Mbandaka, In-Between The Equator & Ruins
I visited Mbandaka, the capital of Equateur province in the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, in 2002. Recently it was in the news for a ”little” outbreak of the deadly ebola disease.
I flew in a UN helicopter from Kinshasa to the north-western city during which I observed from the aerial position, the huge, untainted rainforests across the country.
My visit, at the instance of UN Peace Operations in the country, MONUC, the delegation in which I was, was welcomed by peacekeepers at the airport, onward to the operations headquarters of the Ghanaian contingent.
The next day, we flew to Basankusu, another point of Ghanaian peace operations. Upon return to Mbandaka, I was directed to a tent which was to serve as my bedroom for the next 12 days. There were air conditioners attached to all the tents in the camp so the insides were pretty congenial.
The army officers had a dinner at which we collectively wined and dined and on Sundays, we converged on the premises of a big hall for lightning church service.
We were having dinner one fine afternoon, a precursor to another dispersal to UN Observatory Units, when this bombshell ranged out on television. A coup had occurred whilst the Ivory Coast’s President Laurent Gbagbo was away on a state visit to Italy.
The foiled coup had a big casualty in the only person who had allegedly orchestrated a coup in that country, Gen. Robert Guei. Hoodlums seized the momentary period of emergency to attack and kill him whilst he was having dinner with his grannies on the balcony of his residence. This account suggested the army general was probably not involved in the Ivory Coast coup. His body was dumped in the open and left unattended.
Another day arrived at a routine buffet. There, all kinds of meat including those of snakes and chimpanzees were on the menu. The Congo forests harbour a great deal of these creatures which over time became local delicacies and for the infantry army, their consumptions were not new for they are trained ground forces adaptive to all conditions in the jungle, just for their survival.
Probably, all the UN vehicles stationed there accompanied me to the business district of Mbandaka to buy items. It was a phalanx of vehicles to the city centre where I discovered that the high-end shops were owned or manned by Indians.
The chips of the war in DRC were about to touch the ground at the time of my visit. Indeed, aside from the UN’s vehicles, there were no other cars that I could sight in Mbandaka, only bicycles. For almost all itineraries, the people made them on foot or a few bicycles.
The naked face of Mbandaka was revealed as a city in desolation. Preoccupied by a prolonged civil war, there were no modern buildings in the city. All there remained ancient in outlook. Existing buildings had none of the attractive claddings, or paintings to say the least, and roads had gone bad, and the people looked haggard, holding to mere existence.
Several years down the line, as I mull Mbandaka, ideas race after each other as to how the city may emerge from the ashes looking stronger and appealing. The province in which there is Mbandaka is called Equateur province, translated as one of the unique zones of the Equator. The Equator is a great circle around Earth that is everywhere equidistant from the geographic poles and lies in a plane perpendicular to Earth’s axis. This geographic, or terrestrial, Equator divides Earth into the Northern and Southern hemispheres and forms the imaginary reference line on Earth’s surface from which latitude is reckoned.
I keep asking myself whether Mbandaka can leverage its uncommon geographical stripe to gain some spotlight and gradually change the narrative.
Some of the army chiefs who were on this journey were Brigadier Abdullai, Brigadier Twum, Lt. Col. Nibo, and Lt. Col. Dela Sakyi. The delegation which was in DRC for UN Medals Day 2002, was led by Mr. Eddie Akita, then the Deputy Defence Minister of Ghana. These senior officers had initially interacted with some of us during a brief stopover in Douala, Cameroon for refueling of the army plane.
An exhilarating experience with Ghana’s military and for that matter, UN peacekeepers. The residues of the war, a sour taste in mouths.