Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (29 page)

Like most youths and children who joined the AFDL, he didn’t tell his parents. He and a group of friends went to Hotel Lolango, a run-down building close to the post office where the rebels had set up a recruitment office. A soldier used a naked razor blade to shave
A
,
B
or
C
into the recruits’ heads to mark which brigade they would join. Kizito was put into the
B
group; his scalp burned from the scrapings. He handed over all of his belongings—a watch, a few Nouveau Zaire banknotes, and his ID—to a recruitment officer for safekeeping and got into a waiting truck. “It was like a dream,” he remembered. “I was so excited.”

The AFDL’s first training camp was in Kidote, a hamlet in the hills overlooking the Rusizi plain, just a few miles away from the Lemera hospital where the rebels had carried out the first massacre of the war. In March 2007, I convinced Kizito to take a day off from his job as a driver for a local development organization and take me to the place where he had been trained.

He hadn’t been back since he had finished boot camp there. As we crossed the ridge and the parish came into view, he rolled down the car window and looked around in a daze. “This whole hill was full of sentries,” he said, reliving the moment of his first arrival there. “You wouldn’t have been able to approach—they kept the whole area blocked off.”

Kidote wasn’t even a village. A cluster of school buildings and an abandoned church, all with rusted, corrugated-iron roofs, were set into hills dotted with banana groves and eucalyptus trees. The buildings were surrounded by a flat area, perhaps the size of four football fields, with shoulder-high, dense elephant grass. There were no more than a dozen huts and no sign of movement in the school buildings. “We cut down all that grass. They gave us machetes, and we spent the first week just clearing the pitch. This whole plain was a training ground,” he said. “The hills behind the school were all full of bivouacs made out of banana leaves that we slept in.”

We parked the car and walked down to the church. It had been abandoned for a decade. Even the benches had been pillaged, probably for firewood. One of its walls had been sprayed repeatedly with bullets. Did they execute people here? I asked Kizito. “No,” he said; he didn’t think so. He pointed at a lone eucalyptus sapling in the middle of the meadow to our left. “It was down there.”

After being recruited, Kizito’s initial excitement waned quickly. The living conditions were harsh. The new recruits slept in the open for a week until they were given tarps with UN logos—they had been taken from the dismantled refugee camps—to build small lean-tos they could crawl into and sleep. They weren’t given uniforms, and the heavy labor tore their clothes. After several weeks, fleas infested the camp, and many soldiers preferred to burn their clothes than to stay awake at night, itching. “We would throw our rags into the fire and listen to the fleas pop,” Kizito said, smiling and imitating the popping sound. Kidote is around 6,000 feet high, and even huddling together in their tiny huts at night, the youths froze.

There were over 2,000 recruits in Kizito’s training camp. They were the first graduating class, he remembered proudly, almost all under twenty-five, with some as young as twelve. “Some kids were shorter than their guns,” he recalled, laughing. They came from different social and ethnic backgrounds but were mostly poor, unemployed, and uneducated. Morale, however, was high at the beginning. “They told us that we would finish the training and get money and have beautiful girls,” Kizito remembered, laughing. “What did we know about beautiful girls? We were very young.”

Their diet consisted almost solely of
vungure
, a tasteless mix of cornmeal and beans that often didn’t have any oil or salt. Soldiers cooked the mixture over firewood in large steel vats that had been used for boiling clothes at the nearby hospital. The food made their stomachs knot up; many suffered from diarrhea. They ate once a day, at 11 o’clock, placing banana leaves in holes in the ground to use as plates. In the evening, they were given some tea with a little bit of sugar.

The commander of the camp was a tall, light-skinned Rwandan officer called Afande Robert,
²
who spoke accented Swahili mixed with English. He was quiet but ruthless and feared by the recruits. They called him Mungu (“God”). After clearing the bush for the camp, Robert began the “introduction.” Kizito recalled, “If you lived through that, it was by God’s will.”

The introduction was a hazing ceremony that consisted of three days of grueling exercises on the training pitch. The recruits, or
bakurutu
in the local slang, were divided into groups of twenty-five and surrounded by circles of Tutsi soldiers with long canes. Robert would then yell out “Roll around!” or “Snake forward!” and the soldiers would descend on them and begin beating them.
Viringita
was one of the worst exercises. Next to the pitch was a waist-deep swamp, thick with reeds. The recruits were ordered to get into the water and do somersaults as fast as they could as the soldiers beat them and insulted them. Kizito saw youths have their eyes poked out and noses broken; some were knocked unconscious by the thrashing.

Parts of the hazing were bizarre. In one exercise, called “drinking beer,” recruits would stand on one leg and put one arm under the other leg and their finger in their mouth. “Maintain position for ten minutes,” the order would come. In another exercise, they were forced to roll around on the ground as fast as they could for several minutes, after which their squad commander would yell, “Run!” and they would spurt off vertiginously in all directions, banging into each other. In another exercise, a commander would tell a group of sixty recruits to fetch a stick he threw in the middle of the pitch. “The first to get it doesn’t get beaten!”

If you couldn’t keep up with the strict regimen, you were punished. After committing a minor infraction, Kizito was told to step in front of his fellow recruits and dig a small hole in the pitch. “‘This is your vagina,’ the commander said. ‘Take out your dick and fuck it!’” Kizito told me, blushing and looking down. In front of all of his fellow recruits, he was forced to hump the hole until he ejaculated. “In front of all those people, it was almost impossible,” he muttered. At sixteen, he was still a virgin.

He once made the mistake of reporting sick. At the health center, he told the medic he had a headache, joining a long line of sullen soldiers with various ailments. The medic nodded and turned to a soldier, who then ran at them, beating them over the head with his cane. The medic laughed as they scattered into the bushes. “You aren’t sick! See—you can still run!”

After the three-day induction course, Afande Robert addressed his recruits on the pitch. He was wearing a sweatsuit and sneakers and was holding a cane. Over a thousand soldiers stood in silent formation in front of him. “
Bakurutu
, the army is your family now. The army can be good, but you need to know that you can die at any moment. Have you ever seen people die? No?” He waved at one of his officers. “How many prisoners do we have in jail? Bring me six.”

The officers brought out six weak and dirty prisoners. They were recruits like the rest of them who had been captured trying to desert the camp. Robert ordered his men to blindfold one and tie him to a eucalyptus tree on the edge of the clearing. They lined up in a “firing squad”—Kizito struggled with the English word he had obviously heard more than once in the army—and riddled the prisoner with bullets.

“Good!” Robert barked. “Now I will show you precision marksmanship!”

They brought out the next blindfolded prisoner and tied him to the same tree. Suku, a Rwandan officer known for being an expert shot, stepped forward and counted twenty-five paces from the tree. He pulled a modern-looking pistol from his holster, took aim, and shot the prisoner between his eyes.

“Good!” Robert then gave orders for four officers to pin the next prisoner down by his hands and legs. Another officer took out a hunting knife, pinned his chest to the ground with his knee, and slit his throat—“ like a goat,” Kizito remembered. The officer completely severed the head from the body, then brought it to the recruits, who were told to pass the bloody object around. “When I held the head, I could still feel his muscles twitching,” Kizito said.

“Who is a good
kurutu
and thinks he can kill, too?” Robert cried out. A few brave soldiers put their hands up, eager to please. He called them forward and gave them knives. They slit the throats of the last three prisoners as their peers watched. The induction was over. From now on, Robert announced, they would be called soldiers, not
kurutu.

The training settled into a kind of exhausting normalcy. Kizito spent four months at Kidote, although he says it felt like a whole year. Every morning, they would rise at 4 o’clock and go jogging for about six miles, singing songs as they went. At 6 o’clock, they would begin the military drills back at the camp. They would practice deploying in offensive formations, laying ambushes and crawling up hills. “Our commander would mount a machine gun in the ground behind us and shoot over our heads as we snaked up the hills. If you raised your head a bit, you were dead.”

At 11 o’clock, the soldiers would come back to camp and eat their one meal of the day before heading back into the hills for more military drills. At 4 o’clock, they returned to learn how to take apart and reassemble guns, as well as to learn military tactics. In the evening, the officers gave them time to socialize and tried to teach them about the history and goals of their struggle—they called this
utamaduni
, or culture. At around 9 o’clock, most of the soldiers retired to their tents, exhausted, to sleep. In their newly learned military slang, this was
kuvunja mbavu
, “breaking your ribs.” At night, Kizito would hear kids in other tents sobbing or reading the Bible in whispers.

The AFDL made an effort to instill their revolutionary doctrine in the recruits. The Rwandan and Ugandan officers who led the rebellion all started off as members of leftist insurgencies in East Africa. Knowledge of Marx, Mao, and Fanon had been de rigueur for their leaders, and these teachings filtered down to the lowest level. Kizito remembered them asking questions the recruits didn’t understand:“‘Who are you?’ ‘What do you believe in?’ ‘Why does a soldier fight?’ It was the first time we had thought about such things.” The teachers explained to them how Mobutu had ruined the country, how he had made people corrupt and tribalist. Higher-ranking officers and political cadres received more nuanced lectures, often in Kigali or Goma, about dialectical materialism and planned economies.