Table of Contents
three - “The Body-Odour of Race”
four - They Kill Us for Their Sport
ALSO BY GARY GEDDES
POETRY
War & Other Measures The Terracotta Army Girl by the Water Active Trading: Selected Poems 1970–1995 Flying Blind Skaldance Falsework Swimming Ginger
FICTION
The Unsettling of the West
NON-FICTION
Letters from Managua: Meditations on Politics & Art
Sailing Home: A Journey through Time, Place & Memory
Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things: An Impossible Journey from Kabul to Chiapas
Somewhere our belonging particles Believe in us. If we could only find them.
W.S. GRAHAM
Acronyms
| AYINET | African Youth Initiative Network |
| CIDA | Canadian International Development Agency |
| CNDP | National Congress for the Defense of the People |
| CRONGD | Regional Council of Development NGOs |
| CTO | Centre de Transit et Orientation |
| DRC | Democratic of Congo |
| EPRDM | Eritrean People’s Revolutionary Democratic Movement |
| ICC | International Criminal Court |
| OTP | Office of the Prosecutor |
| ICTR | International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda |
| ICTY | International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia |
| LRA | Lord’s Resistance Army |
| MONUC | United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic of Congo |
| NATO | North Atlantic Treaty Organization |
| NGO | Non-Governmental Organization |
| NRA | National Resistance Army |
| PARECO | Coalition of the Congolese Patriotic Resistance |
| SCF | Save the Children France |
| SHURANET | Somaliland Human Rights Network |
| TASO | The AIDS Support Organization |
| UPDF | Uganda People’s Defense Force |
| U.N. | United Nations |
| UNICEF | United Nation’s Children’s Fund |
| UPDF | Uganda People’s Defense Force |
| USAID | US Agency for International Development |
| WE-ACTX | Women’s Equity in Access to Care and Treatment |
one
Taking Aim
IF QUESTION marks hang over a number of my undertakings, the one suspended over this journey was larger than usual. I imagined my wife and daughters looking up at the quizzical symbol—I pictured it as a pulsing red neon light in the shape of an inverted umbrella handle—and shaking their heads sadly. I shared their quandary. I could hardly breathe in the dust and intense heat, and my vertebrae were rapidly being pulverized from the impact of jagged rocks and potholes. I grabbed my hat and held on as the motorcycle bounced over the treacherous crust of lava and skidded around a corner, sending out a spray of debris into what had once been the main street of Goma, Congo’s easternmost provincial capital, part of a region where warring militias had contributed to the deaths of four million people and the displacement of even more in the last fifteen years. Several armoured UN vehicles, with troops in full battle gear, roared past us on the left, heading in the opposite direction, away from the front lines. I saw only devastation, a blasted wasteland of ruined buildings. Eruption was the operative word here. Choose your enemy, Goma seemed to say: humankind or nature, it’s carnage either way. We skirted the remains of a business with gaping windows. A swollen tongue of lava protruded from the doorway, making its implicit comment on the notion of “progress.”
A kid wearing a blue T-shirt with the word “Westmount” across the chest shouted as we careened past: “Hey, mzungu,