Extraordinary Lives
Walking around the meandering & quiet towns of Gisenyi and Goma,nestled on the shores of Lake Kivu at 1500m above sea level, you wouldn’t believe that the sleepy little lakeside community was once an epicenter of human suffering.
First came nature’s blight: at the northern shore of the lake lies Mount Nyiragongo. Since 1882, it has erupted 34 times, most recently in 2002, where half of Goma was destroyed by the lava and fire.
Then there is the scourge of disease. Walk through Goma and one sees a gallery of ills — men and women, in tattered clothes matted with dirt, victims of polio or leprosy, rolling down the crowded streets in makeshift tricycles or walking on their hands, their withered legs twisted behind them, often begging — stretched out arms to able-bodied people who can barely survive themselves.
And were that not enough, the spectre of Ebola looms, breaking out frequently enough to remind people that their lives are not entirely theirs, that the next outbreak could be the decisive one that finally exterminates the town, hovering in the collective consciousness, like a dull splinter in the mind.
But these woes hold no candle to the scourge that humanity itself has posed.
Salted through these 34 eruptions & countless disease outbreaks have been the depravities of war and conquest. The exploitation and dispossession of the pygmies, the extirpation of the gorilla population, colonialism and its attendant cruelties, slavery, cannibalism, tribalism, theft, hunger … an almost endless tide of unimaginable suffering.
And then a crescendo in 1994: an orgy of slaughter now known as the Rwandan genocide, in which a million people were murdered in 100 days in the most personal genocide in human history.
Less than a decade later, suffering from the ripple effects of the Rwandan genocide & other systemic issues, Congo went through the horrors of what some historians call the unreported Third World War, where up to five million people died.
“And Still I Rise”. Maya Angelou’s third anthology of poetry is the lovesong of this region, because, in spite of the wretchedness of humanity, there remains an enduring stubbornness, a desire to forge a life of purpose and happiness that is hard to extinguish.
Jean Felix was born in the Belgian Congo just when Jonas Salk and Albert Sabine were rolling out the polio vaccine in America. He was born a little too early, or perhaps the vaccine was a little too late to arrive in the Congo. In any case, he was struck with infantile paralysis, and his legs withered beneath him; they remain the size they were when he was afflicted with polio. He could not have lived through a less fortunate time, what with the endless conflicts, the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, and the succession of soldiers who turned up at his village, where assurances of security somehow always morphed into episodes of pillage and killing.
He saw it all: the warlords would come with a brutal swiftness, in land and mineral grabs and in murder. Today, in the age of social media, the notion that history can be devoured up so completely, is frightening. It is as if the rich and loamy earth of Congo soaked up the rivers of blood that had once coursed through the villages and people continued about their lives beneath giant Coca Cola posters as if nothing had happened.
With equal measures of guile, luck and sheer grit, he survived. For those of us used to living in developed countries, human excess is usually hidden under a pretence of gentility. In the main, we do not see it. But is was Jean Felix’s quotidian reality. It was undisguised and always fresh in the memory. In Congo, life pulled him into line, making him feel its weight; to be here today, he has torn out the floorboards and scraped at the foundations of his being to survive.
“And Still I Rise”.
Today, Goma has two borders with Gisenyi: Petite Barrière and Grand Barrière. Petite Barrière is the beating heart of trade between the two countries, and much of Eastern Congo is fed through this busy conduit. Everyday, trucks arrive with shipping containers from all around the world: rice from Thailand and Pakistan; cooking oil from Malaysia and Indonesia; milk powder from the Netherlands, feeding the eastern part of a country larger than all of Western Europe.
The containers are unstuffed of their contents at Petite Barrière, and almost all the operators of the jerry-built tricycles that ply across the border, with the sacks and jerry cans of food, are handicapped men and women: the victims of war, disease and misfortune.
Together with Jean Felix, they have organised themselves into a cooperative. In an extremely challenging environment, they have negotiated concessions from the central government, and found an economic relevance for themselves. The cooperative’s president is a polio victim, an enormous man named Bisimwa, but whom everyone refers to, not facetiously, as Monsieur le Président.
These are a tough and resourceful people, and the next step for them in bettering their lives is access to reliable credit from markets that would see them as a trustworthy business opportunity.
Which is why I’m out here, part of the disparate and varied team that makes up Kommerce.
We began building the technology and infrastructure that could become a bedrock & catalysts for investment and aid in these hardy individuals. In such a tumultuous area with so little reliable infrastructure, blockchain’s trustless qualities make it possible, for the first time in history, for trustworthy and good faith business people to prove their worth without relying on anyone or anything but themselves.
Across the world in Singapore, we dreamt, sight unseen, of working with people who persist through the vicissitudes of bad hands at the lottery of life.
In the men and women at Petite Barrière, we have found them.
“You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.” — Maya Angelou
