the most diverse plant ecologies in the world. Knowing little about Congolese agriculture, when I went to see Bishibiru, I was suffused with a sense of how lush and fertile the land was. In fact, Congo “has the agricultural potential to feed the whole of Africa,” as The Washington Post put it in 2001. But like every economic sector in the country, agriculture as an industry is feeble, unable to thrive because of the absence of a countrywide transportation system and a lack of government financial support, not to mention the fact that war has made working fields in much of the country dangerous.
On land ridden with unstable, shell-shocked men — and haunted no doubt by the deaths of many Congolese at the hands of their Belgian colonial masters — Walter Müller was murdered in 2012.
When Müller took over the land in 1965, he let go a few hundred workers who’d been there since the time of Belgian occupation. Many of the men refused to leave, however. Müller had to procure police papers to try to force the workers out. This struggle is what seems to have ultimately led to his death.
Unhappy they’d been made to leave the land they’d farmed for decades, the workers found a sympathetic leader who organized them into what was basically a makeshift militia. (Or maybe it was the other way around; a man seeking men who would fight for his land.) I was told many times while in DRC that anyone dissatisfied with the government can form his own militia to get what he wants; the country has hundreds of them.
Dissenting politics can cause wars in eastern Congo. But, incredibly, the sympathetic leader of these guys was an elected official. His name was Frederic Batumike Rugimbanya, and he was a provincial member of parliament who had been elected twice in Kavumu since 2006. Short and stocky, he was derisively known as “Mr. 10 Liters” — the size of a small jerrycan commonly used to carry water.
Strange rumors swirled about the politician, who was also a preacher: People said he had killed his two former wives, buried dead people in plastic and practiced witchcraft. Yet he was a popular figure somehow, known as an advocate for the region.
Once the former plantation workers had found a ringleader and some organization in 2012 — or, again, perhaps at his direction — they seized control of the land, and forbid Müller from ever entering again. Müller fought back in the courts, but resentment, anger and greed finally resulted in vengeance.
One day in March of that year, when Müller was at the Lwiro stone church, men attacked and dragged him to the plantation, beating him and breaking his ribs. They stabbed him in the chest multiple times with a spear and left him near death. Eventually, the FARDC (Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo, aka the Congolese Army) took him to a hospital in Kigali, Rwanda, where he died about a week later.
No wonder I felt such a strong sense of dread while staring at that land.
When I was there at the end of 2015, the plantation itself was said to be exploited for its timber, and money was apparently made from renting monthly farm plots. It was, allegedly, very lucrative.
Whatever housing that had existed in Müller’s time had since been destroyed. Men chose to sleep outdoors for fear of being ambushed during the night. They were squatting on the land illegally, after all, and the FARDC was making occasional violent attempts at chasing them off.
Gunfire was a familiar sound in those lush green hills.
What exactly was going on at the plantation was unclear; it was too dangerous to enter. Before my colleagues and I had headed up the slippery hill to get a look, we all agreed we would go no farther. A couple days earlier, Jack and I had already had to employ our cover story about what I was doing in Congo, telling the intelligence service that I was working on a story about whether foreign aid is helping or hurting the country.
At that point, I had just made quasi-enemies of the intelligence guys by working with Jack, whom they apparently despised because of his past critical collaborations with other reporters. I’d also already offended various members of the government by calling out their inaction before I’d even arrived. An armed militia was one group I was eager to avoid alienating at that point.
While a few press freedom organizations have put out safety guides for journalists over the years, there’s never been a section in any I’ve seen that teaches you how to keep yourself safe from militias.
I was pretty sure these men were not going to care what story I was or was not reporting on if I got in their faces.
The day before our visit to Bishiburu, Kavumu’s civil society leader, Felix, a somber young man with high cheekbones, mentioned the plantation during a visit to his office. High on the wall behind his heavy wooden desk hung three black-and-white photocopies: two showing the thatch-roofed and mud-walled houses in his village, and a third that read: Toiture en paille (rarement en toles) les murs en terre batue: “Straw roofing (rarely in sheets) earthen walls.” He used the photos as visual aids to describe how vulnerable the people of Kavumu were to break-ins.
Jack and I went to see Felix so we could learn more about what was happening to Kavumu’s girls. I was starting from scratch even after a couple years of reporting from New York by being on the ground for the first time. I was hopeful that this meeting would produce a couple of leads.
Felix described the dozens of scenes of horror that had taken place in the village since 2013: Families would wake during the night and discover one of their young daughters missing. Inevitably, the girls — aged 18 months to 11 years old — would be found in the same nearby field full of corn, sorghum and sunflowers, bleeding and dazed after being raped. No one knew how the families had slept through the girls’ abductions from their shack-like homes, and no one had any idea who was taking their daughters — or why.
Felix told us about local theories that there was sorcery involved. Families were being put to sleep as men slipped into their houses and stole their daughters; some kind of “magic powder” was being sprinkled over them.
And then Felix told us about the problematic plantation near the village.
Sometimes an interview propels you toward your next interview. That’s all you need — one hint of a promising lead that you can hold up against all the reporting you’ve already done in order to decide whether to take it seriously. I knew right then that this had to be followed up. Immediately. We had to go there as soon as we could.
I also knew that I was endangering every person I met with on this trip. So someone willing to speak so plainly, like Felix, was a godsend. At the same time, I had to make sure he understood the potentially severe outcomes of our interactions. He did. And he chose to speak with me over and over again about these atrocities, for years. Eventually, he would face assassination attempts and threats, having to flee the country at least twice.
Whoever was raping the girls was also deadly, and willing to kill to continue their rampage.
The plantation is located in the 390,000-square-mile Congo basin that encompasses the province of South Kivu, which, as I said, is one of the most biodiverse places in the world. So pretty much the cultivation of anything is possible. (A year after this visit, I would discover that the plantation had been growing a sizeable amount of marijuana, clarifying the land’s value more readily than anything I’d been able to grasp before.)
What grew on the land would prove to be one of the many crucial questions that had to be answered to figure out why — and how — the girls in nearby Kavumu were being abducted and violated. What if there truly was a real “magic” powder being produced on the nearby land?
Could the goings-on over there be connected to the rapes? How? And, again, why?
As we stood looking out over the green expanse of the plantation, I considered whether the MP and the men who worked for him could be responsible for such unthinkable violence against the children of Kavumu. I knew whoever was behind all this had to be powerful, maybe even untouchable, otherwise why would the attacks go on and on, “unsolved,” for years?
As I watched a column of smoke snake through the plantation’s trees, a I felt a chill despite the December warmth of the rainy season in Congo’s relentless equatorial south.
This was just the beginning of what would eventually bring me closer to being part of a group of people who would each add one sliver to the case that would be made to stop, and ultimately convict, the perpetrators.
Coming in Part 5 (or maybe another part after that): I’ll introduce you to the girls of Kavumu. You’ll hear their stories in their own words. I’ll also tell you the story of one father who was falsely arrested for the rape of his own daughter when he went to report the crime. And you’ll meet the doctors who treated the girls, and the many other heroes who helped put an end to the ongoing attacks. Most of all, you’ll hear how everyone involved kept themselves going in the face of such horrors.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
Great writing, and I looked up "gravid." A beautiful word. Thanks again. Julie
I can’t comprehend the sheer grit and determination you had to pursue the truth of the barbarism taking place there. In a world of such conflicting mainstream media, distracted by (relatively) petty Western issues, reporting like this demonstrates the worth and integrity of journalism. I have so much respect for your work.