How I Became A Witch

THE LULL BEFORE THE STORM

Among the questions I constantly have to battle with is the one about my own identity; my tribe. All I knew while growing up was that I was a Lega. Back then I knew pretty much nothing about the Lega tribe and it was unclear to me who between my dad and my mom who was a Lega. At times my mom would call my dad a "Munyabungo" which is a pejorative name used to bully yet a different tribe from the same region in the great Kivu, the Shi, a term which at that time did not understand properly either. Though apparently she did it for fun, at times she would do it if my dad annoyed her or misbehaved. That was leaving me so confused as to whether my dad was a Lega or a Mushi. And since with my dad one of the hardest thing to have was a conversation, i never really dared ask a question or think it out loud until lately.

From what little i heard through informal family conversations, my mom and dad came from South Kivu to the capital city in the 1970s. I heard my mom's family didn't think my dad was a good match for her so it was hard for them to get approval, my dad then had to steal my mom and run away with her up to Kinshasa and then after settled the situation the due way with my mom's family. I'm giving you this as part of the little information i managed to salvage to satisfy my thirst for knowledge. But still i might not be able to fully verify all this. Still digging to find how they both managed to start life in Kinshasa i found out that one of my mom's brother was allegedly well positioned in the Central Bank and helped my dad get a job in there shortly after they arrived, where he worked pretty much until he retired thirteen years ago.
Thanks to that abundance, they started a happy family in which I ended up being the fifth born.

However, I equally have very limited information to share about life before my birth. The least I can tell is that they were blessed with four children before my mom finds herself turning almost barren. She told me for six years she had been unable to conceive and then I was finally born after a number of trials and errors. And even after my birth things wouldn't look up. My mom was unable to produce any milk naturally so I had to rely on bottled milk my whole childhood. I pretty much remember when our last born was came six years later, that is when I satisfied my curiosity by tasting breastmilk for the first time in my life since at that time mom could breastfeed. I can remember I was still six at that time when mom squeezed some into a glass for me but i can not remember the taste anymore. Im sorry but I didn't like it so much.

My early life pretty much was hard but just a year later my mother got pregnant again and my young sister was on her way coming. My mom had to take care of both of us and I was told I was lucky to reach my fifth birthday. But prior to that, When I was three the bank decided to transfer my dad go work in his home town of Bukavu in Kivu. Therefore he had to kove with his whole family; we had to leave. I was so young but I can still vividly recall some of the sharp memories from when we landed in Bukavu. The trip should have been intense for me because the only thing I can clearly remember is only how the big lorry drove into the gates of our new home in Kibombo and i was sited in the driver's cabin. Then i was carried down by somebody but then I have very little memory left of the whole time: like in 1995 when mother came back from the hospital after delivering Fabrice, the last born as we had many family members and neighbors come for the baby shower. Women were singing traditional songs and dancing. Enough food was cooked to catter for all the guests and we had a great party. I also recall still back then how my dad would come home quite late in the night with his friends and colleagues from the bank in cars and would offload sacks of Nouveau Zaire bills, drag them inside the house and share among themselves. Those days corruption was the way of life in the country anyway. I was very young but I could tell life was good at least for us. But still I have very limited memories left of those good old days. But all I can argue is that we were rich; we were living a lavish lifestyle. After all working for the bank is still a big deal today. We had cars, living in a nice big house on the main road on top of a hill, plus many more houses here and there. We had rich relatives coming to visit from other towns and I had the impression that my dad was always surrounded with rich people. Some of them later died famous deaths in unclear mysterious circumstances. We even had helicopter holiday trips across Lake Kivu through the city of Goma, which I was later told.

My dad valued education a lot, so I was enrolled at E.P. Muhungu; a neighborhood government school to start my primary education at. I came from Kinshasa in the west of the country where we spoke Lingala and all of a sudden I was in Bukavu, a swahili speaking town in the east. By the way Swahili was my parents' mother tongue that was sometimes used at home so it wasn not that strange to me. But still I had to take some time to get used to all these changes and make friends which eventually I think I successfully did. Three years went on and my family was doing great. We at least bought two more homes and we had plans of moving into the one in one of the new upscale neighborhoods right along the shores of the lake called Clinique. I too was doing great I made a female friend at school called Kaboyi. Her dad was a news reporter with the national television so it was great to have a friend whose dad you see on tv. Plus we just lived a couple of hundred meters apart, we were able to spend some good time and we developed towards each other a great feeling that I would today describe as primitive form of love. We would hold hands in our way back home from school, spend more and more time together at her place; and she was beautiful. But little did I know all that was about to hit an abrupt end.

In the next year i was about to go thru a series of events that would later become the cornerstone of this book. It definitely is going to take a whole new book if I had to do a detailed account of it but what later came to be known as Africa's world war was just about to begin.