African Heroes: stories of brave badasses

Don’t Look Here for Heroes

There’s been little heroism to report in Goma, eastern DR Congo, over the last 10 months that I’ve lived here.

There has been a lot of sexual violence. No one knows how much, but at least thousands of girls and women have been raped here – mostly by civilians, according to one trustworthy database. I know all you hear is that Hutu rebels who perpetrated the Rwandan genocide are raping people. That’s the sexiest way to sell the story, and it appeals to a world of news readers who have been sold simplistic moralized stories about genocides and holocausts for more than 50 years. But it’s not true. Monday I was in an orphanage for little girls whose parents offer them to horny strangers for a few bucks. Their caretakers, a couple of local social workers, told me that the majority of girls in Goma have been sexually abused at least once in their lives. I guess it’s the equivalent of leaving your kids at home for a few minutes while you run to the store and buy a carton of milk. No big deal!

I just took a walk, and the normal events that transpired during my walk more or less explain the anathema of so many men exploiting and raping women and little girls. 

17:00 - Leaving the office, am hissed at repeatedly by a man standing around doing nothing on the street, one of hundreds.

17:10 - Walking down a relatively wealthy and tranquil sidestreet, I pass three boys sitting on chairs in front of a house. One is wearing a police uniform and has an AK-47. “Where are you going?” They ask.

17:15 - Rounding the corner to head towards the boulevard, I see two men conferencing in the road. “Oh, listen, I’ll catch you in a bit. I am going to go harass this white woman,” says the drunk looking one with a big scar on his face in Swahili. Or something like that.

17:17 - “Hey, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,” says the drunk looking man with the scar on his face in French as he rapidly approaches me. “Where are you going?” As soon as he catches up to me, he starts to walk next to me. “Where are you going, beautiful?” I try to walk faster, and he speeds up. I stop, he stops. “Can you please just let me be?” I say in French. “I don’t want to walk with you.” “Why not!?” he says. I don’t answer. Instead, I turn around and start walking back the other way. He does the same. His friend is shouting at him in Swahili, and the kid with the AK-47 is laughing with his friends and a good view. After a minute of my deliberate and focused walking, the man stops following me.

17:21 - I pass dozens of women carrying 20 lb water bidons on their heads, others carrying food, others selling wares on the street.

17:25 - I re-enter the gated, guarded compound where I work.

Now, just imagine the whole scenario and think about rape. Is it hard to make the connection? Like, we’re inside of a private house and I’m a Congolese girl and drunk dude with the scar on his face is a family friend. “But I don’t want to take my clothes off,” I’d say as he ripped them off. “You don’t? Why?” as he proceeded to rape me. Oops! I guess he asked too late. Then when I went to tell the police, maybe one of them would take the opportunity to rob me of my last money, grope me, and then hitch a ride on a mototaxi with his gun unintentionally pointed at pedestrians on the side of the road. When the case went to trial, oh, six months later, I might be dead, because the drunk dude with the scar on his face might have killed me in revenge for reporting his behavior. Not enough people would find this unreasonable to make him accountable for it.

I am so sick of living in Congo

I am taking two days off right now in Goma instead of going on vacation because four days is not enough time to leave the continent. I’m telling you, if you think African warzones are exciting, think again. Some missionary may be getting shot right now on a remote road in Rutshutu territory but it is boring as a Kansas corn field where I live. The stimulation consists of relentless, pervasive shitty/sleeziness, like the flight path that is above my bedroom by about five meters and results in my being woken up every hour all night and morning by an airplane that sounds like it’s about the crash into me and is carrying probably some minerals that rebels extracted as part of a terror campaign in the bush. I don’t see the rebels, just the devastated women and children they kidnapped and/or raped brutally. One airplane crashed just down the street last year leaving a crater. And the pilots are probably my drunk Ukrainian next-door neighbors, the ones who spent three hours one night going back and forth with two prostitutes they had hired with the following conversation:

Pilot drinks vodka shot: “I’ll tell you what money is…”

Prostitute: “Money? I need a lot of money.”

Pilot: “Money? I’ll tell you what you’re worth. $20”

Prostitute: “I’m not giving you no more or no less for that.”

Pilot drinks shot, prostitute drinks shot and stumbles: “This is nothing.”

Pilot: “More than you’re worth.”

No sex commences, repeat conversation for three hours. Poor Tobias. My roommate actually had to try to sleep listening to that cause they brilliantly built our houses one inch away from each other even though they could have filled up the vacant lot/trash heap across the street and given us more room. But we did get to see into their rooms, and this drunk dude with the prostitute, who walks around the house in army pants and no shirt, sleeps on a bed of planks!

I am going to another frat party tonight at another gorgeous house on Lake Kivu. Tomorrow I will have a hangover and spend the whole day doing my laundry and wincing from the sound of the planes and wondering why the hell we pay our guards when all they do is sit on their street and jeopardize our security. They should be called insecurity guards.

Then maybe I will glance out the window at the dirt playground/trash heap and feel sorry for the kids playing soccer with no shoes on top of volcanic rock and the other kids eating from the trash or those breathing in the toxic black smoke that comes from the burning trash.

I want to move to Europe.

What's the point of this blog?

This blog began when Emily Meehan was stuck in Somaliland without any money left to pay for her hotel, driver, soldier-security guards, or food. But she wanted to go into the desert and walk with nomads, as freelance journalists are wont to do. So she told her friend Greg Galant that she was going to send an email to every single person she had ever met asking them for $20. She asked Greg to open a Paypal account for her so they could pay into it. The Internet connection was not fast enough for her to do that in Hargeysa, or maybe, she was just saying that because she was intimidated by the prospect of opening up a Paypal account. Greg advised her not to do this, but instead start a blog and raise money with the blog via the tool Chipin, which would connect to Paypal. This Emily did. She had already decided to start a blog about how cool Africa is after much conversation with William Deed over a lazy weekend in the Mara Triangle.

After gratefully collecting $1500 from friends, readers, and her devoted literary agent, Susan Rabiner, Emily was able to pay her team and head out to the desert to interview nomads for this NPR story about drought in the Horn of Africa. (The collection was made possible by Dan Wambua Muende and Alessandra Argenti of Nairobi, Kenya, who dutifully helped their roommate by withdrawing money two days in a row from an ATM with Emily’s bank card and then trying five days in a row to wire it to her in Somaliland, where there are no banks, via Dahabshiil, a Hawala money transfer agency.)

The seed of this idea to write about how cool Africa is came out of a conversation between Emily and Neil King in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal. Neil and Michael Philips were coming up with story ideas for Emily to report while in Somalia. Neil said all anyone ever hears about from Africa is war and scourges. He said there must be some positive stories to tell and Emily should try to find some. He suggested one in Juba, Sudan, which Emily has since forgotten. But this got her thinking, she liked Neil’s suggestion. Neil himself seemed quite liberated for a finance reporter and Wall Street Journal employee.

And here you have the result, “African Heroes: Stories of Brave Badasses.” The original title was “African Heroes: Stories of Brave Badasses on the Last Frontier,” but when putting up the blog, Greg Galant left out the ending for reasons Emily never discovered but nonetheless agreed with. Greg is the one who chose the Tumblr platform.

African Heroes has been linked to by dozens of blogs and reviewed in a June 2009 article in the Diplomatic Courier called “Getting Out the Good News: Blogging Africa’s ‘Other Side.’”

Writes John Bavoso:

While some blogs focus on innovations, others choose to highlight the stories of people who make Africa such a unique region for other reasons. This was the reasoning behind the new blog African Heroes, which, as its tagline “stories of brave badasses” suggests, sheds some spotlight on Africans who are worthy of news coverage for the inspiring deeds they do and lives they lead. Emily Meehan, the blogger behind African Heroes and an American journalist living and writing in East Africa, chose this theme because she felt it would appeal to readers both inside and outside of Africa. “I use the theme of ‘badasses’ or heroes in proper English because I think it’s something Americans love,” Meehan wrote in a recent email correspondence. “It’s something my African heroes and most Americans have in common, they’re all pioneers.”

Meehan is familiar with both worlds – until fairly recently she was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, covering issues relating to twenty-something’s in America. However, working in the mainstream media lost its appeal after a while. “I got very tired of seeing that every media outlet was covering the same stories, very few of which interested me,” Meehan remembers. “So I decided to work on news that was under-reported.” The first step in this process was to find a location which interested her and a place where she could see her journalism making an actual difference in the lives of people. “I have always loved traveling to obscure places. I drew up a list of some obscure places with misunderstood troubles: Chechnya, Georgia, Somalia, Venezuela, Congo. The Horn of Africa was just full of my ideal content.” So, in a move reminiscent of the badasses whom she has come to portray and admire, Meehan packed up her things and moved to East Africa with what most people would consider not much of a plan.

Meehan is currently working on a five-part piece on Somalia as well as other projects for various media outlets on a free-lance basis, but she really enjoys meeting people and writing her hero profiles. Her most recent hero is a man named Dr. Dihoud, a founder of the Somali National Movement (SNM) and the only psychiatrist in Somaliland, the autonomous region of Somalia which has claimed independence but lacks formal recognition from the international community. Included on the blog is an audio clip of the man telling his story in his own words and with his own voice. Dr. Dihoud is a very prestigious and accomplished man – but Meehan did not seek him out, per se. Instead, they met while staying in rooms across the hall from one another in a hotel – which is a testament to the fact that truly great African heroes can be found anywhere, doing anything.

In the end, these blogs may never be as popular or well-read as the traditional news outlets’ – but the positive information that is being put out for public consumption is being produced by people with a true dedication to helping Africa and Africans. And, for the most part, being different is just fine with these bloggers – they’re out to provide a distinct alternative for media consumers. “When I first came to Africa I was coached by a very good journalist named Pedro. I had plans to write about corruption and war in Somalia. He told me not to,” Meehan explains. “Nobody cares, it’s been happening for so long, don’t just write the same story as all the others, he said. I don’t completely agree with Pedro … But if my only news is bad news, how am I helping?”