Portfolio

 

  • Attention must be paid.

    —Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

    Preface


    A straggle of road. A few mud and thatch homes. My translator and I jolting along in the back seat of a battered Toyota demio. The grass palely green, not the shimmery copper it had been during last year’s drought, but not lush either. An occasional baobab, those gnomish trees that make you believe in ancestors, no matter your religion.

    This was outside Kilifi, a touristy resort on the Kenyan coast named one of 52 places to visit in 2025 by the New York Times. This inland area more than a kijiji, or village, but certainly not an mji, or town. We were there to interview farmers about their experiences with climate change. Scientists say climate change is a problem of the future, a long-term but inexorable problem. But here in Kilifi it is already happening. So far, most of what I’d seen had impressed rather than dismayed me. Most of the farmers id interviewed so far knew about climate change and were responding with astonishing ingenuity to the problem, altering growing seasons, experimenting with new varieties or new crops, asking neighbors for advice, even forming their own WhatsApp group to share experiences and information.


    But as we turned off the main road toward a isolated cluster of huts, i spotted a woman hunched over, hoe in hand, baby on her back, weeding. She looked 75, but was, ii would later learn, 60. 

    It was hot, high 30s (or high 90s, farenheit) and humid, with a wet bulb temperature high enough no surgeon general would recommend stoop labor. She had on a striped skirt and grey T-shirt, both faded. No shoes, not even the colorful plastic flip flops ubiquitous in the region. A beaded necklace.

    We stopped. I got out with my translator to explain my project and ask if I could interview her. After a pause for translation—this was not Swahili, which I can manage, but the local Giriama language—she readily assented. (I never did have any potential interviewees say no, although some asked for a bit of money. It is journalistically verboten to give money to sources, but I did it sometimes anyway.)

    We sat in the shade. Her story: married at 19, four kids, her husband long passed on. One daughter single in kilifi working as a maid in a tourist hotel, the other in Nairobi, tied to a drunk for a husband. Three grandchildren to care for. She owns her own plot, a hillside parcel on which she grows a little wheat, a few shrubs of tomatoes, and a local black bean, called njahi, prized for its hardiness but said to taste like rusty nails in soup. Across her faded tshirt, I noticed the words: “I love you so much.”

    We talked a bit. It was hard, she said, and getting harder for her grandchildren. There are times when the food runs out entirely. On those nights, she told us, she puts a few stones in the pot and lights the fire anyway, pretending to cook so the children think food is coming. Tomorrow morning, she tells them, we will eat.

    My translator stumbled as she spoke the words in English, her voice catching. It was hard to get through. I put down my pen and walked away for a bit.

    It’ is easy to get lost in the global mathematics of climate change--the parts per million of carbon, the billions of dollars in climate finance given or not given, or the estimated 800 million people now living in what the Word Bank calls absolute poverty--who also happen to live on the front lines of climate change. But global numbers mean little without local names. The story of our warming world is happening in a thousand places like Kilifi, among people as far from the global spotlight as it is possible to get, to people scraping a living on hillside plots, wearing faded t-shirts and no sandals. 

    Attention must be paid.




    It cannot be said that climate change lacks support, even if it has not yet galvanized action remotely commensurate with the scale of the crisis. Consider the sheer density of the organizations involved, cascading from the hyper-global to the hyper-local.

    First, there is the UNFCCC—the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—the foundational treaty adopted in 1992 to stabilize greenhouse gases. It remains the granddaddy of the climate bureaucracy. The UNFCCC is tasked with staging the massive annual assembly known as the Conference of the Parties (COP), held recently at COP30 in Belém, Brazil. These summits are famous for generating sweeping commitments that none of the signing parties have the remotest intention of keeping—in part because the delegates are routinely outnumbered two-to-one by fossil-fuel lobbyists, and in part because the host countries are often major oil exporters. [1]

    COP relies heavily on the reports of the IPCC—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Assembling the latest data from thousands of dedicated, often brilliant scientists, these reports are enormous tomes that could double as construction material in a pinch. To sit on an IPCC steering committee is the crowning culmination of a scientific career. There, experts spend months annotating conclusions with parenthetical assessments of mathematical probability. The IPCC’s landmark report found the baseline reality to be unequivocal: human emissions have warmed the planet, causing permanent damage; a staggering 43% cut in emissions is required by 2030 to avoid surpassing the 1.5°C threshold; and for the most vulnerable populations in poor countries, the window for adaptation is already slamming shut. [1]

    These global warnings are dutifully fed down into regional, national, and local bureaucracies, generating an absolute avalanche of paperwork. The descent from global heights to local realities feels like a cascading waterfall of useless paper:

    • Global Baseline: The UNFCCC treaties and foundational IPCC frameworks.

    • Continental Overviews: Strategy documents from the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN).

    • National Mandates (Kenya): The domestic Kenya Vision 2030 plan, undergirded by the Economic Strategy and Implementation Plan 2016–2030, the Climate Smart Strategy 2017–2026, Sessional Paper No. 5 of the Climate Change Act, the National Adaptation Plan, the Draft National Irrigation Policy, and Sessional Paper 13 on Integrated Coastal Zone Management.

    • County Realities: The Kilifi County Integrated Development Plan 2023–27 and the—now sarcastically ancient—Kilifi County Climate Change Act of 2021.

    I once had the distinct pleasure of watching the authors of such papers at work. In 2018, I attended a plenary session of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome—perhaps the world’s leading body tasked with ensuring humanity has access to safe, nutritious food. No doubt profound things were spoken and world-saving decisions undertaken, but the only thing I remember from that plenary is a grueling, 50-minute debate between the Russian and Burundi delegations over the placement of a semicolon. This is a true story. Reader, I will not pretend to any false modesty: I was almost certainly the best writer in that room. I couldn't see that it made a single bit of difference.

    Once a global problem is identified, flotillas of international bureaucrats alight in agonies of acronym-minting organizations, speaking a language impenetrable to outsiders. Eventually, and with great fanfare, consensus is reached. Declarations are issued in the six official UN languages, and with a flurry of whereases and therefores, a solemn proclamation is birthed: “Our multi-stakeholder ecosystem must leverage an integrated framework to de-silo community-based synergies through partner-led ideation.” [1]

    The great and the good look upon their work, and they see that it is good. Then they jet home—more than a few on private Gulfstreams. 

    Meanwhile, in Kilifi, at the end of a long, dusty road, Mama Damaris stands outside her home and stares up at the sky, waiting for rain.


  • Lost in the celebratory choruses following Navi Pillay’s 2026 Nobel Peace Prize win was her pivotal role in releasing the landmark DRC Mapping Exercise Report. That this crucial chapter went unmentioned is a poetic, if devastating, injustice. It reflects the very plight of the document she championed: an epochal investigation whose warnings have been completely unheeded, its recommendations buried, and the Congo itself left to suffer in the dark corners of the international conscience.

    When global institutions praise Navi Pillay for her lifelong dedication to international law and human rights, they selectively curate her legacy. They celebrate her historic fight against apartheid, her tenure presiding over the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and her recent courage investigating modern atrocities. Yet, her period as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights—the exact window when she defied intense diplomatic blackmail to officially release the Mapping Report on October 1, 2010—is treated like an inconvenient footnote.

    This selective amnesia is exactly what political philosopher Hannah Arendt warned against when analyzing the mechanics of mass atrocities. Arendt noted that even historically, granting the slain the "right to be remembered" was a self-evident acknowledgement that we share a common humanity. When states commit mass murder, their ultimate objective is often the total liquidation of the record of their victims' existence. By burying the history of the eastern Congo, the international community becomes complicit in this symbolic erasure.

    The text Pillay authorized remains the most definitive, damning blueprint of this forgotten genocide. The UN Mapping Report meticulously documented over 617 incidents of horrific violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1993 and 2003. Its most explosive finding concluded that the targeted mass killings of Hutu refugees and Congolese civilians by Rwandan forces and their allies, if proven before a competent court, "could be characterized as crimes of genocide."

    The response to this truth-telling was telling. Neighboring regimes launched aggressive, fierce denials. Whistleblowers were forced to leak the draft text to Le Monde just weeks before its release, terrified that immense political pressure would force the UN to dilute Pillay's uncompromising language. Pillay stood firm and published it anyway.

    Yet, decades later, the global response amounts to a profound, hollow silence. Out of fear of disrupting regional geopolitical alliances, or perhaps paralyzed by lingering guilt over the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Western powers have consistently looked away from Kigali’s devastating interventions in the DRC. No international tribunal has been formed. No high-ranking military commanders have faced accountability. The report gathers dust while the cycle of violence in the eastern Congo churns dynamically onward.

    Because the deceased cannot actively enforce their own right to dignity, the moral burden shifts squarely to the living as an absolute obligation—what ethicists call le devoir de mémoire (the duty to remember).

    No one understands this heavy burden better than Congolese gynecologist and fellow Nobel laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege. For years, Mukwege has used his global platform to demand that the world act upon the Mapping Report’s recommendations. His words echo as a direct challenge to the very international order that just celebrated Pillay’s prize: "We cannot build peace on mass graves, and we cannot build a future by forgetting the past."

    The Norwegian Nobel Committee rightly noted that Pillay dedicated her life to holding national leaders accountable. If the world truly wants to honor her legacy, it must stop treating the Congo as a blind spot. Fulfilling the true spirit of her Nobel Peace Prize means summoning the courage to confront Rwanda's historical and ongoing role in these atrocities, resurrecting the Mapping Report, and ensuring that the millions of lives lost in the Congo are finally granted their fundamental right to be remembered


  • I went boating with the alleged war criminal General François Olenga in late July, at the riverside resort he built on the outskirts of Kinshasa. Olenga is President Kabila’s former top military advisor, and since June, 2017 has been under sanctions from the US Treasury. Troops under his command allegedly tortured and raped detainees and arbitrarily executed opposition figures; on several occasions they fired live rounds into crowds of protesters, killing dozens. Local human rights groups fear him. He’s accused of having killed a street kid for supposedly stealing his phone. The Treasury froze any assets Olenga might have in the US and made it illegal for Americans to do business with him.

    If those sanctions are having an impact, it’s not evident. His resort, Safari Beach, which was also sanctioned, appears to be thriving. I visited on a Sunday. You pull off the cratered road west of the airport to a clean strip of asphalt lined with dwarf coconut trees. The lawn is manicured. There are red-tiled paillotes and yellow cottages and white marble statues that might be Greek or African. The main building overlooks the river, which is blue in its broader expanses rather than brown, and astonishingly under-exploited. In the six hours we sat on its banks I saw perhaps two commercial boats pass by, a flat-bottomed fishing boat and a barge heaped with boxes. This, remember, twenty navigable klicks upstream from one of the world’s ten biggest cities. By late afternoon there were a hundred or so guests, mostly African, but a fair number of whites, drinking and dining on the terrace overlooking the river. The cocktails were the bright plastic color of the playground equipment. A band played old Congolese rumba hits. Parties of guests were taking motorboats to picnic on a sandbank. A handful of Chinese were working on a dry dock; tools lay about.

    General Olenga was the chief of the Maison Militaire, or Military House of the President, which oversees Kabila’s praetorian guard, here called the Garde Républicaine, and which is basically the successor organization to Mobutu’s feared Division Spéciale Présidentielle.  Educated at the University of Paris, he spent years in Germany before joining Kabila’s father in 1997 in the Rwandan-led invasion that toppled Mobutu. He proved useful; he knew people in eastern Europe with arms for sale; Kabila named him head of logistics. He rose through the ranks, remained close to the son on his father’s assassination, cycled in and out of top positions. His response at being sanctioned was to point out, not unreasonably, that none of the other military and police chiefs had been proscribed. Also, he asked, why sanction Safari Beach? Its facilities were open to the opposition for meetings and retreats; they were as welcome there as the government.  

    At one point we were invited to join the general on his speed boat. He wore a pea jacket and Mammut army cap. He is late middle-aged and scowly, but intelligent-looking. His daughter and her German fiancé joined us. They and the general conversed fluently in German. She wore a floral print scoop dress and a crucifix on a delicate gold chain. He had photochromic glasses, dark in the sun. The boat was bright metal red and the interior was a creamy leather. We moseyed up and down the river and then the engine cut out. The general spoke into his phone and a canoe puttered out to us with a jerrycan of gasoline. I thought to myself: I would not want to be the guy who was supposed to have topped off the general’s engine. The general yelled at the guy, but no more than your average mogul might have done. We reached the dock and the general and his daughter walked arm-in-arm off the gangplank.

    Although we hadn’t interacted much on the expedition, we joined the general at his table. He mostly spoke to his business manager, in a pink dress shirt and slacks. The general spoke better German than he did, the fiancé told me. At one point he complained about the band. The lead singer was flirting with his fiancée, he said. We clicked through the pictures I had taken on the boat.  He asked if I could send him one, of the two of them. There was a breeze. Perhaps the band leader didn’t understand who he was dealing with, said the German. There was an edge to his voice. We could take him around back, there were soldiers here who could help us. A dozen or more, easily summoned. I asked him about his wind farm. He swore me to secrecy and told me details I promptly forgot. His English wasn’t very good, and I was mostly nodding. It was a 2013 Riesling.  

    In announcing the sanctions against Olenga, John E. Smith, the director of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said, “This action against Olenga sends a strong message that continued acts of violence, aggression, and suppression by the Congolese military against its own citizens are unacceptable. The United States is prepared to apply additional sanctions against those who undermine the DRC’s democratic or electoral processes.

    Three weeks later I saw pictures of the couple’s wedding. She wore the crucifix. He wore the glasses. They were clear and his eyes are green.


  • The fine, ochre dust of the Kilifi hinterland is relentless. Long after you branch off the Mombasa-Malindi highway, it clings to your skin like chalk, choking the stunted thorn trees and wedging deep into the stitching of your boots. But for months, this suffocating red haze did more than just coat the landscape—it acted as a vault. Deep within the fractured wilderness of the Shakahola forest, the dust hung heavy in the humid air, masking a macabre secret and swallowing the scent of decay from the shallow graves hidden beneath the scrub.

    On April 14, 2023, acting on an anonymous tip that spoke of missing children and whispered atrocities, local police hacked their way down a remote, overgrown footpath. At the end of the trail, amid the charred and ash-strewn remains of a makeshift church, they uncovered a sight that would permanently scar the collective psyche of Kenya: hundreds of shallow graves, hastily dug beneath the low canopy of the scrubland. Inside lay the bodies of men, women, and children. Most of them were horribly emaciated, their ribs pressing sharply against parchment skin, their eyes sunken back into hollow skulls. [1, 2, 3]

    These were the disciples of Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, a former mini-bus taxi driver turned radical televangelist. Mackenzie had found his dark inspiration not in traditional African theology, but in the fiery, apocalyptic broadcasts of William Branham, a mid-20th-century American end-times preacher whose legacy of aggressive anti-modernity still ripples through the global fringes of pentecostalism. Armed with Branham’s terrifying cosmic warnings, Mackenzie built the Good News International Ministries. He instructed his flock that the secular world was an engine of damnation. To survive the looming tribulation, they were ordered to systematically strip away every vestige of modern life. They smashed their televisions, burned their identity cards, threw away their cellphones, and discarded their watches. Modern medicine was branded as demonic; vaccines were labeled the mark of the beast; formal education was condemned as an illusion designed to lead children to hell. [1, 2, 3, 4]

    In late 2022, Mackenzie led hundreds of his most devoted followers deep into the 800-acre Shakahola ranch, commanding them to fast to death to "meet Jesus" before a world-ending event he predicted for April 2023. To completely control them, the compound was systematically carved up into twelve distinct, isolated villages, each ironically named after biblical landmarks like Bethlehem, Judea, and Jerusalem. This was not a chaotic gathering, but an engineered administrative grid of death. Behind an absolute wall of silence enforced by armed scouts who beat or strangled those who wavered, the mass starvation camp remained entirely hidden from state authorities until the soil could no longer contain the dead. [1, 2, 3, 


    For scholars who map the dark anatomy of human belief, the Shakahola tragedy represents a terrifying iteration of totalistic control. Historians of religion frequently distinguish between traditional millenarian cults—which often emerge within agrarian, peasant societies experiencing the sudden shock of colonial conquest or economic collapse—and the highly insular, world-rejecting cults typified by the Jonestown massacre of 1978.

    When Jim Jones led 918 followers to their deaths via cyanide-laced punch in the remote jungles of northwestern Guyana, he did so by exploiting the severe alienation of the late-1970s West. Jonestown drew in the lonely, the disenfranchised, and the ethnically marginalized who were desperate to escape the grinding anomie of American urban decay. Those followers rejected the capitalist world, but they died believing their ultimate sacrifice would somehow validate, redeem, and usher in a socialist, racially integrated utopia on earth.

    By stark contrast, Paul Mackenzie’s theology possessed no such redemptive arc. He did not retreat into the Kilifi wilderness to build a better society or to model an alternative way of living. He came not to redeem the world, but to entirely discard it. His was a rigid, mercilessly transactional creed focused exclusively on spiritual extraction—a hyper-literal escape hatch designed to transport his flock into heaven moments before the physical world was consumed by fire. Under his direction, the deaths and secret midnight burials of these starving children and adults were chillingly referred to by cult leadership as "weddings"—celebrations of their permanent departure from the physical earth. In the worldview of Shakahola, the earth was already dead; there was no point in saving it. [1, 2, 3, 4]

    As the horrific particulars of the exhumations began to dominate the international press, I found myself viewing the tragedy through the specific lens of my own ongoing journalistic investigation into global warming. It felt like an obvious, almost mathematically neat correlation. Kilifi County was the epicenter of a historic, multi-year drought that had turned valley farms into copper dust, shriveled the maize, and brought thousands of families to the brink of the nanjala—the local hungry season. Surely, I reasoned, the people fleeing into Mackenzie’s forest were desperate, starving peasants. It felt logical that a community broken by the relentless failure of the rains would be uniquely vulnerable to a charismatic prophet promising that the end of the world was at hand. If the sky had already turned to brass, why not believe the preacher who told you the apocalypse had arrived?

    Armed with this thesis, I traveled into the rural communities immediately bordering the Shakahola forest, seeking out neighbors, local elders, and residents who lived within earshot of the compound. But when I presented my theory, I was met with immediate, unyielding resistance. The local Giriama farmers were adamant: climate desperation had absolutely nothing to do with the Shakahola deaths.

    "These were not our people," a local village elder told me, shaking his head with visceral certainty. "They did not come from these dry hills."

    As the judicial proceedings at the Mombasa High Court later laid bare during the prosecution of Mackenzie and his 28 co-leaders, the followers who marched into the forest had been recruited from entirely different, often prosperous regions of Kenya—from the fertile highlands of the Rift Valley to the bustling neighborhoods of Nairobi and Kisumu. They were not destitute peasants broken by local crop failures. Instead, the victim list was comprised of the aspiring middle class: trained carpenters, active police officers, credentialed nurses, and university students. They had liquid assets, which they liquidated entirely to buy small, worthless plots of land inside Mackenzie's forest grid. When I asked the neighbors what could possibly compel a comfortable, educated professional to starve their own children to death in a thorn thicket, their answers bypassed economics entirely. They spoke in hushed tones of kamuti—black magic, spiritual bewitchment, and an inexplicable hypnotic power that Mackenzie wielded through his recorded sermons. For them, it was an infection of the mind, not a failure of the atmosphere. [1, 2]

    Refusing to let go of an explanatory framework that tied the tragedy to the global climate crisis, I drove deeper into the interior, visiting an adjacent village clustered around a drying seasonal water pan. I sat with another group of smallholders and repeated my questions, searching for any documented link between the drying landscape and the vulnerability to the cult. Once again, the response was uniform. The residents repeated that the cultists were outsiders, insulated from the local realities of rain-fed agriculture. Global warming had not driven those people into the graves.

    But as our conversation drew to a close, an old man sitting on a low wooden stool told me a story almost in passing—a local narrative that had taken root in the wake of the horror. It was the kind of miraculous tale that communities instinctively construct to keep the darkness at bay, but it was a story that tangentially, and profoundly, illuminated the hyper-complex intersection of human and ecological crisis in the region.

          


    Weeks before the final, lethal phase of the fast in early 2023, an eight-year-old boy inside the compound had realized he wanted to live. His parents were deep in the throes of the starvation fast, too weak or too brainwashed to notice when the boy slipped away from the makeshift shelter under the cover of night. He was half-starved, his small body burning through its final reserves of energy, and he was utterly unfamiliar with the dense, disorienting labyrinth of the Shakahola scrubland. With only the pale, erratic light of a waning moon to guide him, he stumbled blindly through the thorns, terrified of the cult's armed scouts who patrolled the perimeter to catch runaways. [1]

    As the boy pushed through a thicket of acacia, he suddenly found himself face-to-face with two massive African elephants.

    In the traditional ecological balance of Kilifi, elephants were deep-forest creatures, rarely seen near human settlements. But the historic drought had fundamentally upended those ancient boundaries. With the interior waterholes completely dried up and the native vegetation scorched to the root, herds of elephants had begun aggressively encroaching on human territory. Driven by hunger, they regularly broke through farmers' fences, raiding small shambas and trampling crops under the cover of darkness. The relationship between the local community and the wildlife had devolved into a tense, dangerous conflict for basic survival. [1]

    By all the laws of nature and wildlife behavior, a pair of massive, drought-stressed elephants encountering a sudden human presence in the dark should have reacted with defensive aggression. The boy was small enough to be crushed instantly beneath a single footstep. Instead, the old men explained, the elephants did not charge. They approached the shivering, emaciated child with a strange, quiet gentleness. They touched him softly with their trunks, testing the air, and then turned, slowly pacing forward through the dark. Instinctively, the boy followed the gray shadows of their massive flanks.

    For several kilometers, the two elephants acted as silent guides, forging a clear path through the jagged thorns and keeping the predators of the night at bay. They walked until the low, corrugated tin roof of a remote rural police post materialized out of the pre-dawn mist. Reaching the edge of the clearing, the elephants stopped. The boy ran forward toward the safety of the station lights. Behind him, the two massive creatures raised their trunks toward the brightening sky in a silent, majestic gesture of farewell, before turning and vanishing back into the grey expanse of the forest. The boy was taken in by the officers, fed, and eventually reunited with extended family members in a distant county. He is, by all accounts, safe and recovering. [1]

    As I sat on the dusty edge of that village, listening to the wind rattle the dry palms overhead, the deeper truth of the region finally became clear. My initial, heavy-handed journalistic assumption had been wrong: climate change did not cause the Shakahola massacre. The madness of Paul Mackenzie was a modern, ideological disease born of psychological isolation and radicalized theology, drawing in middle-class citizens who had willfully disconnected themselves from the real world.

    Yet, the climate crisis was not absent from the tragedy; it was the silent environment inside which the entire horror unfolded. The drought was changing the very behavior of the animal kingdom, forcing elephants to become nocturnal scavengers on the margins of human civilization. The human world in Shakahola had become completely unmoored from reality, turning its back on life, medicine, and the earth itself in a desperate rush toward death. But out in the dark, the natural world—represented by two starving elephants searching for water—had somehow retained its orientation. In a forest defined by the absolute failure of human empathy, it was the displaced wilderness that had shown mercy to a dying child.


  • The town of Bukavu lies on the southern edge of Lake Kivu, in the foothills of eastern Zaire. Lake Kivu is one of a series of lakes that pool in the recesses of the Great Rift Valley—the result, geologically speaking, of diverging tectonic plates. On maps, the lakes appear as a line of slender blue streaks tracing the cleft of the continent from Ethiopia to Mozambique. Lake Kivu is distinguished among these only by its high methane content, which kills all but the smallest fish.

    The town, a provincial capital, contains a bottling plant, a small soccer stadium, and a few scattered factories manufacturing nails, flip-flops, and cement. Along the Avenue Mobutu, the main commercial strip, shops sell everything from Korean electronics to silk underwear. Hotels and bars proliferate. In every one hangs a jowly picture of the president wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses. Green hills surround the town; farmers' plots are dark rectangles of red earth. Beyond the city limits lies an abandoned tourist center, its window sockets vacant, spears of grass shooting through the crumbling floor. Bukavu was thought of in the colonial era as the Switzerland of Africa, and even today is known for its strawberries, which ripen in April. They are tiny and delicious.

    The residential part of town is composed of two distinct sections separated by a hill. The first comprises five palm-canopied peninsulas reaching into the waters of Lake Kivu like crooked fingers. Each is arrayed with pastel pink or powder blue cottages lined with bougainvillea and frangipani bushes. The expatriate community—including American missionaries, Belgian officials, and Greek businessmen—lives here, as do the Zairian elite. Outside the steel gates of their homes, on strips of cardboard, sleep the night watchmen. The night watchmen wear tattered clothes and sharpen their machetes on flat granite stones, which also serve as pillows.

    The other section of town is called Kadutu but is known simply as la cité. A makeshift squatter settlement, it contains anywhere from a hundred thousand to three hundred thousand people, half of them children. Most live in one-room huts constructed of wattle and daub and roofed with corrugated tin. Few have running water or electricity. Aside from the aptly named Avenue des Martyrs de la Révolution, there are no streets, paved or otherwise, in the entire quarter. The houses sprawl up the surrounding hillside, and when it rains the winding footpaths between them turn slick and muddy. Latrines and open sewers are standard: a feral odor pervades. Many people wander about in rags. A surprising number of them are drunk on five-cent shots of the moonshine local brewers distill out of manioc and corn husks. The young prefer hemp—they say it dulls the ache in their bellies. Occasionally, an outbreak of cholera or measles or dysentery or bronchitis erupts, and scores of children die. Sometimes children die of starvation, and sometimes they die for no apparent reason at all. If you venture deeply enough into the shantytown, children will no longer shout "muzungu" or "white person" at you, but will instead call you "pape." It is one of the few charms of the place to be mistaken for an Italian priest who retired to Bologna ten years before I arrived.

    I lived in Bukavu for eleven months in 1981 and 1982, and was called "pape" often. I was there on a postgraduate fellowship, to gather oral histories. I hoped to learn something about poverty in Africa; I wanted to write about it. Before my departure from the States I'd been given a check, a pat on the back, and—from my fellowship committee—a letter with a glamorous gold seal, an amulet against meddlesome bureaucrats. I'd also received, from the Center for Tropical Diseases at McGill University, vaccines against yellow fever, cholera, typhus, typhoid, rabies, and hepatitis; a packet of quinine, chloroquine, and Fansidar to ward off malaria; and an assortment of pills, capsules, and suppositories—amulets, I suppose, of a different order.

    I arrived in Bukavu not entirely ignorant of the circumstances I would be getting myself into. A professor of mine had worked in the area several years before; she urged me to keep a low profile, to trust no one I met in bars, and to speak respectfully of the president. Her warnings, with their implications of danger and intrigue, had secretly thrilled me. I felt acutely conscious of a certain innocence, and imagined that this was a deficiency of character that Africa would quickly rectify.

    In fact, during my time in Bukavu I became increasingly disoriented and disheartened. Though there were moments when I felt an acute consciousness of the wonder of my existence—at dusk, a certain slant of light gave even the shantytown an incandescence—there were days I hated Africa with an intensity I could scarcely understand. Consider the beggars who congregate outside the Marché X—the local grocery. They are painfully courteous; they smile obsequiously; they will compete, quietly, to open the glass door for you. Some of them have only one limb—a thickly muscled arm, for example. Their other limbs are shrunken—infant limbs on adult bodies—the result of polio or some other ghastly tropical disease. Their pelvises are enclosed in sackcloth. They come toward you walking, if that is the word, like tripods. They drag their abdomens in the dust. And when they are beside you and waving their arms, you have to decide whether you're going to give them anything. The first few times you fumble in your pockets, and feel obscurely as though you have failed some test of character. But every day you witness some squalid tragedy or routine horror; it is hard to remain shocked. After a while, I discovered I could walk past the beggars and pay no more attention to them than if their pale, outstretched palms were a patch of sunflowers. I knew I wanted to learn from Africa, but what I wanted to learn and what Africa had to teach me were as distant from each other as the two quarters of the city.

    One Monday morning in early March, three or four months into my stay, my friend Numbi asked me for a loan. His baby was sick, needed medicine. There was nothing unusual in his request: people were always asking me for money. The folks I interviewed, for instance, routinely sought a little gift once the interviews were concluded. At the school where I studied Swahili, a succession of groundskeepers and night watchmen loitered outside the classrooms to beg me for loans. I'd listen to their stories—stories about leaky roofs or the high cost of school uniforms—and solemnly have them put their mark on the 100-Z bill copy out on the quadrille-lined notebook paper I used for my vocabulary lists. The loans were small—five dollars here, ten dollars there—but added up. It took the better part of a month for me to realize that I had developed a reputation as an easy touch. They were making less than twenty dollars a month, and knew better than I did that I wouldn't insist on repayment. On the street, bolder children pursued me, shouting, "Muzungu, nipe cinq zaires"—though they sounded almost bored, and would have been astonished, I think, if this muzungu had ever given them the five or ten cents they clamored for.

    I turned Numbi down. Perhaps it is only in retrospect that I remember a slight hesitation in his manner, a suggestion of regret across his normally cheerful face. But I hadn't even known that he had a child—or a girlfriend, for that matter—and I felt vaguely betrayed. I considered him a friend. More than that, I'd practically saved his life.

    Numbi was of a type—not at all the worst type—that travelers to the third world encounter fairly often. A student at the local teacher training college, where he was called Chomsky because his first name was similar to the linguist's, Numbi did, in fact, have a flair for languages. As a high school student in a village too small to appear on any map, he'd learned fluent English by hanging out with Peace Corps volunteers. He invariably wore jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers. If the temperature dipped below eighty, he'd don a jean jacket whose frayed seams were stitched together with dental floss. I sometimes thought nothing would have made him happier than to own a Jansport pack and a Walkman—the complete uniform. The first time I met him, he sidled up to me in the street and asked, in English, if I was an American: I walk like one, apparently. He introduced himself. I complimented him on his English. He complimented me on my Swahili—which was risible. There was a pause. Then he asked me if I knew the Boss's music.

    This was on the main boulevard. I looked at him closely. He had a round face, short hair, and very black skin—a color Africans disparagingly call kiri, after the shoe polish. A barefoot old peasant woman walked down the street carrying on her back a load of firewood the size of a dresser. A boy passed us dangling a scruffy red chicken by its feet. Upside-down, its yellow eye blinked slowly. Bruce Springsteen seemed as far away as one could imagine.

    Still, Numbi and I got to be friends. We'd go out to bars and pretend not to notice who was paying. We talked—he was indefatigably curious—about everything: politics, sex, divorce laws, the American fondness for beef. He still had something of the village in him—he believed in sorcery, for example, and was adamant that at least a few of the colonists had practiced cannibalism. Once I came upon him in his dormitory while he was dressing. He was remarkably skinny, all bones and sinews; he looked like an unrigged clipper ship. Gradually, as I came to know him, I understood that it wasn't Springsteen, but the idea of Springsteen, that Numbi loved. Growing up in a remote village, gazing for hours at the pictures in the complimentary Newsweeks the volunteers received in monthly batches, Numbi had fabricated, out of glossy ads and celebrity stills, an image of the world beyond his village—a world as alluring as it was impossibly distant. And if his enthusiasm for things American was naive, and sometimes grating, there were plenty of times when, discouraged and homesick, I found it deeply gratifying.

    Then one day Numbi didn't show up for a get-together we'd planned. Waiting for him in the mildewed yellow room I leased from a Zairian family, I read a chapter, and then two, of War and Peace—a book I'd selected for its bulk as much as anything else—and grew more and more impatient. Prince Andrei was about to leave for the front—he'd parked his silver plate, Turkish pistols, and saber—when I heard a knock. It was Numbi's roommate, Kagepa. Police had stopped Numbi two days ago. There had been a fight. Numbi was in jail. He might be conscripted, sent to some far-off post. Perhaps I could help?

    I had imagined that the prison would be something frightful—a fortress whose watchtowers bristled with guns, a miasma of rust and dark corridors—so when I discovered that it was a white stucco cottage on a suburban street overlooking the lake, I felt relieved: stucco cottages I could handle. Kagepa walked me to it and vanished into the crowd. I would go alone. There was nothing particularly brave about this plan: I hadn't yet heard about the missionaries who'd been strip-searched for interfering in an arrest and left all day in a neck-high vat of sewage; the faith I had in my skin color was as certain as it was unmerited.

    I approached the front door. An angular soldier in worn fatigues sat on the porch. A single green button held his shirt closed around his navel. His feet were bare; a pair of black shoes stood beside the screen door. I had the impression that he was buffing his toenails, and I thought, "That can't be right." But in fact it was. A plastic pink manicure kit lay by the mud-crusted shoes. The soldier had crossed his left foot over his right thigh, and with bits in hand, was giving his nails his utmost attention. When finally he swung his gaze toward me he did so with such an aggrieved air I almost apologized. He couldn't have been more than twenty. He had a pinched, narrow face, and the whites of his eyes were a sickly cast of yellow—the color of scrambled eggs—which is the telltale sign of hepatitis. With a nod he directed me to the rear of the bungalow.

    In the backyard, under an eucalypt tree, a half-dozen soldiers sat on a rough wooden bench, drinking palm wine. They were older than the one out front. Their rifles lay carelessly on their laps or leaned against the bench at odd angles. I shook hands all around—the soft one-pump Zairian squeeze. The soldiers were subdued, their expressions vacant. They'd probably been drinking all day. I wasn't sure, all of a sudden, what to do next. Local etiquette requires a degree of indirection. You blurt out what you want and people are likely to take offense. I looked at the grass and gazed at the lake. "Nice view," I volunteered.

    The soldiers mulled that over. "Are you an American?" one of them asked. The topic of Muhammad Ali came up. In 1974, Ali rope-a-doped Foreman for seven rounds in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, and in the eighth knocked him out. A soldier stood up and did the Ali shuffle. It is said that Ali did not warm to Africa, that he went home thankful for the slave ships, but that was not the kind of detail I thought wise to report. Instead, I translated the Ali theme—"float like a butterfly and sting like a bee"—and talked about Mike Tyson, who was then just beginning to accumulate his heavyweight titles. When the inevitable question arose, and I answered that yes, Tyson is black, the soldier who'd demonstrated the Ali shuffle pumped his fist in the air and said, "Tu vois comme c'est fort, le sang d'Afrique?"

    The cottage itself was situated on a plot of land that sloped toward the lake. The front of the cottage opened onto the first floor, but in the rear three steps led down to a bolted steel door painted white. One of the soldiers slid the bolt open and the door swung in to reveal a dark basement room with crumbled slab walls and a tiny double-barred window. The soldier mumbled something and Numbi appeared in the doorway, blinking in the sunlight. He looked terribly discouraged—and slighter, even, than I remembered him. He was not at all surprised to see me. Though two of the soldiers stood by and fiddled with their guns—which, alarmingly, kept slipping off their shoulders—Numbi's English allowed us to talk freely. He was being beaten up once or twice a day, he said, as were most of the dozen or so other prisoners in the basement. He held out his left hand; it was the size of a baseball glove, and trembled in the sunlight. They had whipped him, too. There were welts on his back. The prisoners were let out once a day, and then only to carry their feces to the bushes. I glanced over at the soldiers. They were passing the bottle around. The guy who'd demonstrated the Ali shuffle noticed me looking his way and repeated his performance, grinning.

    It is odd, but until that moment I hadn't understood how pathetic all this was. I'd come prepared to storm the Bastille, and despite the pedicurist and the drunken soldiers, I'd continued to imagine some dramatic encounter, with myself as the intrepid journalist. But there was nothing grand about it. People with guns were beating up people without guns, and they were doing it for no better reason than that they could. I asked Numbi how I could help. He shrugged. He just wanted out.

    Time was called. A soldier took Numbi by the elbow, led him down the stairs, and gently guided his head under the doorframe. Numbi disappeared into the gloom of the basement and the door swung shut. The bolt made the scraping sound of metal as it closed.

    Negotiations lasted most of the afternoon. Numbi had not had his national ID on him when the soldiers stopped him—a criminal offense. As to his hand—they regretted it had proven necessary to restrain him, and hoped it wouldn't happen again. Perhaps, I suggested, there was some fine I could pay on his behalf. That really wouldn't be possible, they said. Mostly the soldiers and I sat around, staring at the grass. The bottle came my way now and then, and I took a swig. Eventually, I left some money with the soldiers, with the understanding that they would speak to their captain.

    Later that day, Numbi came by to thank me. They had let him out as soon as I'd left. Numbi was still subdued, but I felt jubilant; I hadn't been confident that I'd accomplished anything at all. That evening I wrote home a version of the day's adventure, concluding, "Best twelve bucks I ever spent."

    That had all been three weeks before Numbi requested, and I denied him, the loan for his child. In the interim, Numbi and I had returned to our old habits, thrashing out the issues: cannibalism, sex, foreign policy. I was, if anything, more generous with the beer money, less equivocal in my opinions. In my mind, the events of that day had brought us closer together, and I imagined that Numbi felt the same. So when he asked me for a loan, surprising me with news that he had a daughter, it was by a logic peculiarly American that I turned him down: there was no space in what I had understood of our friendship for surprises like that. Perhaps he was lying, I told myself. Perhaps he didn't have a daughter at all. And the following day, when he repeated his request, more diffidently than before, I refused even to listen to him.

    Page 5

    There are moments when the projector of one's existence is jolted, and the frames blur—moments that later replay themselves in the mind as though on a tight loop. I fished around in my pockets and came out with a thousand-zaire note—the equivalent of ten dollars. "Will that be enough?" I asked Numbi. "Do you need more?" And here the reel begins to clog in the machine. In one frame, Numbi is thanking me—his voice is garbled, but I can hear the words "Merci, patron. Merci, merci." In the next, I realize that Numbi has prostrated himself in the dirt by my feet, and I, too, am speaking. In fact, embarrassed and angry, I am shouting. "Get up, Numbi, stop it! Get up!" I pull on Numbi's lapel, yanking him up, and am reminded of how slight he is. But even as the camera focuses on the rough blue texture of his jacket and the yellow sprinkling of dust on the nape of his neck, even as it pans back to the street, where children in khaki uniforms are on their way to school and the beggars are lined up in the dirt, I have surrendered to the guidance of a small boy who volunteered to help me. He wore a pair of baggy gray shorts fastened about his waist with a piece of twine, and he had intelligent eyes and perfect square white teeth. His name was Pole Pole. Every time we came to an open gutter or had to step over a puddle, he'd solicitously call my attention to it. I guessed from his size that he was six years old and was dismayed to learn that he was nine.

    No one was going to take me for a chump. I wasn't so innocent anymore.

    On Thursday morning I ran into Numbi downtown. I'd gone to one of the cafes, as I sometimes did, to get eggs and toast with a slice of baked tomato. I have no idea what he was doing. It was eight o'clock, and he was miles from school. Perhaps he'd been up all night, walking around. There were hollows under his eyes. His jean jacket, which he usually kept so crisp and neat (the counterculture ideal of the scruffy would strike even so Americanized an African as Numbi as incomprehensible), hung limply from his shoulders. He seemed to have aged in the two days since I had last seen him. He looked defeated, stricken. I asked him how his daughter was and he let out his breath very slowly. She was sick, he said. He wasn't sure she would live. He closed his eyes and rocked back and forth on his heels.

    That afternoon I decided to visit Numbi—not in his dormitory or in the bars where we usually met, but at the home where Anna, his girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend—they were splitting up) lived with her family. The house was located in the heart of the shantytown, down a labyrinth of footpaths. I followed the directions Numbi had given me that morning—a left past a bamboo fence, a right at a leaky spigot—until I was thoroughly lost. When I arrived, a third time, at a clearing where children were playing soccer with a bunch of balled-up newspaper, I surrendered to the guidance of a small boy who volunteered to help me. He wore a pair of baggy gray shorts fastened about his waist with a piece of twine, and he had intelligent eyes and perfect square white teeth. His name was Pole Pole. Every time we came to an open gutter or had to step over a puddle, he'd solicitously call my attention to it. I guessed from his size that he was six years old and was dismayed to learn that he was nine.

    He led me down a narrow corridor between two rows of houses. We walked bandy-legged along the lips of a concrete ditch running with sewage and came to a clearing, in back of which stood a better-than-average house—for the neighborhood. It had a cement floor, chipped brick walls painted a faded green, and a tin roof that hadn't rusted through. A woman in a striped red blouse stood in the doorway, cradling her infant. This was Anna, and from her demeanor, I guessed she'd been expecting me. She had a round face and thick arms; her blouse had holes in it and her infant was wrapped in gray linen blankets. She greeted me shyly. When I asked her in French if she spoke that language she said, "Vieux," and with a movement of her hand beckoned me up a couple of stairs and past a room where a man in a black suit lay asleep on the wooden slats of a sofa frame, to an alcove where an electric bulb flickered. There were no windows in the house and even with the bulb on, it was stifling and dark. I sat down on a black vinyl chair whose split seat spilled yellow foam and waited, while Anna went into the sunlight. The walls were bare except for a few black-and-white photographs that were pinned below a plastic figure of Jesus. The man stirred while she was gone, but did not wake up.

    Presently Anna returned with another woman who introduced herself in French as Celestine. Celestine was a light brown color and she had dyed her straightened hair shades of yellow and tan, like a leopard skin. She sat down beside me on a rickety stool and every now and then would clasp my arm as she talked. Anna leaned against the arch of the alcove still cradling her infant. They had taken the child to the infirmary earlier that day. The nurse said the baby had bronchitis and had urged them to keep her bundled up—that was the reason she was swaddled in blankets. I was shown a plastic bottle containing red and white capsules of tetracycline.

    I would not have thought tetracycline the drug of choice for bronchitis, nor would I have imagined it wise to keep a baby wrapped in blankets when the temperature outside was ninety degrees. On the other hand, I couldn't be sure that these were incorrect procedures, either. I asked if I could see the child. As Anna leaned over and lifted the infant—whose name was Isa—into my arms, the man in the black suit woke up, rubbed a hand over his face, and staggered out. I was pretty sure he hadn't seen me and for some reason was glad I wouldn't have to account for my presence there.

    As soon as I saw Isa I knew that she suffered from more than bronchitis. She was starving: she looked like the pictures one sees on TV or in magazines. But photographs typically evoke pity; holding Isa, her body shuddering with each heartbeat as though struck by a hammer, I had the feeling that an unspeakable vulgarity had been committed. I closed the child's blankets and gave her back to her mother.

    It was getting late; I promised Anna that I would return the following morning and take Isa to the best clinic in town. Isa would be my project, the one bit of good I did in Africa.

    It was my habit on Thursdays to have dinner with friends of mine, a couple named Stephen and Marlo. He was an American scholar and former Peace Corps volunteer; she, a Rwandan educator and language instructor. They are compassionate people, Christians in the best sense of the word, and I imagined that they would prove a receptive audience for me. Our Thursday dinners were usually a source of consolation, a chance to vent some of the week's accumulated frustration, sadness, and anger. Over a game of cards—we were playing hearts, of all things—I told them about Isa, omitting those details that might have seemed incriminating. Perhaps Isa was just one more of too many stories that they had heard; perhaps they understood that it was too late to help; perhaps, too, they sensed the vanity that grew in me that night. Stephen told me about an American woman who lived and worked in the shantytown, a nurse with years of experience tending malnourished and diarrhetic children. "A real saint," he said, lifting his bottle of Primus beer.

    "But isn't there a Belgian doctor on this side of town?" I asked. "She may even need to be medevac'd."

    "Ahh!" Marlo cried. "J'ai gagné!" She spread her cards on the table in a triumphant fan.

    "Comme d'habitude," I said. It was a standing joke that Marlo won every game we played, whether it was chess or go fish, all while overseeing the complex operation of putting the children to bed.

    "I don't know," Stephen said. "Your best bet might be this woman."

    But I wanted more than directions to some local clinic. And the more I insisted, the more discomfited Stephen and Marlo became, until, finally, I was ushered out into the night.

    The next morning I awoke early and set off. I had in my pocket sixty dollars and directions to the clinic. Once again I no sooner strayed from the main road into the thicket of mud shacks than I got lost. No child volunteered to help me this time, and I was determined not to ask. After an hour of wandering I was about to give up when I came to the narrow corridor Pole Pole had led me down. I skirted along the rim of the concrete ditch, the sewage gushing beneath my feet, but even before I came to the end of the corridor, I heard the singing.

    The funeral and wake lasted all day, and in my mind the details are a series of disconnected notes. The men sat outside on straw mats; the women were grouped inside, on the unvarnished sofa and floor. As the white visitor, I was chaperoned into the house and given the best seat—the black vinyl chair with the split seams. The women sang hymns for hours. Numbi sat beside me, ashen. He was grateful I had come, he said. Anna was off in the bedroom. Just once I heard from within the sound of a muffled sob. At some point, a carpenter came and fitted a pinewood coffin he brought in that afternoon. My cash helped pay for the cattle truck that functioned as the neighborhood hearse.

    One final note. As I climbed the hill on my way home that day, I tripped and fell in the mud. A thick sheet of the stuff covered my backside; my hands were caked to my wrists with the heavy clay. At that moment the schools happened to be letting out the children. As I staggered to the top of the hill, wiping my hands on the front of my pants, a couple of boys noticed I had fallen and were so amused by this that they called out to their companions. They were joined by still more children, and soon a parade—the boys in their khaki pants and stiff white shirts, the girls in blue skirts and white blouses—funnelled down the street behind me. The kids—there must have been scores of them—swung their satchels in the air, and cried out to alert 

    onlookers to the passing spectacle.

    I'd like to report that I responded with grace, that I laughed, too, at the muzungu with the humanitarian zeal and the mud all over his ass. But I didn't. I was furious. My education, such as it was, would last longer than I could have imagined


  • Opinion | How Congress Devastated Congo - The New York Times

  • May 21, 2013

    It is the sense of Congress that the exploitation and trade of conflict minerals originating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is helping to finance conflict characterized by extreme levels of violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, particularly sexual- and gender-based violence, and contributing to an emergency humanitarian situation therein, warranting the provisions of section 13(p) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as added by subsection (b).

    —Dodd-Frank Act Section 1502, Paragraph “A”

    “Pour nous, sans nous, c’est contre nous.”  —Traditional Congolese saying


    Thank you, Chairman John Campbell, Ranking Member Wm. Lacy Clay, and Members of the Subcommittee, for holding this hearing on the unintended impacts of Dodd Frank’s conflict minerals provision. My name is David Aronson. I am a freelance writer and editor who has lived and worked off and on in central Africa for 25 years. I have written about the Congo for The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Republic, Dissent, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, the World Policy Journal, and elsewhere. My blog,www.CongoResources.org, receives some 15,000 unique visitors a month.

    Dodd Frank 1502, the “conflict minerals” provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reformand Consumer Protection Act (DF-1502), is a case study in how good intentions can go awry, particularly when a compelling activist-sponsored narrative substitutes for considered and timely analysis. As I will make clear:

    • Advocates for the law disregarded the consensus opinion of Congolese experts who repeatedly warned them of the dangers the campaign posed to their people;

    • The law imposed a de facto embargo on mineral production that impoverished the region’s million or so artisanal miners; it also drove the trade into the hands of militia and predatory Congolese army units;

    • The military situation on-the-ground has considerably worsened since passage of the law and the SEC’s promulgation of the implementation guidelines;

    • The case for DF-1502 rested on dubious and misleading assumptions;• 

    A dozen or so scholars and NGOs have independently studied this issue; they have all concluded that the law is imposing unacceptable costs on the Congolese while doing little to diminish the violence.

    Background

    Since the late 1990s, protracted civil conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo have led to an economic collapse, massive population displacements, deepening poverty, and a chronic state of food insecurity. It is hard to exaggerate the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe that has engulfed the country. Here are a few data points:

    • The International Rescue Committee’s detailed, geographically randomized populationsurvey of 2007 estimated that 5.4 million people had died as a result of the wars and that the country was continuing to experience some 45,000 excess deaths per month. Even if the actual numbers are just half of what the IRC estimates, this would still make theconflict in eastern Congo the deadliest since World War II.

    • In the latest UNDP report, the Congo placed187th out of 187 countries on its ranking of human development indicators, behind Afghanistan, Niger and Burundi. The country stands at the bottom of the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Global HungerIndex. And earlier this month, Save the Children announced that Congo had displaced Niger as the world’s worst place to be a mother. Niger is a desert; the Congo, properlymanaged, could be a breadbasket to the continent.

    • Some 88 percent of Congolese live below the absolute poverty line of $1.25 per day;

    about 70 percent lack access to adequate food; and one in four children is severely malnourished. About 2.7 million Congolese are internally displaced, third most in the world.

    Given the scale of this disaster, it is entirely creditable that activists in this country and abroad felt an obligation to respond. Their mission, to educate Western audiences about the suffering of distant people and enlist them in efforts to remedy that suffering, is part of an inspiring tradition that began with the 19th century abolition movement, continued through the international campaign against Red Rubber at the start of the 20th century, and persists in some of today’s most distinguished human rights campaigns. It is a tradition I strongly identify with.

    Unfortunately, in their quest to fashion a narrative that would resonate with and therefore galvanize their largely Western audience, activists ignored the complexities of the local context and brushed aside Congolese experts who repeatedly warned them of the dangers the conflict minerals campaign posed to their people. In doing so, they developed policy prescriptions that damaged an already tenuous economy, entrenched the position of the warlords, and accomplished little by way of resolving the conflicts.

    Disregard of Local Experts

    In a New York Times opinion editorial I wrote about DF-1502, I reported that knowledgeable Congolese felt excluded from the conflict minerals debate. It was, they told me, a dialog in which their voices went unheeded, dominated by Western advocacy groups confronting Western electronics companies. As a result, immensely important decisions about the lives of millions ofCongolese were made without any input from them.

    It happens that an organization with impeccable credentials for supporting the rights of workers in Third World countries wrote a contemporaneous paper about this very topic. The organization describes itself this way: “MakeITFair is a European project focusing on the electronics industry, especially on consumer electronics like mobile phones, laptops and MP3 players. We want to let young people across Europe know about the labour abuses and environmental problems that aregoing on right now around the world – just to satisfy our demand for all the latest electronicgadgets.” In an October 2010 report, they wrote the following:

    The makeITfair project, however, deplores the lack of communication with local

    stakeholders when formulating what should be done. … "When high level institutions and industry are busy drawing up standards, local views and priorities are in danger of remaining unheard…. Despite the fact that all such initiatives aim to end the mineral trade funding armed groups in Eastern DRC, there is growing concern that there is a boycott in practice on minerals from Eastern DRC, which may lead to worse consequences for the people on ground…. During interviews in Goma and Bukavu in May 2010, IPIS encountered very few representatives of civil society groups who were in favour of an embargo on minerals from Eastern DRC. By far most informants questioned the usefulness of an embargo.1

    Negative Unintended Consequences

    The Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act was signed into law on July 22, 2010; on August 22, 2012, after several postponements to allow for further public debate and fact finding, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) promulgated a detailed set of implementation regulations. What has happened in Congo as a result?

    In early 2011, in response to negative publicity from activist groups and in anticipation of the eventual implementation of DF-1502, the Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC)—which includes most large US electronics companies—advised the Malaysia Smelting Corporation, the last remaining smelter processing minerals from eastern Congo, to stop accepting minerals from central Africa that were not certifiably clean. The resulting de facto embargo of Congolese minerals went into effect on April 1, 2011 and had an immediate impact on the artisanal mining sector and on the broader economy of the region.

    1 Voices from the Inside: Local Views on Mining Reform in Eastern DR Congo, Finnwatch and Swedwatch, October2010. http://makeitfair.org/en/the-facts/news/local-voices-must-be-heardTo understand the extent of that impact, consider this open letter from 50 South Kivu civil society organizations dated July 5, 2011, and addressed to President Obama and SEC chair Mary Schapiro: In this environment, artisanal mining has emerged as one of our only economic lifelines, and has directly and indirectly provided millions of jobs. The abrupt cessation of this tradehas had devastating impacts on our people:

    1. Millions of our artisanal miners have suddenly had their livelihood cut from under them.

    They find it increasingly difficult to pay school, health, or maternity fees; some even report having difficulty providing food for their families.

    2. Mining enclaves have emerged over the past decade in places so remote that only planes can access them. The world's sudden refusal to buy these minerals means the planes no longer service these communities; with nothing to trade, they are unable to provide themselves with such basic necessities as salt, sugar, oil, cloths, soap and so on.

    3. Because artisinal mining was one of our only engines of economic growth, secondary economic impacts are being felt throughout the province. Even in our large towns, economic activity has diminished; construction slowed; trade in everything fallen. People with very little to begin with are now doing with less.2

    I would add one more reason for concern: near epidemic-levels of livestock and crop diseases are currently devastating agricultural production. Families who dispersed their risk by sending somemembers to mine while keeping others at home to farm are being hit on both counts; they have nothing else to fall back on.

    Today, the de facto embargo on Congo’s tin, tantalum and tungsten (the three Ts) is still in effect,and DF-1502 continues to depress the economy of eastern Congo. There has been some resumption in the trade, from three sources:

    • Several “conflict-free” initiatives are underway, with mixed results. The Dutch are funding a project in Nyabibwe that has produced a few hundred tons of product; local CSOs hope to expand the project to five nearby mining sites. However, there are allegations that the site, widely viewed as a test case for responsible sourcing, is already being exploited by a military-led smuggling racket.

    • Despite the central government’s suspension of a couple of Chinese trading houses from the mineral trade in May 2012, Chinese firms continue to buy some modest amount of undocumented minerals at significantly discounted prices.

    • Finally, there has been a significant expansion in illicit trade through Rwanda, with cassiterite in particular being smuggled across Lake Kivu and repackaged as domestic Rwandan product. The fact that Rwanda is one of the unintended beneficiaries of the

    2 Open Letter to President Barack Obama And SEC Chair Mary Schapiro From Religious, Civil Society and Business

    Leaders In South Kivu Province, Democratic Republic Of Congo, July 5, 2011. http://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-

    40-10/s74010-324.pdflegislation is a bitter pill for many Congolese, who point out that Rwanda has been plundering Congolese mineral wealth for years.

    Overall, however, the trade has by no means reached its pre-embargo level, and miners receive significantly less than they used to for each kilogram of mineral that they produce. (Untagged cassiterite sells for $3-4 per kilo, in contrast to $9-10 per kilo for the tagged product. Miners were receiving $13-15 per kilo prior to the embargo.)

    In contrast to the three Ts, the trade in gold continues unabated, with virtually no procedures in place to formalize let alone control it. As my fellow panelist, Sophia Pickles from Global Witness recently documented, up to 10 tonnes of gold from South Kivu are being laundered each year through Burundi and exported to Dubai--with an “almost complete absence of checks.

    ” In North Kivu, a significant portion of the gold trade is controlled by the Congolese army commanders, including ex-General Gabriel Amisi, who was fired as chief of staff last year after it was revealed he had been selling weapons to militia groups. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that “opportunities for illicit gains only increased after the U.S. in 2010 passed a Wall Street overhaul, known as Dodd-Frank.

    ” While a number of efforts are underway toestablish “conflict-free” gold supply chains for boutique jewelers, gold is so valuable, so easy tosmuggle, and so fungible that it is hard to imagine how the trade could be brought under control.

    I would respectfully submit that preventing Congolese warlords from selling gold to Middle Eastor South Asian traders in one of the most ungoverned areas of the world is not a feasible policy goal.

    A Plethora of Initiatives

    As the Pole Institute has documented, the number of different international initiatives to deal with Congolese minerals is astounding—and increasingly problematic: “It has become increasingly clear that the parallel development of a range of different international standards, which in the end all have to be applied by the same actors, is a problem... The multiplication of uncoordinated visits for many different purposes are generally regarded by economic operators on the ground as auditing activities with related increase of audit fatigue. Participants warned against the increase in ‘conflict minerals tourism’ that fails to deliver concrete results.”3

    The Violence in Congo Has only Gotten Worse

    The economic harm caused by DF-1502 might be worthwhile if the embargo were having its intended effect, of reducing the overall level of violence in the region. Advocates used to argue that the legislation was not having its intended effects because the SEC had yet to issue the implementing regulations. Now that it has, it is important to ask whether we are seeing an improvement on the ground.

    3 Dominic Johnson, Senior Analyst, NO KIVU, NO CONFLICT? The misguided struggle against “conflict minerals” in the DRC. The Pole Institute, April 2013.Roger Meece, the UN special representative in Congo and Monusco chief, drew a dire picture in a briefing before the Security Council. Appealing for an additional military brigade, he told the Council that an “ever-growing number of violent, destructive rebel groups is battling for territory while terrorizing local populations. ” Other groups have echoed Meese’s assessment. Just last week, the International Red Cross reported that violence in eastern Congo had reached“unprecedented levels.” This is not the result we were led to expect.

    The Case for Conflict Minerals Rested on Dubious Assumptions

    To be fair, it is difficult to disaggregate the impact of the conflict mineral law from other developments in the region. It could be that the situation would be even worse if the legislation hadn’t passed. We have to examine whether the advocates’ reasons for expecting the law to reduce violence stand up to sustained analysis. Here is how the Enough Project made the case for conflict minerals legislation in April 2009:

    The time has come to expose a sinister reality: Our insatiable demand for electronics products such as cell phones and laptops is helping fuel waves of sexual violence in a place that most of us will never go, affecting people most of us will never meet. TheDemocratic Republic of the Congo is the scene of the deadliest conflict globally since World War II. There are few other conflicts in the world where the link between our consumer appetites and mass human suffering is so direct.4

    As several scholars have noted, this analysis fails on several counts:

    1) It misdiagnoses the nature of the conflicts in eastern Congo. For example, the rebel movement that is of greatest concern at the moment, the M23, does not control any mines, has not attempted to do so, and does not seek to control mineral transport in the regions it does govern.

    2) It diverts attention from other much-needed policy actions in the field, such as resolving land conflict, promoting inter-community reconciliation, jump-starting economic development, and fighting corruption.

    3) It does not take into account the enabling context. Even if minerals were as central to the conflict as advocates claimed, attempts to impose a regulatory regime are unlikely to succeed given the institutional weakness of Congo's central government.

    4) It ignores the fact that there are numerous other opportunities for violence entrepreneurs to make money, from taxing transport routes to robbing banks.

    5) It increases the likelihood of conflict by depriving young men of nonviolent livelihood alternatives and by exacerbating competition between local stakeholders over ever-scarcerresources.

    4 The Enough Project: “Can You Hear Congo Now? Cell Phones, Conflict Minerals, and the Worst Sexual Violence in

    the World,” April 1, 2009. http://www.enoughproject.org/news/strategy-paper-can-you-hear-congo-now-cell-

    phones-conflict-minerals-and-worst-sexual-violence-wExperts all but Unanimously View the Campaign as a Failure

    Over the past eighteen months, a dozen independent scholars and NGOs have published reports on the impact of the conflict minerals campaign. Strikingly, they have all reached similar conclusions: DF-1502 is harming ordinary people, helping militia and warlords, and in no way significantly reducing conflict. Here is some of what these scholars and activists have had to say:

    Laura Seay, assistant professor at Morehouse College, for the Center for Global Development:

    “Nicknamed “Obama’s Law” by the Congolese, section 1502 has created a de facto ban on Congolese mineral exports, put anywhere from tens of thousands up to 2 million Congolese miners out of work in the eastern Congo, and, despite ending most of the trade in Congolese conflict minerals, done little to improve the security situation or the daily lives of most Congolese.”5

    Raymond Gilpin, director of the US Institute of Peace Center for Sustainable Economies (CSE):

    “Though well-intentioned, [DF-1502] fails to address the root causes of conflict and grossly underestimates the resilience and adaptability of the warring factions. In recent months the armed groups have proven that they can quickly adapt, shifting from conflict mining to smuggling, racketeering (including ‘taxes’ imposed on coal and cattle) and bank robbery.”6

    Severinne Autesserre, assistant professor at Colombia University, for the peer-reviewed Journal of African Studies:

    “The well-meaning international efforts have also had unintended ramifications that have prevented the intervention from achieving its stated goals, and that have even, at times, contributed to the deterioration of the situation in eastern Congo. … Because of these exclusive focuses, the international efforts have exacerbated the problems that they aimed to combat.”7

    Enrico Carisch and Dr Claude Kabemba, of the Open Society’s South Africa Initiative:

    “But the reality on the ground could not be more different from the concept that every conflict in eastern Congo is - at its heart - a fight for control over the country's vast natural resources. This certainly does not appear to be the case with the current conflict.

    In fact… the hundreds of thousands of artisanal gold miners in four provinces (North Kivu, South Kivu, Oriental and Maniema) are no longer afraid of warlords or militias. Instead, they fear the hordes of corrupt civil servants, bureaucrats and members of the government's security forces, who are far more interested in exploiting the miners rather than supporting and protecting them…

    5 Laura Seay, What's Wrong with Dodd-Frank 1502? Conflict Minerals, Civilian Livelihoods, and the Unintended

    Consequences of Western Advocacy. Center for Global Development, Working Paper 284, January 2012

    6 Raymond Gilpin and Brett Boor, On the Issues: Instability in the DR Congo. US Institute of Peace, August 2012

    7 Severinne Autesserre, Dangerous Tales: Dominant Narratives and their Unintended Consequences. African Affairs,

    Oxford University Press, February 2012The current conflict is not about minerals. It is about Congo's dreadful governance - and the

    bloody role of neighbouring governments.”8

    Dominic Johnson, a senior analyst for the Goma-based Pole Institute:

    “A pattern is emerging in which Kivu's mining sector is being asphyxiated in the name of reform.

    Before 2010, Kivu's mineral traders had willingly participated in moves to strengthen formal and

    legal channels and to safeguard Kivu livelihoods by creating “conflict-free” production and

    trading chains within Eastern Congo. The mining ban killed this off…

    ”9

    To my knowledge, not a single independent analysis has concluded that Dodd-Frank 1502 has had a positive impact on developments in eastern Congo.

    Listen to Congolese

    Finally, I would ask the subcommittee to listen to the voices of Congolese who have been affected most directly by the law:

    Serge Mulumba, president of the mining cooperative CDMC, in a letter to the SEC:

    "We cannot give you exactly the number of lives that are lost each day following the cessation

    of artisanal mining in the DRC and yet even if a child died or who is hungry or do not go to

    school because his father digger lacked money, this is a tragedy, it is a sad news that should

    challenge our humanity."10

    Pastor Raymond Muhombo Shemihiyo, in an open letter posted on Fair Jewelry Auction:

    "Please listen attentively to our cries of weeping and anguish. Our families and us will be

    doomed to death if you do not hear these cries of alarm. Do not wait to rescue us when we will

    be already in the grave. Act in time to avoid the humanitarian catastrophe that would arise from

    the consequences of your suspension to purchase our minerals."11

    The heads of three South Kivu mining associations, in a letter to Intel, begged the EICC to

    reconsider DF-1502:

    “What is the refuge of all the Congolese jobless, around 85 % of the population. Is it to make

    peace or to trouble the peace, when the life is stopped for a population? No job, no life. Please

    imagine the consequences…”12

    8 Enrico Carisch and Dr Claude Kabemba, Congo-Kinshasa:Conflict Minerals Not Fueling M23 Rebellion

    Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (Johannesburg), 27 November 2012

    9 Dominic Johnson, Senior Analyst, NO KIVU, NO CONFLICT? The misguided struggle against “conflict minerals” in

    the DRC. The Pole Institute, April 2013

    10 Mulumba K. Serge, President of CDMC Mining Cooperative in DRC/KATANGA, October 17, 2011

    11 SOS From The Small Scale Miners of the Congo Regarding The Dodd Frank Act, A Letter from Pastor Raymond

    Muhombo Shemihiyo, General Mining Cooperatives of North Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

    12 Letter to Dr Jerry Meyers, Chair of Extractives work group Intel, from Mukulumanya W. Josue President of the

    Gecomiski, and Raymond Muhombo Shemihiyo PresidentFather Didier de Failly s.j., in a letter to the SEC:

    “Now if the Dodd-Frank regulations are applied from April this year it will ruin all these efforts

    and condemn hundreds of thousands of people in Eastern DRC to keep under the terror of these

    maffiosi barons, instead of improving the whole situation. Even in Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi,

    thousands of people will be badly affected.”13

    “For us, without us, is against us”

    Chairman John Campbell, Ranking Member Wm. Lacy Clay, and Members of the Subcommittee,

    I began my testimony by lauding the tradition of international citizen activism represented by groups like Enough and Global Witness, who at their best continue a centuries’ old tradition of global conscience. One of that tradition’s signal achievements was the peaceful overthrow of South Africa’s apartheid regime. Defenders of the conflict minerals campaign sometimes suggest that it resembles the divestment campaign of the 1980s. Just as divestment imposed real, tangible costs on the South African economy but ultimately proved worth the price, so, they say, the conflict minerals campaign will eventually prove to have been worth the temporary economic dislocations it has caused.

    I agree that the comparison to the divestment campaign is instructive. But it is not the similarities of the campaigns that strike me so much their differences. For one, the anti-apartheid activists were acting in solidarity with South Africa’s moral and political leaders. Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu urged Western countries to divest from South Africa. In calling for their universities and companies to divest, Western activists were following the lead of South Africans rather than fashioning a solution of their own. In the case of conflict minerals, by contrast, the activists consistently brushed aside the concerns of informed local leaders. Second, the divestment campaign targeted the right people with the right incentives: The leaders of apartheid South Africa saw themselves as representatives of European civilization. They could therefore be shamed by a Western-led campaign aimed at stigmatizing them. By contrast, the horizons of Mai Mai Sheka or Mutomboki are entirely local. It is safe to say that they do not care what Western starlets think of them. Finally, the divestment campaign was based on a clear theory of change: It pitted ageing pro-apartheid politicians against South Africa’s business elite, who wanted an end to international isolation so they could go back to making money. With conflict minerals, just the opposite is true: By sidelining legitimate business interests, DF-1502inadvertently—but predictably—put money and power into the hands of the worst elements on the ground, with the negative consequences we continue to see.

    13 Father Didier de Failly, Note on The Need To Let Some Time To Implement A Thorough Control System On

    Artisanal Mining In Eastern DRC, 3/10/2011. http://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-40-10/s74010-


  • The Dead Help No One Living: A Return to Congo | JSTOR

  • Mobutu Redux? - Dissent Magazine

  • Opinion | 'KABILA OR CHAOS' - The Washington Post

  • Opinion | Zaire's French Connection - The New York Times

  • A Wish List for Central Africa - CSMonitor.com