Across a savannah ruled by no one, three brothers shouldered a bamboo pole. Their nephew had a broken leg but there were no longer any doctors there — nor vehicles, nor roads, nor telephones, nor electricity.
They strapped Bolnevi Ngonstala (13) into a chair, tied it to the pole and tramped south where there was rumour of a clinic. Bolnevi’s misfortune was not just to fall from a tree, but to do so in this corner of Africa.
For much of the journey his moans and the creaking bamboo were the only sounds to break the stillness. Villages were deserted, houses ruined, fields untilled. They passed petrol pumps with nozzles of rust, the concrete bases sprouting weeds.
This is the Pool region of the Republic of Congo. Ninja country. A rebel movement has for years battled the government in a guerrilla war with atrocities committed on both sides.
The Ninjas wear purple as a sign of suffering. Their hair is dreadlocked because of a Bible passage that says no razor should touch the head of the chosen ones. They say an apocalypse is coming and, after so much destruction, many suspect it has already started. Ten years of fighting have made Pool desolate.
Thousands have fled their homes to hide in the forests, hungry, sick and frightened of the men with guns and blades.
”It is one of Africa’s totally forgotten conflicts. Hardly reported, yet it’s a major humanitarian catastrophe. The society is just melting back into the bush,” says Paul Foreman, a head of mission for Médécins sans Frontières in the capital, Brazzaville.
The world hardly noticed, partly because the conflict was overshadowed by the mayhem in a bigger neighbour with a similar name, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and partly because no key Western interests were involved.
Fighting between the government and rebel forces raged longest and fiercest in Pool, Brazzaville’s rural hinterland, spilling into the city itself, levelling entire neighbourhoods and shattering the skyline.
It was bush towns like Kindamba that suffered most. Helicopter gunships blasted buildings while soldiers and rebels on the ground used brutal guerrilla tactics against civilians caught in the middle.
To punish a population seen as Ninja sympathisers, the government last year effectively sealed off the entire region and barred all aid, turning Pool into a blank space on the humanitarian map.
Since a fragile peace accord in March some aid agencies have returned. They have found ghost towns and rebels-turned-bandits roaming a lawless countryside.
A decade ago this former French colony was one of the most developed, sophisticated parts of Africa. As a Soviet client state it boasted an educated population with good roads, clinics and jobs.
Then the Berlin Wall fell and the roubles stopped flowing. A botched move to a market economy and corrupt spending of offshore oil revenue were followed by a succession of civil wars in which rebel and government forces raped and butchered civilians.
”The tragedy is that as the rest of Africa is slowly pulling itself up, Congo keeps deteriorating,” said Foreman.
Flying north from Brazzaville, The Observer team landed at Kindamba in a four-seater plane — the first Western journalists in years to do so. Anything heavier risks sinking in the grassy airstrip.
From his base the Ninja leader, Pastor Ntoumi, spotted the plane and asked to meet the passengers. Reputed to be able to turn sticks into rifles and cure the sick, his next move could make or break the truce.
A once-busy market town of 20 000, Kindamba’s population is now around 3 000. House after house, shop after shop are scorched shells. Carcasses of tractors and cars rust beneath foliage, shrubs link across tracks. Parents tell disbelieving children about electricity and running water.
The hospital — a long, single-storey building with punctured walls and little furniture — is a vast improvement on the squalid ruin the Médécins sans Frontières team found two months earlier. Even the door handles had been looted. Now there are shutters on the windows, insecticide-treated mosquito nets, guards. And one doctor, Steve Harris, to treat up to 150 patients a day.
There is neither equipment nor drugs, but Dr Harris can treat malaria and malnutrition — and broken legs. It was here Bolnevi’s exhausted uncles lowered their bamboo stretcher after a 62km trek.
”He fell from a tree while collecting mangos,” said Fabien Nganoziom, slumped on a bench.
At his surgery in Britain, Harris would X-ray the femur, insert pins and apply a cast. In Kindamba he improvised a splint from palm branches and asked a carpenter to make another, around which tarpaulin would be wrapped.
There are no statistics about how many have died but Harris suspects a grim toll. In people who hide in forests without shelter or medicine, eating berries and nuts for months or years, malnutrition enfeebles the immune system and treatable diseases become killers. One elderly woman and her daughter could barely walk because hundreds of flies were living in their feet from eggs hatched beneath the skin.
The guns have been silent for months but after previous broken ceasefires, people are wary of returning, especially since the Ninjas are known to be frustrated with the current peace accord, says Norbert Nkeoua, the closest thing Kindamba has to a mayor.
”Many people are still living in the forest. They don’t have confidence in the peace. They are afraid because the rebels still have guns and Pastor Ntoumi is still free.”
Nkeoua cannot rebuild his own house, a concrete wreck draped in weeds, for want of money and material.
It is the same for the churches. A rocket has peeled the Protestants’ roof like a tin-opener and the walls are peppered with bullet holes so Jean Bruno Babuoukana’s congregation sings Christmas carols in what used to be his home. Babuoukana is not a cleric, but is filling in until a real one shows up.
Jonas Mayembo celebrates Mass for the Catholics but he too is a layman standing in for priests absent since 1998. His smock has pictures of Jesus, but the crucifixes and Bibles vanished long ago.
”The people need spiritual succour. I do my best,” he shrugged.
Before Médécins sans Frontières arrived the hospital had been staffed by nurses who were not nurses and doctors who were not doctors. Only the patients were real.
Many rebels, too, are fake. They have Ninja dreadlocks and a fetish for purple, but no belief in Pastor Ntoumi.
”You’d characterise them as thieving bastards basically,” says one analyst.
Aid workers have been robbed.
”There are no jobs for young men and it’s just too easy to join a militia group or bandits, get a Kalashnikov, stop a car and ask for 3 000 francs,” says Maarten Merkelbach, of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Brazzaville.
Critics accuse the government of undermining the March peace accord by making no effort to restore basic services to Pool and failing to integrate the rebels into the army. The reason, they say, is that President Denis Sassou Nguesso, a northerner, has not forgiven the insurgents and he has no desire to help southerners.
Kindamba’s garrison commander, Lieutenant Fernand Longa, insists the war is over and security is returning.
”We even play football with the Ninjas,” he says. He does not mention the last match, where a beer bottle was broken over somebody’s head and both teams produced assault rifles.
The uneasy truce is visible at a sun-baked, open-air disco. Powered by a car battery, the speakers wedged in trees, a stereo blasts traditional music while the DJ plays a harmonica into a megaphone. Off-duty soldiers lounge on one side, sipping palm wine. Ninjas lounge on the other, and between them civilians dance.
”The government’s promises have not been kept. If the pastor gives the order, we’re ready to play again,” says Fidele Bikoumou (35), wearing a purple turban and curling a trigger finger.
Alexander Mouzita, a tall, lean 42-year-old in a purple robe and baseball cap, reiterates that Pastor Ntoumi wants an interview. Mouzita says the Ninjas are invulnerable.
”The pastor was sent by God. He protected us. The helicopters attacked and nobody died. Is that not bizarre?”
The dreadlocked fighters at the first checkpoint on the dirt path leading to Ntoumi’s headquarters at Loukouo clamber into the car to toy with the cameras, rifle through bags and ask for presents. The second checkpoint guard lifts the bamboo barrier without a word.
The compound is a collection of corrugated tin huts and concrete houses neatly arranged around trees and five Land Cruisers. Purple sheets hang from doorways, there are lines of washing, a smell of cooking and the sound of children counting in French: ”Dix-huit, dix-neuf, vingt.”
We are seated on white plastic chairs facing an empty chair. Behind it an AK-47 hangs from a tree. Flanked by three aides, one carrying a satellite phone, Ntoumi emerges from a hut to offer a handshake and a smile. He wears white slip-on shoes, brown jeans, a blue T-shirt and a yellow sports jacket. No purple. No crucifixes or jewellery visible.
He was expecting us earlier, it turns out, and apparently slipped back into casual gear when he thought we were not coming. His voice is soft, his French grammatical. He has no plans to break the truce, he says, but adds an ominous caveat: ”Although what happens next is in the hands of God.”
As a Pentecostal preacher in Brazzaville in the mid-1990s, Ntoumi had no desire to enter politics, until ordered to help the displaced of Pool.
”The Holy Spirit told me to to collect the people and form the Ninjas.”
His goatee is flecked with grey but he looks younger than his 39 years. He remains mild compared to his aides, who scowl when questions turn personal. His first wife was not a good wife, he says, and he shares the compound with a second wife and two children. He loves music — jazz — but has not heard of Duke Ellington.
”Afterwards I’ll sing a song if you like.”
He hands over photocopied reports purportedly from the president’s office outlining genocidal designs in Pool. They appear crude forgeries. When asked how he obtained them, Ntoumi smiled.
The only tense moment is when he is asked whether his movement is vegetarian. The messianic leader drops his gaze, shifts in his seat and lifts a shoe with a toe. He used to eat meat before the war.
”But not any more.”
Dusk is approaching — bandit time — and the interview ends. Ntoumi disappears behind a purple sheet into a house. There is no time for the song. — Guardian Unlimited Â