I wanted to protest my separation from my family, friends and all who knew me in my home town. But I could not muster the strength to carry this out due to my present circumstances. After being held here for many months I was finally taken before a judge who was to try me as an enemy of the state of Zaire.
Here, the affable judge who was to try us as enemies of the state bought us sickly sweet mint tea. By the end, I was even playing chess with the jailer who administered 40 lashes to town drunks under Shariah, the religious laws enforced under conservative Islam. The whip-man's name was Salah. To him the beatings were a job. At night he studied microbiology.
During my last night in the ghost house in Kinshasa, I endured my longest interrogation at the hands of an army colonel named Abdullah. He grilled me for nearly six hours, bludgeoning me robotically with accusations of espionage, absurd charges that I knew even he didn't believe. At 1 a.m. he finally played the good cop, and asked if I had any questions of my own. I did. I wanted to know the fate of Zaire.
"More war!," he said without hesitation. He stared hard down at his desk.
After days of lies and mind games, these were the first honest words that escaped his lips.
Here I sit writing the words of those who underwent this extremely unfair trial their recollection, their story, their life, I sit in peace and quiet something which a lot of Congolese people do not even know the meaning of because they have never experienced it, such harshness, torture, pain. Time and again we seem to forget about those of us who are less content and those of us who have less to like and less to do but work in the field trying to merely stay alive. Every second that he lived, he lived under the fear and thought that he would die and always thought of those who thought of him.
Spare a thought for those who live in fear of death day in-day out.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
"It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."
To those who fought in the making of the Democratic Republic of Congo these people include: Soldiers, children and civilians and everybody else.
Written by:
Iyaaz Matadar
