What Does Globalization Look Like in Eastern Congo?
Photographer Richard Mosse uses an unusual combination of technologies to tell the story of the conflict in eastern Congo.
A Congolese musician in the town of Mweso watches as a convoy of United Nations peacekeeping troops, escorted by attack helicopters, withdraws from their camp at Pinga to reinforce other regions.
by Ben Mattison
Globalization has an impact even in a place like eastern Congo, where connections to the outside world are weakened by the ongoing violence, poverty, and crumbling infrastructure. We asked photographer Richard Mosse ART ’08 to share some of his work there, and in the resulting images, you can see tendrils of the global system. The warlord hiding deep in the forest talks on his cell phone and refers to a copy of a report written by Human Rights Watch. The man panning for gold by hand will sell what he finds to middlemen and on, eventually, to the global market. UN peacekeepers flit through towns and villages. Even the workers cutting down trees to make charcoal are part of a tangled series of causes and effects with significant implications for the global challenge of climate change.
Mosse has been taking photographs of the conflict in eastern Congo since 2010, capturing potent images using a combination of older technologies.
He shoots with a large-format bellows camera, a nineteenth-century design executed in the 20th century by camera maker R.H. Phillips, and uses Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued infrared film that was used for military surveillance during World War II and the Vietnam War. Intended to isolate human bodies among foliage, it renders infrared light as bright pink. Since the chlorophyll in living plants reflects infrared light, plant matter appears pink; other objects absorb infrared light and appear more or less as they do to the naked eye.
“It’s a very unusual, eccentric film format,” Mosse says, “It turns colors inside out.”
An artisanal miner pans for gold by hand in a river in Mwenga, South Kivu. Rebels from the FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda) command the nearby Tchondo Mountains, mining gold at Burinyi and enforcing a mineral tax on miners and mineral transporters, while carrying out frequent ambushes in this area.
The port of the lakeside city of Goma, on the border between Congo and Rwanda. Goma sits on Lake Kivu, one of the Great Lakes of Central Africa. At this time, the main road between the two cities of Goma, to the north of the lake, and Bukavu, to its south, was blocked because of a collapsed bridge. Most traffic between these two regional centers is transported by boat. The skeletons of colonial rail bogies sit rusting on the shore, with expensive modern Land Cruiser vehicles idling nearby, typically belonging to non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Colonial detritus is a common sight throughout Congo, which once had an elaborate infrastructure built by the Belgians to extract the land’s wealth from the country’s interior and transport it to the coast where it was shipped north for Europe. That infrastructure was not maintained after colonialism ended, and is generally in a state of decay.
The road north of the town of Kitchanga, leading toward Walikale, is paved with volcanic basalt from nearby Nyamuragira crater, which erupts frequently. There are few cars, with most goods being carried by hand, bicycle, or chukudu, an ingenious, locally made, two-wheeled wooden vehicle designed for cheaply transporting produce, charcoal, building supplies, and other goods. Kitchanga, in Masisi Territory, North Kivu, has been afflicted for decades by numerous human rights violations carried out by a patchwork of armed groups, as well as the Congolese national army (FARDC).
Deeper in the jungle, this is the main road to Walikale, near Pinga. This road is in extremely bad condition, often impassable. Usually, the only traffic which can make the crossing, especially during the rainy season, are Land Cruisers and motorbikes. Trucks carrying minerals, wood and other commodities can pass but extremely slowly, taking days or even weeks to traverse a couple of hundred kilometers. Infrastructure throughout Congo is so dilapidated that parts of the country are inaccessible except by air.
This abandoned home is evidence of displaced communities who have fled the front lines between the Nduma Defense of Congo (NDC), also known as Mai Mai Sheka, and the FARDC.
Ntabo Ntaberi Sheka, leader of Nduma Defense of Congo. The NDC say they bear arms to protect ethnic Nyanga communities from armed groups, such as the FDLR. However, the UN Group of Experts say that the NDC competes for control of mineral-rich areas, such as the mine at Bisie, which holds vast resources of tin. NDC extorts all aspects of artisanal mining activities by imposing illegal taxes. Bisie is owned by Alphamin, a mining company traded in Canada with American and South African investors, which is currently carrying out exploration on the mountain. NDC have attacked Alphamin’s exploration base repeatedly. If Alphamin’s industrial mine at Bisie is successfully opened, it could bring much more transport and communications infrastructure to the area, and create jobs.
Rebel fighters from the NDC. Though the group is well armed, fighters try to blend into civilian populations, carrying machetes instead of rifles to avoid detection. Sheka’s former colonel, Gedeon, and a party of fighters loyal to him have recently defected from NDC to attack Sheka. It is said that Gedeon is motivated by a secret bounty placed on Sheka’s head. As a result, the two groups frequently clash in this area.
Sheka with his officers at a jungle base in the mountains of Walikale. Sheka and his men are alleged to have systematically raped more than two hundred people in the village of Luvungi for at least three days, starting on July 30, 2010. Sheka is said to have ordered the mass rape episode in order to increase his notoriety and gain influence in negotations with the Congolese government. Sheka rejects the allegations. When interviewed by the photographer, Sheka said he had several wives and girlfriends and asked, “Why would I need to rape?”
Members of the NDC. The United Nations mission in Congo (MONUSCO), along with the FARDC, began military operations against NDC in July 2014. Yet Sheka and his men remain at large, taking refuge in the remote jungles of Walikale, where they continue to loot the local communities and illegally tax the region’s miners, whom they claim to protect.
A portrait of an NDC rebel, showing a bivouac erected as a temporary dwelling. Life in the jungle is extremely hostile.
Sheka communicates by cell phone. Cell phone coverage in Walikale is very limited; however, a mast has been erected near Sheka’s remote hilltop base. Sheka changes his number frequently to avoid detection. In all of Congo there are almost no fixed line telephones, but there are 37 million cell phone subscribers. Cheap cell phone coverage has changed life for the Congolese, as it has for many throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Other armed groups in the region communicate by satellite phone.
A Congolese musician in the town of Mweso watches as a convoy of United Nations peacekeeping troops, escorted by attack helicopters, withdraws from their camp at Pinga to reinforce other regions.
Artisanal miners panning for gold in the Kadubu River, carrying the tailings of BANRO gold mine, Walungu, South Kivu. BANRO is an advanced industrial gold mine that produces about 140,000 ounces of gold per year. The rough roadway leading to BANRO’s mining operation is being upgraded by a team of construction workers from Civicon, a Kenya-based construction and transportation business specializing in heavy loads and specialist cargoes. The Mukungwe Mountains can be seen in the far distance, where local farmers burn the hillside in preparation for sowing crops. The Mukungwe Mountains are also host to large artisanal gold mines, producing minerals which are directly linked to armed groups.
The village of Karaba in Walungu Territory overlooks the Tchondo Mountains in Mwenga Territory, South Kivu. Armed Hutu rebels from the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) have recently moved into the Tchondo Mountains, destabilizing the region, carrying out frequent ambushes on the main road, and mining gold at Burinyi. The photographer’s porter refused to carry equipment around the mountain for fear of being shot by FDLR rebels.
Woodcutters preparing a mound of timber to produce charcoal near the town of Pinga, Walikale Territory, North Kivu. Most families in Congo cook using charcoal. Armed groups are involved in almost every industry in eastern Congo—from artisanal mineral exploitation to the culling of primeval forest for charcoal production. The illegal charcoal trade is estimated to earn DRC’s militias $14-50 million USD per year in road taxes.
Woodcutters chopping trees near Nyangezi in South Kivu.
Nyafunze Valley in South Kivu, between Mushinga and Kaziba, is peaceful and beautiful. Before 2003, this valley was extremely dangerous, hosting the FDLR and Mudundu 40 rebels. But now, no armed groups are active in the valley, having retreated further into South Kivu or disbanded. In spite of the conflict, Congo has huge potential for tourism, with some breathtaking scenery and well managed national parks, as well as a very welcoming population. If and when order is restored to eastern Congo, it could become a popular tourist destination again, just as it was in the 1950s.
Because of its otherworldly appearance, Aerochrome was adopted by the psychedelic movement—on the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s album Are You Experienced, for example.
“So you had this tension at this historic moment, a tension in the medium where it was being claimed, appropriated, used, and manipulated by both sides: by the anti-war movement, on album covers and posters, and simultaneously by the U.S. military to actually target the Viet Cong,” Mosse says. “I really wanted to bring all of that baggage to bear on my work in the Congo in order to think about war photography—not simply to critique it, but to find alternate ways to tell stories.”
Historically, Mosse notes, war photographers have avoided “over-aestheticizing” their work. “It's a very codified way of representing the world,” he says, “for a very good reason—because you're dealing with human suffering.”
But, he adds, “in my opinion, aesthetics—in other words, beauty—has a great role to play in telling a story and communicating. Beauty, in my opinion, is the sharpest tool in the box of communication. So if you disregard the aesthetic potential of photography in trying to tell these stories, I feel that that's a mistake.”
In addition to showing in galleries and receiving attention in the media, Mosse’s work has taken on a second life on social media. With its intense colors, the series is particularly striking on a backlit computer screen. “It kind of got out of my control, in a nice way,” he says. “That's how photography works.”
But on the internet, it’s easy for the visual imagery to become separated from its context. “I try my best to contextualize the work and to anchor it to the narrative of eastern Congo,” where an estimated 5.4 million people have died of war-related causes, he says. “That's not just the people getting killed by bullets. That's also sickness, malnutrition, hunger, displacement, and exceptionally high mortality rates. But we don't really hear about it in the Western media as often as it warrants.”