Delphin : The Ups and Downs of a Mercenary

Most studies focusing on those people not directly engaged on the armed struggle, despite being few and far between, tend to ‘simply’ analyse people's livelihoods and coping strategies, thus, narrowing the study of social existence, and consequently that of behaviour, to mere forms of maximisation, to the fundamental. In the case of the DRC this coping, or rather surviving, goes by la débrouille:

“Getting by, or la débrouille covers a wide spectrum of activities and stratagems, hustling and peddling, wheeling and dealing, whoring and pimping, swapping and smuggling, trafficking and stealing, brokering and facilitating—in short, making the most of whatever opportunities arise to avoid starvation” (Lemarchand, 2009:257)

As real as Lemarchad statement can be, limiting the analysis of the social existence and behaviour of warscape inhabitants to avoiding starvation, is not only lazy and unethical, but also plainly wrong. As such one of the main aims of this research project is to investigate not how people survive to make a living but how they conceptualise and search a life worth living. Delphin's story is a case on point.

 The rollercoaster of becoming-

Delphin’s interview was marked by two particular idiomatic expressions: ‘Je me suis trouvé nul part/ ridicule’ ( I found myself nowhere, ridiculous) and ‘évoluer’ (to advance in life). Delphin constantly used these terms as opposed to each other when relating the roller-coaster of ups and downs that has so far been his lived experience. While every turn for the worst came alongside a 'je me suis trouvé nul part', when he seemed to be doing fine, the word of choice was évoluer. Delphin’s life-story is marked as much by his struggle to get by, as for his constant thrive to forge a better life, to évoluer.

Delphin was born in the territory of Kabare in 1990. Delphin’s mum died while giving birth, and the responsibility of taking care of Delphin and his older brother was singly handled to his dad. When the economic affair of maintaining a nuclear household became too much, Delphin studies were cut short and he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother:

‘My childhood was hard, hard because the maternal love was not there.. my dad did not have the means because he was still doing his studies of mathematical physics, so, I found myself nul part…I found myself without studies, a matter of roaming the streets of the neighbourhood’

A short military affair-

Although he made clear that while living with his grandparents he had many ‘facilities of life’; at the age of 14 he decided to self-enrol in an armed group. This is what Delphin referred to as the pivotal moment of his childhood.

When I asked Delphin why he would leave all these ‘facilities’ behind to join an armed group he answered that:

‘Because all those things I was looking for, she could not give me, a boy of that age trying to évoluer he has a need for things… things of necessity like money… new clothes, and those other things that appealed to my sensibility ..I had to move to find those things… After the Mutebusi war of 2004 I found myself in an armed group called Mudungu 40…because life was so very difficult, I find myself nul part, and I thought that in an armed group I could make a life’.

Delphin’s case is by no means unique. While interviewing those is arms was not an aim of the project, it happened quite a few times, and the reasons for taking on arms among those people I interviewed always seemed to point towards the same direction: they did not do so neither for greed nor grievance (Collier & Hoeffler, 1998, 2004; Stewart, 2008; Keen, 2012), they did so either in hopes for the future, or out of them- either way in search of making a life for themselves .

And so, In search of évoluer, to ‘find those things which touched his sensibility,’ at the age of fourteen Delphine decided to self-enlist within the M-40. His time within the Mai Mai group was however short lived for he disliked the experience:

‘It was difficult there, we placed small barriers at the level of the street and we waited until someone wanted to cross to ask them to leave something with us, half of what they were carrying, if they did not we tried to find a way, if not we will hold them during the day and let them free in the evening- they will regret this… the population did not appreciate this, and so we will put pressure to the chef the cartier, so the population will gather a little money to take out the barrier…

…It was just vandalism… I always loved being in group and there was other advantages like having respect from others, being a soldier at that age was a source of pride, with a gun and an uniform.. but it was difficult because they made you do tasks not fit for a kid of my age like patrolling at night, work the land, they send us far away walking to change barriers, 30 km… I find myself ridicule, I thought I will have a better life, an easier one, because I thought the facilities in my grandmother’s house I will find anywhere else, but my taste for it was disappearing’.

Breaking stones and eating at night-

A year within the M-40, and after several failed attempts, his family managed to negotiate his exit from the group at the cost of one cow Delphin went back to live under his father’s roof and enlisted back to secondary school:

‘I found myself en train d’évoluer… I really appreciated that life, I did a reinsertion not only in society but also with my family’

The good days however were again short lived:

‘Finding something to eat with my father’s wife was difficult, she did not treat us like sons, it was hard to eat, we had a mother that was not ours, I found myself with my father and he was with his new wife and their kids, although we were the first ones… I found myself breaking stones to eat’

In the morning, Delphin will go to school, and after, him and his brother will go near the Ruzizi riviera to pick up stones and break them to pieces and sell them by kilos to earn a little money and buy food on their way home. They however, had to wait until the new formed household will finish eating and then cook something for themselves. This affair lasted for a while until he finished his secondary school and obtained his diploma.

Teaching and paying for university-

By 2013, Delphin’s brother was married and living with his wife’s family, which he explained to me ‘had a little more means’. Delphin wanted to go to university, but since his father will not further fund his studies and he had not means to pay for the required fees- the affair was impossible.

Because he had completed his secondary diploma he could however work as a low rank professor, and so he moved to his brother’s house and found a job teaching at a primary school. However, as luck will have it, after two good years ‘evolving’, one of the professors was discovered having an affair with one of the students and as a result the whole teaching unit got fired by the director:

‘And there, I found myself again nul part, my life degraded, my life was so very difficult again, I did no longer studied, nor worked as a professor, I found myself nul part, I found myself simply at home without anything to do’

His brother’s house was meters away from a busy intersection, and so it occurred to Delphin that he could start a little kiosk business where he will sell soft-drinks, sweets and the like to those passing by in order to pay his university. This worked out for about a year, however by the time the final exams were on, the kiosk was no longer profitable and he could not pay the required fees. Determined as he was, he found a job as a private professor for children; for a few months this worked well for Delphin, but eventually his client decided to move to Goma with his family, he unsuccessfully tried to find more private lessons to give but once more:

‘I found myself again in the street… nul part.. and so I started doing this mercenariat in which I currently find myself’

A mercenary and a hospital bill-

For the following years Delphin did any odd bits and pieces he could get his hands on. When covid-19 arrived, the possibility of working got severely affected, but he considers himself lucky because he found a job building a site in Nguba, Bukavu. The work lasted a while and it also provided him with the skills and the necessary materials to start building a living space for him and his girlfriend within the parcel of his brother’s new extended family. Although he was doing fine, Delphin felt he was not advancing in life and so he decided to get married:

‘I told myself too much is too much, until when? The question I asked myself was, until when? I see my brother and the others evolving, doing big things,.. people are getting married, they have their own transport, have moved to the city while I am still here in the countryside… so I told myself I was going to get engaged’

Life seemed to be going forward, until shortly after marring bad luck stroke Delphin again:

‘In 2020 life degrades again, I found myself down again, we could say down because life became hard because my wife is pregnant of our second girl, she is been hospitalised and life has become a catastrophe – how to find something to pay the hospital bills?

But thanks to an acquaintance he made while working as a builder, he crossed paths with a job opportunity building houses for Banro in the territory of Luhwindja. Two straight months of work that pay the total sum of 160 dollars. Enough to pay the hospital bills and continue with life.

Since then, Delphin’s has been mostly working as a pushpusher. This is hard work for the job of a pushpusher entails spending the good days, the ones he finds work to be done, pushing a heavily charged wooden trolly up and down the hilly city that is Bukavu. Delphin explained that his mercenariat is now complimented by his wife, whom enlarges the household income by going to the border with Rwanda to buy tomatoes and sell them in Bukavu.

Delphin defined his current situation as being ‘nul part:

'I admire this mercenariat because it allows me to buy basic necessities… like soap.. clothes.. food…and to give money to my family … but I cannot consider being pushpusher as a job…. How to do things like putting a little bit of money in the bank?’

When I asked Delphin about his dreams for the future and his biggest current challenges he answered that he dreams of:

‘being someone in life by my own means… I feel uncomfortable, because this (being a pushpusher) is not my ambition, I evolve in a bad way, I do not know what I wanted to be, but it was not this that I am… my life does not respond to my expectations, my necessities, my needs and my wishes’

Despite his current situation, Delphin has not lost hope to go upwards again, as he remarked in the end of our interview:

‘We cannot évoluer without looking for a life, we have always the intention to fight against life, if one find itself simply with the arms crossed, hunger will attack…. but as the saying goes: do not lose hope while you are still breathing’

Se Débrouiller or Évoluer?

Delphin’s ‘mercenariat’ may be a clear example of this hustling and peddling to avoid starvation, however, his constant reference to being nul part, his impossibility of évoluer, is a good remainder that people under the social condition of war are not simply searching to make a living. Although in warscapes the lack of possibilities to achieve projects of becoming a is very real, people are nevertheless in search of a dignified life.

This may seem trivial, but it has serious consequences for the study of armed conflict; particularly when looking at drivers of social behaviour. In the case of Delphin, it shows how the frustration and boredom that comes from being ‘nul part’ factored as a reason for joining a militia, just as much as the deception of not finding what he was looking for led to self-demobilisation. Importantly, Delphin’s case is not unique, for those people whom I interviewed and had joined a militia replicated the same pattern: they enlisted with hopes of making a life, but taking on arms did not respond to their sensibilities and expectations- so when possible they left; all in all, they did not find a life-worth-living.

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Searching for What?

Although focusing on the opposite dynamics- why people return to arms after processes of demobilisation, some authors have highlighted that this process of circular return- a pendulum movement between civilian and combatant life- is largely shaped by the fact that, ex-combatants cannot find the forms of capital and wellbeing they acquired within armed groups while reintegrated as civilians (Vlassenroot et al, 2020). Interestingly, in my research I have found this phenomenon to be farily common also among street children in Bukavu. These processes of circular return highlight that: both, armed groups and the street represent autonomous social spaces which provide specifics forms of wellbeing that are hard to replicate when outside of them (Idem) .

While pointing in exact opposed directions, both, Delphin’s story and these processes of circular return highlight the importance of analysing people’s search for well-being when looking for drivers of social behaviour, and thus, how a nuanced understanding of larger conflict dynamics requires that our inspection moves beyond the fundamental into the existential.

Therefore, the real question that warscape anthropologists should be asking is not how people in conflict zones make a living, but rather how do they go about making a life, and one worth living for that matter.

Bibliography

Collier, P. & Hoeffler, A., (2004) ‘Greed and Grievance in Civil War’. Oxford Economic Papers, No. 56, pp 563–595.

Collier, P., and Hoeffler, A., (1998) ‘On economic causes of civil war’, Oxford Economic Papers No 50. Pp 563-573.

Keen, D., (2012) ‘Greed and grievances in civil war’ International Affairs  88 (4) pp. 757-777.

Lemarchand, R., (2009) The Dynamics of violence in Central Africa. Phildelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Stewart, F., (ed.) (2008) Horizontal inequalities and conflict: understanding group violence in multiethnic societies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Vlassenroot, K., Mudinga, E. And Musamba Busy, J., (2020), ‘Navigating social spaces : armed mobilization and circular return in Eastern DR Congo’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 33(4) pp 832-852.