The town that refused to die

In the 15 years since Chris McGreal first visited, Goma has experienced looting, corruption, invasion, civil war and was half destroyed by a volcano. It is now in the midst of a property boom 

Tuesday October 2, 2007
Guardian Unlimited 


Abbe Oswald Musoni stands in front of the charred remains of Goma cathedral following the devastating eruption of the Nyiragongo volcano in 2002. Photograph: Martin Godwin
 

  War has been good to Masumbuko Kakera. The peace is making him richer still but the wily Congolese trader could not have become one of the wealthiest men in Goma without the years of foreign invasion, occupation and rebel governments, besides the help of nature's occasional assault.   "There was no government to speak of so people helped themselves," said the 42-year-old, who has just added a luxury hotel to his assets. "There is a lot here. Gold, coltan, everything. People are building everywhere these days. There's a lot of wealth."                    Article continues
  
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Whether war has been as good for his traumatised hometown and most of the rest of its 160,000 residents is another question.   The "tourist capital of Congo", perched on unforgiving volcanic rock on the northern shore of Lake Kivu in the far east of the country, has emerged from each crisis over the past 15 years a little bit more wrecked and hoping that whatever came next would not be worse than what went before. But it was.   The mass graves of Rwandan refugees, the tide of lava that ripped the heart out of the town and the booming security industry to protect those with money from those without (but who do have some of the guns that came with the wars) are a testament to what Goma has endured.   So are the deeply rutted roads, the days without electricity and the grand but crumbling old post office built by Belgian colonisers on the main street that hasn't delivered a letter in more than two decades.   But, for now at least, Goma is enjoying a boom of sorts as new cars
 and motorbikes clog its streets, and a property surge has driven up the price of land more than ten-fold in the past few years.   Mr Kakera waves his arm toward a small plot next to his hotel. It has just sold for $200,000.   "Five years ago you could get that for $30,000. Prices are going up because the money from the gold and coltan have created a lot more demand for land," he said. "Everyone is making money, even the guys who used to sell pieces of goat on a stick next to the road. Now they are selling mobile phone recharge vouchers."   That is not a universal view.   "War is good for some people and bad for others," said Jean Paul Lukunato, singer in Goma's best-known rumba band. "Some do excellent business and others just go down into a hole. There are many more cars, many new houses. But you never know how these people with their big cars and nice houses got their money. Perhaps it was the wrong way. Many people get rich because the government isn't really in
 charge."   Lukunato's band used to call itself Financier, deriding the spirit of the age in Goma. Now the members are known collectively as Tout Chic OBG Mouv.   "In Kinshasa everybody sings love songs but we play music for peace and life," he said. "People in Kinshasa haven't really experienced war like we have so they don't think about it. We think about it a lot."   The wars, Lukunato said, changed everything.   "It created division between people. Before the war, I could live with you without caring where you are from. But after the war, I would say you are from the south or Rwanda, you are not from my village, you are different," he said. "I don't think we know what we are anymore. We are not one country. We are not one people. We are Gomatraciens."   Few towns have suffered as much. Goma's decline under Mobutu Sese Seko's neglectful rule in the seventies and eighties from a thriving resort popular with tourists in pursuit of mountain gorillas was hastened by the mass
 looting of the town by the army in 1992.   Soldiers barracked a few miles to the north were not paid so they followed the example of their comrades in the capital, Kinshasa, and tore the town's shops apart.   There wasn't much in the stores to begin with but by the time the army swept through just about all that was left were a few of the basic foodstuffs.   A month later the soldiers were not paid again. The commanding officer arrived in Goma to offer the mayor a choice; come up with the cash to pay his men or they would be back to loot people's homes.   The Catholic church led a massive collection, with townspeople carrying cardboard boxes of the rapidly devaluing national currency - then running at about six million zaires to the US dollar - into a local bank. (The bank is now a Chinese restaurant, another innovation for Goma).   When the army commander returned, the mayor broke the news that about half of what the soldiers were demanding had been collected. It was good
 enough and the town was spared another pillage.   Still, the destruction from the first one had driven many businesses into the ground and the future was bleak as Goma's economy sank.   Hutu influx   Two years later came the next blow. Gomatraciens awoke one July morning to an indecipherable low rumble as hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutus shuffled through the town, broken, exhausted and silent as they fled the Tutsi rebel victory across the border.   The soldiers of the defeated Rwandan army, and the Hutu militiamen who had led the genocide of Tutsis, arrived fed and often riding on the backs of lorries.   The women and children arrived on foot after walking for days, living off bananas and a few other plants along the roadside. Some crossed into what was then Zaire and, relieved of the burden of trying to escape, died on the spot from exhaustion.   More than a million Hutus struggled into Goma over three days. Those that could were forced to keep walking north and
 settled in refugee camps on the unsparing volcanic rock where they swiftly began to die in their tens of thousands from cholera.   It was another testament to the shortcomings of the United Nations that so many should succumb to a disease that kills through dehydration within a short distance of one of the biggest lakes in Africa.   UN officials said they couldn't hire lorries to carry water to the refugees because they lacked the necessary forms for authorisation. It took an Irish medical charity to shell out the cash to get things moving.   The roadsides were lined with corpses wrapped in the reed mats the dead had carried from Rwanda.   Yet many Gomatraciens and aid workers could not shake off the knowledge that a large number of these "refugees" were unrepentant murderers of their Tutsi neighbours.   Adding to the sense of apocalypse, the Nyiragongo volcano that dominates the Goma skyline fired up a carpet of ash that hung over the town, darkening the skies and
 prompting mutterings of divine retribution.   There is nothing today to mark the mass graves of the Rwandan Hutus in Goma. There is one opposite the airport, covered in banana plants these days, and others on the edge of town carved out by diggers and filled within days. Many in Goma pass by the burial sites every day without even knowing they are there.   "It's as though we forgot part of our history," said Lukunato. "We all knew they came here and died. Everyone saw it. They were tripping over the bodies. But I don't think anyone really remembers that they are still here, beneath our feet."   Invasion and civil war   But the Hutu refugees' legacy to Goma was to be more than their own graves.   Few would have imagined it at the time but the exodus was to herald years of invasion and civil war. The soldiers and murderous militiamen kept up their killing of Tutsis with cross border raids and in 1996 the new government in Rwanda invaded Zaire through Goma to clear the camps
 - the start of years of slaughter in Eastern Congo.   The Rwandans were back two years later installing a puppet rebel government in Goma to control a large swath of the east of the country.   It was then that Kakera saw his chance, trading with the rebel leadership as the money from the plunder of the gold and cobalt mines rolled into the town.   "I made my money trading. I started at the lowest level bringing in sand from Rwanda and sending lorries to Bujumbura and then branched out to Kampala, Nairobi, even Dubai," he said.   Kakera was one of a clutch of businessmen who swiftly replaced the old Mobutu loyalists and Belgians and came to dominate trade in the town by tying themselves to the Rwandans and their rebel allies who took over Goma.   "Under Mobutu people were like prisoners. No one could see what people did in other countries. Goma had no future. It wasn't like this before. Mobutu just took what he wanted and left nothing for anyone else. Now Goma has a
 future," said Kakera.   The old kleptomaniac, who stashed away about $5bn while his country went to ruin, was driven from power by the first Rwandan invasion.   It is striking how completely the visible signs of Mobutuism have been erased. The greatest monument to the thieving dictator's disdain for his people was his Goma palace on the banks of Lake Kivu.   While the rest of the town struggled to get around in clapped out cars, and relied on a hospital with few medicines and a lack of even the most basic medical equipment, when Mobutu fell, six new black Mercedes and a fully equipped ambulance - the only one in Goma - were discovered parked at the palace ready for the rare occasions the great man visited.   But the young view fondly an era that they cannot remember but which at least didn't involve war.   "Mobutu wanted to unite people, to make one country," said Muhindo Musi, who plays in the rumba band and who was 12 years old when the man who ruled Zaire for 32 years
 fled the country of his creation and died a few months later of cancer.   "People could travel without being attacked. Now it's very difficult to go from one region to another because of these armed groups. We are not one country anymore."   Some things don't change. Travelling the length of Lake Kivu to the city of Bukavu in the south is very much easier than in years past with a three-hour ride on a comfortable high-speed boat in place of an eight-hour journey on some of the worst roads in Africa.   But the old Congo rears its head at the port's immigration desk, which everyone must pass even when travelling from town to town inside the country.   Passports are scrutinised with intensity to see if some minor infraction might be used to extort a few dollars. Failing that there is the "hygiene" desk where foreigners are obliged to produce evidence of their vaccinations.   No yellow card and you're offered a choice, neatly spelled out in an official looking form: pay $10
 for a jab or $15 not to have one.   Pulling out a camera to photograph a butterfly nearly causes a national security incident even though there are no military installations to be seen and the buildings look as if they'll collapse of their own accord without help from foreign saboteurs.   Eruption   The volcano finally erupted in 2002, sending a tide of lava a kilometre wide and two metres deep through the centre of town.   Walk along the main street today and suddenly the potholes give way to a hump of hardened volcanic rock. Some of the old shops remain, their entrances strangely below the new street level. But most were carried away as the eruption cleared a swath through the town and down to the lake.   Near the water's edge a clutch of rusting cars sticks out of hardened volcanic rock like tombstones after their owners left them atop a hillock and fled into Rwanda, but the lava rose high enough to engulf the vehicles.   The eruption destroyed about 40% of the town -
 more than 4,500 buildings and a large part of the airport runway, although the progress of the lava was slow enough that there were few human casualties.   But the new coat of volcanic rock also cleared the way for a building boom, and set off a bidding war for land. Dotted across its surface are new shops and homes.   Kakera's hotel, which opened in April, is one of an array of new and comfortable hotels sprinkled along the lake front, a huge advance on the filthy and dilapidated Grand Lac hotel that had a near monopoly before.   The tourist town doesn't have many tourists but the hotels are busy enough with businessmen, aid workers and an array of foreigners with east European and southern African accents.   "Goma is a town different from the rest of Congo," said Kakera. "It doesn't look to Kinshasa for its survival. It looks to its neighbours to the east - Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda. It looks to the rest of Africa. They all come here, for good or bad."   Yet, for all Goma's
 tribulations, the rumba band members agree on one thing. They would all like to travel and make their names as famous musicians, but they will always come back.   "Goma is a paradise," said Mr Lukunato. "People outside may not see it but if we had peace this would be the first town in all Congo."





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