Here’s why Congo is fucked up: the war is constant and if one correlates a map of where the battle lines are they correspond precisely to where the mines are so because the conflict is based around a series of mines Congo is essentially a mafia state and the war has no possible political conclusion. For the American audience imagine every impression you have about West Virginia and then imagine that the mining companies have militias and that West Virginia is full of uranium and French-speaking Africans that don’t play well on broadcast news. Imagine all that and DR Congo is still much, much worse.

So…enter Ben Affleck to tell the world about a situation with more death than Darfur (take THAT Cheadle).

You may see some of his reportage here: Affleck Story

Do the millions of deaths now matter because one of America’s highest paid actors has acknowledged their existence?

Will said actor be there in five years?

It’s extremely difficult to criticize someone of megalomaniacal wealth going to parts of the earth where pennies a day can make a difference.

Still…all smiles and good intentions are not exactly what they seem. One must ask questions, do very high-profile publicity junkets as journalism actually educate the public in a manner that journalism should?

Also, the celebrity line that, ‘Wherever I go the spotlight follows me so as long as I have the power of glowing light I’ll use this for good rather than self-promotion. Aren’t I selfless?’ Ergh, not quite.

The blame should not be placed on the thespians, though, it should rest entirely on the current professional bankruptcy of news agencies enthusiastically combining their celebrity reporting with foreign coverage.

Gone are the days when Entertainment Tonight had entirely different content from CNN.

What I’d love to see is all of this reaching its logical conclusion and we get a ‘How to Catch a Predator: Celebrity Edition DR Congo’.

I remember when I was in Rwanda and Paris Hilton was supposed to come to promote herself; a lot of the journalists actually made preparations to leave the country for Congo and Uganda during the course of her stay. You aren’t allowed to refuse a story so we decided to go to find other stories to avoid the shame of contributing to this process.

Long-term, this type of PR fused with Nielsen obsessed, celebrity reporting and a desire to ‘raise awareness’ will be extremely harmful because it is prodigiously difficult to educate the public about African stories politically, economically, or whatever. The stories that get the most play in the general news in the region are still about mountain gorillas because mountain gorillas are an endangered species and this is a narrative in which people have a pre-existing interest.

So now, let’s say this Affleck trend continues for another 6 months after which he would have done his good deeds and can get back to the Hollywood life. What will people then know about Congo?

A) That the humanitarian catastrophe going on there is the result of abundant minerals and natural resources that ensure there can be no internal political resolution to the war and suffering. These resources end up in the hands of DR Congo’s neighbors and also the great powers of the world like the United States, Russia, and the European Union all of whom could do a tremendous amount to halt the prolonged misery there but perpetuate it instead to serve their own national interests. This is evidenced by the fact that the permanent members of the UN Security council all have large mineral holdings in DR Congo and the United Nations has had a military presence in the country for over 40 years. Nobody has a financial interest in seeing DR Congo work as a nation.

Or

B) Congo is that place where Ben Affleck went and it has a lot of rape. I wish we all had the courage of Ben to do something meaningful in life.

The media elite behind this trend ought to feel a sense of shame and realize that misinforming the public is not superior to telling them nothing at all.

In Congo, nobody pays taxes but everyone pays bribes. There’s nothing the Western mind would call a government, guns are everywhere but not everyone can afford bullets and anything can and does happen.

As an outgoing AP reporter said, for cultural reference it would be best to think of Rwanda as ‘Apocalypse Now’ and Congo as ‘Mad Max’.

“Somalia is functioning anarchy, there are rules, Somalia does not have inflation. Here though, this is non-functioning anarchy.” A grizzled and brilliant aid worker recently said to me.

I am still trying to understand the Congolese economy, but American dollars are accepted for all transactions and change is generally given in dollars except for amounts of one dollar or less, which is given in Congolese currency.

There is an order here though, something deep and twisted and consistent.

Let me give you an example. Every few months an endangered mountain gorilla will be killed. These can be caused by anything from poachers to escalating violence between the government and the rebels. Whenever this happens I wryly note that this story gets run while the deaths of hundreds of people in the area does not. Also, over 150 of the rangers dedicated to protecting the mountain gorillas have been killed over the past decade.

Last July a family of four gorillas was taken from the forest and executed by being shot in the back of the head. This received a lot of coverage, but the backstory did not. Before these four gorillas were murdered there was an incident where two gorillas were killed and one was used for food by troops loyal to the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda. Nkunda is extremely charismatic and sensitive to Western media so (in the tradition of military discipline here) he ordered that if any of his men ever killed a gorilla again they would be executed.

Park officials watch over the bodies of four mountain gorillas that were executed this week in DR Congo. IGCP and wildlife authorities are working to prevent further killings. Photo © Altor IGCP Goma

 

 

 

No gorillas were killed until July when the family was found executed. The backstory on this is that the Congolese government was conducting an investigation into the use of trees in producing a 30 million dollar a year charcoal trade (charcoal is widely used in the region as gas and electricity are prohibitively expensive). In order to send a message and maintain control over the region the charcoal traders executed the gorillas.

 This is the Congo narrative behind seemingly random acts of violence.

There’s a moment in Micaheal Herr’s wondrous little tome ‘Dispatches’, when he was running around stoned through Vietnam and all the American warriors marveled at the fact that Herr had actually chosen to be there.

A bit of this flavor exists in journalism today in that entering any war zone as a freelancer you are there by your own choosing.  All major wire services are quick to tell you that you are a freelancer and not a staffer and will enjoy none of the perks of a staffer though the risks are even greater.  They will, however, gladly take your photos.

Machetes at play in Masisi, DRC.

So you go into and through hell, existing on will, wiles and a new metaphysical sense of peril.  The sense that tells you the shadow ahead is infested with 13-year-olds with thousand-yard stares who will kill you if you step into their domain but leave you be if you pass on by without entering the ambit of the shadow.

There is a confederacy of other people you meet who understand, a small cadre possessed of stalwart courage and brilliance known nowhere else.  After it ends and the war zone is left for the needed sanctuary of some arbitrarily drawn borderland and when the flashes of atrocity are still flitting on the back of your eyes every time you blink.  After it ends, when everyone has their own advice on how to deal with it the first thing I heard was to go out and get drunk and wash all the images away and so I tried.

I didn’t really want to, but I tried.  I drank a lot, a toxic amount.  But I still felt nothing.  Physiologically I was affected, my speech slurred eventually and walking took a slight increase in concentration but mentally I could not feel drunk, I could not feel anything.

You get so locked into fear and action that the normal spectrum of human emotions disappears and you have to relearn your former life.  I think that’s when people get really fucked up, when they pass that point and have gone swimming too long in the abyss and their heads can never really escape even if their bodies do.

Eventually, if you make it, you return to the homeland and tell someone an anecdote and they tell you to go to therapy; you know that the person telling you this would not have survived 6 hours in some of the places just traversed.  Then you hear a car backfire and duck under a table with a group of your friends because a car backfiring sounds like a mortar exploding.  It’s not post-traumatic syndrome except in that a car backfiring sounds exactly like a mortar exploding.

I think post-traumatic syndrome is more a convenient and medicinal casting away of people who have endured what the rest of one’s society has not and continually refuses to acknowledge.

All those soldiers with the extended tours…When they come home and are accused of being mentally diseased what people are actually saying is that they don’t want to hear the stories that caused them to try and drink away the pain and cringe in a deep hurt inside their skulls at the sound of a hammer repeatedly thunking-thunking in the distance.

Nobody can understand except others who have endured it, the other photojournalists who have been to war.  Nobody but them can understand because they are the ones who have undergone that consciousness expanding experience of true conflict.

Eventually, you come to and learn that all cars backfiring are not mortars and can forget the former associations.  That’s really all post-traumatic disorder is are associations required to survive in hell extrapolated onto a softer civilization.

There are entities that remain though, while in the Congo, in addition to learning the difference between the sounds of variegated guns, I learned the difference between the sound of a woman crying after her child has been killed and a woman crying after she has been beaten.

People said it would be the smell of death that would remain but for me it’s the sounds.  The sounds and the knowledge that the places I left behind are the same or worse as when I left.  This knowledge makes me want to go back even though friends who love you tell you that nothing will ever change and the friends who love you are correct.  For me though, any change away from the all-present anarchy I saw is a worthy cause for one must try and break the devil’s nose…even if it is just one photo at a time.

One of the most altering aspects of the Congo is how one experiences moments that can only be described as Borgesian.  For example, the birds don’t stop singing while the sounds of men killing men spurt through the forests. Please listen to the audio to feel a portion of this experience:masisi-eleven-guns.mp3 

It’s a strange thing indeed to leave the logic of carnage that I found myself necessarily assimilating to in East Africa and return to Los Angeles.

You look for signs that you’ve changed in the interactions of friends and former lovers, always begging inside to know the answer of how damaging was it to bear witness to humanity in the flesh living in the realm beyond a nightmare’s horizon? How deranged have I become?

  Concussion following first attempt at Congo.

 

It doesn’t really matter though, the good people who are also good friends remain that and the others quickly drift away in an expedited emotional culling.  When asked ‘how was it there?’ or ‘how did it change you?’

I often think that the experience cut the fat off of my soul.  One realizes the things that are truly important in life and within this crystalline gaze through the myopic abyss one is endowed with what can be called perspective hinting towards wisdom.

Wisdom and the construction of a morally beautiful life are in a polemical relationship with the value structure handed to us by contemporary American society.

I speak mostly in axioms now, that’s changed.  I’ve lost the sense of apologetically conforming to social interactions and hierarchies

Over there you learn not how sacred life is, but how ephemeral and expendable it is, and so every day should be spent in the pleasurable relief that goals were marched towards friends and family have gone to sleep safely

You also learn that our unseen lords wielding MBAs control who lives and who dies in places like the Congo and who the next president will be and things like this.

Then there is the waste.  In Rwanda there are very few trashcans and almost no litter.  This is because everything is used.  Children will take plastic bags and bundle them together to make a soccer ball.

It’s not that I want everyone to cease spending hundreds of dollars for the privilege of taking back an unnaturally symmetrical tree for the holidays or to spend their days droning on about feeling guilty for living in a land of such excess and plenty.

I just want everyone to understand why they care about any of these things? Why the petty issues that make them so miserable even seem to matter at all.

They do and they will continue to do so because no other way of life is practically acceptable.  I think this is also displayed in journalistic coverage of Africa.  Generally, a chronicling of the starving, maimed and dying are acceptable news stories to run.  I sought these things out leaving what could have been a comfortable existence in America but deep down I think that the public reads and sees these things and perceives the suffering of others in a different continent as a resonant validation of life in America.

Congo is fucked and it will remain so because Congo is at the bottom of the world’s food chain.  One runs out of fingers tabulating how many nations (African, Western, and Asian) are in there funding proxy wars and mineral companies.

Then people shrug their shoulders and say ‘well, that’s Africa.’

Embedded with the blue helmets and headed towards Masisi. 

It is…but Africa is perceived entirely incorrectly.  Africa is no more tribal than any American college campus where black and white students voluntarily segregate themselves during meals and fraternity selection.  The difference is that Africa lacks the burden of technological proof of continental highways and fluoridated water.  The pettiness and murder of the land are the product of a binary human identity and narrative we all understand: You and Me, Us and Them…

and in this narrative is the creation of a group and the creation of a group also requires a persecution narrative to justify solidarity.

You can hear it in the mind-numbing talking heads that have usurped the duty of journalists, ‘Democrats have always done this to America, Republicans have always done that…’

It can be felt in the question, ‘who are you voting for?’

Pick a side.  Do you love your freedom? Do you respect a woman’s right to choose?

Aren’t you tired of those liberals ruining our schools like they’ve always done?

Choose: Conservative or Liberal? Rich or Poor? Weak or Strong? Hutu or Tutsi?

I remember one day after intense gun fire in the Congo everyone’s nerves had been broken and a new-found friend took me aside and told me that he was a Tutsi but that his father had been murdered, ‘disappeared’

by unknown neighbors and he had moved on and kept his secret ever since but still lived in terror that someone would come from his former village and expose his identity and then he would be hacked to pieces like his father had been.

Except, he was only half-Tutsi, his mother was from one of the various races in Congo that anthropologists have used to carve out the nation according to their own ivory tower, ethnic maps.  In his mind though, he is a Tutsi because his father had died for that reason.

So it will continue, the killing, the rape, the misery.   The reason though is all too human: us and them.  There simply is no other way humans can practically see the world.

Why is the killing and rape so common there and not here?

The financial incentives that maintain a sense of future here, the mortgages, credit cards, pensions, and student loans, the things that subtly guide the American existence.  Remove these and death is never far away.  So why not kill? There is nothing that will be lost.

Finding the reasons for the irreality of death abroad does not solve anything and it does not cushion the return to a world where credit cards and consumerism seem to cause as much stress as gunfire.  It does though, for me, help to breach the tribal urges we are given without being asked by being born in America.

It is far better to see individuals in the maw of horror as they actually are and not as we are instructed to perceive, better still to face existence and try to help others before they are taken, one life at a time.