Photo by Johnnathan Tshibangu on Unsplash
After over fifty years of suppression, the Congolese wanted their independence from the Belgians and were primed to fight for it. In the face of this, Belgium just gave up. It was 1958 and we were living in Bukavu in the Belgian Congo.
The colonial administration was the first to go, leaving their countrymen and other whites to fend for themselves. Congolese troops attacked their Belgian officers, looted shops, and indiscriminately beat or killed whites in the streets and set fire to their cars. The white population dropped everything and left as fast as they could.
“One family arrived with a young child with only one shoe,” Patrick Walker said. He was the British District Officer in Uganda, who took in refugees, including us, from the Congo. “They’d left in such a panic they didn’t bother to look for the other one.”
The Congolese rebels weren’t too picky about who they killed; all that mattered was if you were white. And there we were, all of us so blond and fair the local children followed my two sisters and me around and touched us to see if we were real. They called us vizuka, or ghosts.
“Vous dois partir. Maintenant … You must leave. Now,” Sebastien, our Congolese servant, said. “Ils te tueront … they will kill you.”
And so, we did. We crammed as much as we could into our VW Bug and drove east toward Kenya, traveling on unmarked dirt roads to bypass roadblocks. Along the way, we were taken in by Patrick Walker and other British colonists in Uganda and Kenya, as well as missionaries—the only whites to go that deep into the bush.
After two years overseas, American corporations granted employees and their families home leave—a temporary transfer back home for a month of R, R, and R: repatriation, re-exposure, and re-orientation to the United States. So, from Kenya, we were flown back to Canton, Ohio.
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That was our first home leave. My grandparents met us at the Akron/Canton airport, and while my dad and grandfather snagged our luggage from the carousel, my mom, grandmother, sisters, and I talked nonstop over each other, punctuated with hugs and kisses.
When we got to our grandparent’s brick bungalow, the street in front was lined with cars. They’d arranged a surprise party with family and friends to welcome us home.
The next day, a reporter from the local paper came to interview us about our escape from the Congo. A photographer took our picture.
“Just like the Kennedys,” my grandmother said.
When the month was up, we went back to the Congo. This time to Elizabethville, Katanga.
On the flight from Ohio to Katanga, my mom wept and, taking our cue from her, my sisters and I sobbed, too. My dad sat in his seat like a stone, looking straight ahead.
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According to my dad, Elizabethville was like a European city.
“There are tree-lined boulevards, shops, almost everyone speaks English. And there are grocery stores.”
This last was a hook for my mom, who had always aspired to the life of a middle-class American housewife with a local grocery store nearby. She wanted to drive to that supermarket or to our grandmother’s house to watch soap operas or Liberace play his white piano on a revolving stage.
My mom wanted to spend time with her friends from high school and from her job as a telephone operator, which she quit when she got married. This was the kind of life my mom had signed up for when she married my dad. And it was an ambitious goal for a woman with her background. She was the daughter of a security guard at a steel mill and a stay-at-home mother, neither of whom had finished high school.
My dad hadn’t graduated high school, either. His father was an alcoholic and when he did get a job, he spent his paycheck at bars on boilermakers—shots of whiskey and Iron City beer, so in my dad’s sophomore year, he dropped out to work in a meat-packing company to support his mother and two sisters.
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My dad worked at Goodyear Tire and Rubber when we got out first transfer. He was in the International Division, an elite department in the company, where all the employees had bachelor degrees. My dad did eventually get a GED, but no college degree.
He couldn’t afford it. I know this because sometimes my mom herded my sisters and me into the bedroom where we hid under the bed until the landlord stopped knocking on the front door.
Nevertheless, my father must have enrolled, maybe even taken a class at Kent State, the local college, because it was listed as his alma mater in the company newsletter. None of us ever knew the story. He got angry if we brought it up, so the subject, like so many others, was off-limits.
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When we arrived in Katanga, we were surprised. For once, my father was right, almost, about our next assignment. Elizabethville was pretty and civilized in the European sense. There were wide boulevards lined with palm trees and purple bougainvillea. And there were shops, but most of them sold things like elegant women’s dresses, swizzle sticks to defuse the bubbles in your champagne, and Rosenthal crystal flutes from which to drink your defused champagne.
But there were no grocery stores, no Liberace playing a white piano, and no soaps on TV. There were no TVs. And not many people spoke English. Also, it wasn’t a good time to be in Katanga. My dad either forgot to, or deliberately didn’t, tell us there was a full-scale war on, and the battlefield was the pretty city of Elizabethville.
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Two years later when we came home for our second home leave, from Katanga, there was no party. Everyone had prior obligations.
Sorry, you two, but we’re dropping the kids off at summer camp and it messes up the whole day. You understand what I mean. You get married, get a house, and then kids come along, and before you know it your life revolves around theirs. Remember when we’d go out for cheeseburgers and a beer? Or dancing and come home late? Those days are long gone. Now you hit the hay at nine o’clock, get up the next day, and do it all over again. You know what I mean.
But my parents didn’t know. Everywhere we moved, we lived in sparsely furnished company houses. There were no organized activities for children in Katanga. For the adults, there were dinners and embassy parties, until the U.N. jeeps were overturned and set on fire. My parents slept with loaded guns under their pillows. No two days were alike.
This home leave, when my mom told my grandmother how much she missed her, my grandmother turned on her.
“I suppose you think it’s easy for us,” she said. “All of you living the big life with servants and all. And you take the girls away from us, too. Imagine how we feel during the holidays when everyone else has their grandkids at home. You have no idea how hard it is here,” she said.
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Few people spoke English in Elizabethville, so there was no school for English-speaking students. The American and British children sat in a shed in Mrs. Smith’s backyard where she taught us. She and Mr. Smith were Methodist missionaries and they had a son my age named David. Mrs. Smith was a good teacher, but I don’t remember a thing about her lessons. The only thing I remember is David—my first crush.
When your parents are expats, you learn to move fast. Sometimes you only live somewhere for a few months, usually moving in the middle of the school year. You can’t afford to spend much time making friends, even if they do speak English, which was rare in the places we lived. Better not to invest much in getting to know someone when you—or they—could leave, possibly the next day, and you’d never see them again.
I knew all this, but we’d been in Elizabethville for two years, longer than anywhere else we’d lived, including the States, where we’d moved at least four times in seven years before our first overseas assignment. Katanga might be different.
So, I laid in bed in the mornings and thought about David. I didn’t think about romantic stuff. I didn’t picture him kissing me or holding my hand. I thought about the Anthill Incident, when David and his friends finally accepted me as one of the them.
On Sunday afternoons, the Americans played baseball with the Canadian U.N. soldiers stationed in Elizabethville. One of those Sundays, David and two other boys decided to climb to the top of an old empty anthill. Most of them in Africa were steep mounds about twenty feet high, so it wasn’t easy. I wanted to go with them, but David told me it was strictly no girls.
“Why?” I said.
He said, “Because.”
“That’s not fair,” I said and followed them.
But I didn’t get far. They pushed me down and when I tried to get up, they sat on my back. I pounded the ground with my fists, kicked my feet, and screamed. “I’ll get you for this. I’ll get you, just wait.”
They got off my back and helped me up. I tried to brush the red dust off my clothes, but it was useless. I was filthy. I braced myself to be knocked down again, but nothing happened. The three of them stood and looked at me.
“I’ll remember this,” I yelled. “I’ll get you back.” And I stomped off, clouds of dust behind me.
After that, the boys let me play with them. I’d stood my ground and they respected me for it. But I got in trouble when my dad saw my dress.
“What were you thinking? What if someone had seen you? Do you want them to think that’s what American children look like?” he said. And he didn’t speak to me the rest of the day.
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One evening, I overheard my dad tell my mom that on his way home he’d seen a mob of Congolese on the road. He stayed as far back as he could, but they weren’t interested in him. A U.N. vehicle driven by two soldiers was headed towards the mob. The driver stopped the jeep, and as if it were one living thing, the mob rushed towards the vehicle, swarmed it, and swallowed it. The jeep and the soldiers disappeared. My dad floored it and shot past, never taking his eyes off the road in front of him.
“There was nothing I could do,” he told my mom. “I just wanted to get back to you and the girls.”
I was horrified and outraged. Why hadn’t he done something to help those soldiers? Why hadn’t he manned up? I didn’t want to think about what had happened to them, but I couldn’t help it. Were they macheted? Beaten? Butchered and eaten? I’d seen pictures of human corpses with their calves stripped of flesh. Nothing else, just the calves. I wondered if that was the juiciest most tender meat, like dark meat on a chicken. And then I felt sick.
I didn’t want to think about what happened to those soldiers, but now, years later, it still haunts me, like a lot of things about Africa. I don’t want it to, but it does.
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After the locals started shooting at U.N. soldiers and burning their jeeps, a group of white adults—diplomats, missionaries, businessmen and their families—met on Sunday evenings for cocktails and to talk about the political situation, to count heads, and to see if anyone had gotten an exit Visa. We were all desperate to get out, but it wasn’t easy. In Katanga, you had to have an exit Visa issued by the local government, which changed daily. The women in the group, including my mom, started a prayer circle.
One of the adults’ favorite topics was “What would you do if you were in a car and a mob blocked the road?”
Would you stop?
Would you throw the car into reverse and retreat as fast as you could?
Would you gun the engine and shoot through the mob?
It was always the same: everyone talked at once, some of the men stood up and waved their hands and began to yell. I never stuck around to hear the end, if there ever was an end, because they’d pick up next Sunday where they left off. I was always surprised at how much thought the adults put into this.
It was simple, wasn’t it? Of course, you’d drive straight ahead as fast as you could, tires throwing up a smokescreen of dust. You wouldn’t have enough time to turn the car around and go back, and if you stopped, you could be killed or worse. But if you kept going you might have a chance, right? Besides, the people in the mob would get out of the way. Of course, they would. Right?
As a child, it seemed so simple.
Eventually, I’d get bored and join the other kids to play pom-pom-pull-away outside on the lawn under the baobab tree in the softening dusk. It’s a game where one child faces a line of others—their arms locked together like a chain—who run as fast as they can toward her. Her goal is to stand her ground and, if she’s lucky, touch someone to join her.
Rebecca Jung is a writer and poet who currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. She grew up an expat due to her father’s work, living in eight different countries on five continents within a span of ten years. Her work has been published in literary magazines, including: Sky Island Journal, Memoir, The Impetus, Pennsylvania Review, Evening Street Review, Postcards Poetry and Prose, Not Very Quiet, The Write Launch, Prometheus Dreaming, Purple Clover, and The Bangalore Review. Her work has also appeared in two books: Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh, and Burningword Ninety-Nine, A Selected Anthology of Poetry, 2001-2011. She is completing a memoir titled “Home Leave.” She earned her B.A. in English writing from the University of Pittsburgh, and a B.A. in art history from Kent State University.