democratic-republic-of-the-congo

"African Pygmies speak languages belonging to either the Nilo-Saharan or the Niger–Kordofanian family. It is assumed that Pygmies once spoke their own language(s), but that, through living in symbiosis with other Africans, in prehistorical times, they adopted languages belonging to these two families."

"We paddle away from the shore. Reflected in the water, the moon gazes up at us, then twists and blurs in the current. Until the pirogue slips under the tangle of branches overhanging the river and the moon disappears behind the trees."

"A hut is a green cocoon, a shell of leaves that is round and compact. Warm and welcoming, protective: as you enter you immediately feel the desire to lie down on the floor in foetal position. You are inside, but it's as if you are not there at all: the hut makes you invisible. In the sense that it is all formed from the forest, of leaves and branches, living things. Animals passing by mistake it for a bush."

"The forest fills you with its own being. It feeds you. It gives you food from its own mouth. In the eyes of the Baka every animal hunted, every fish caught or fruit picked is like an offering, a sacrifice that the forest makes of itself, a gift to be thankful for."

"Though the pygmies die young they start life early, generally marrying at eight or nine. The men buy their wives with three or four spears and ten to fifteen arrows, according to the market value of the lady. These they pay by instalments, the courtship beginning by the suitor presenting the father with a spear, and if accepted he comes along again as soon as ever he can raise another, but not till the last arrow is handed over is he allowed to take his bride; thus the father always has something in hand, should the suitor change his mind, with which to sooth the sorrowing lady of possibly seven or eight years of age. A man can have as many wives as he can afford to buy."

"We are all coming back as we like the Belgian side best."

"If we make a village here it is good. If we make it in another place it is just as good."

"The short stature of Pygmy groups around the world has long intrigued anthropologists. It is generally accepted that their small body size is a result of genetic adaptation; however, which genes were selected, and the nature of the underlying selective force(s), remain unknown. The various hypotheses proposed include adaptations to food limitation, thermoregulation, mobility in the forest, and/or short lifespan. A recent study of the HGDP-CEPH populations identified a signal of selection in the insulin growth factor signalling pathway in Biaka Pygmies, which might be associated with short stature, but this signal was not shared with Mbuti Pygmies. By contrast, we found strong signals for selection in both African Pygmy groups at two genes involved in the iodide-dependent thyroid hormone pathway: TRIP4 in Mbuti Pygmies; and IYD in Biaka Pygmies (Fig. 7). Intriguingly, a previous study found a significantly lower frequency of goiter in Efe Pygmies (9.4%) than in Lese Bantu farmers (42.9%). The Efe and Lese live in close proximity to one another in the iodine-deficient Ituri Forest and share similar diets. Moreover, the frequency of goiter in Efe women living in Bantu villages was similar to that of Efe women living in the forest, and the frequency of goiter in offspring with an Efe mother and a Lese father was intermediate between that of Efe and Lese. These observations suggest that the Efe have adapted genetically to an iodine-deficient diet; we suggest that the signals of recent positive selection that we observe at TRIP4 in Mbuti Pygmies and IYD in Biaka Pygmies may reflect such genetic adaptations to an iodine-deficient diet. Furthermore, alterations in the thyroid hormone pathway can cause short stature. We therefore suggest that short stature in these Pygmy groups may have arisen as a consequence of genetic alterations in the thyroid hormone pathway. If this scenario is true, then there are two important implications. First, this would suggest that short stature was not selected for directly in the ancestors of Pygmy groups, but rather arose as an indirect consequence of selection in response to an iodine-deficient diet. Second, since different genes in the thyroid hormone pathway show signals of selection in Mbuti vs. Biaka Pygmies, this would suggest that short stature arose independently in the ancestors of Mbuti and Biaka Pygmies, and not in a common ancestral population. Moreover, most Pygmy-like groups around the world dwell in tropical forests, and hence are likely to have iodine-deficient diets. The possibility that independent adaptations to an iodine-deficient diet might therefore have contributed to the convergent evolution of the short stature phenotype in Pygmy-like groups around the world deserves further investigation."

"Channelling attention and resources to the Ebola outbreak, donors and government officials were blindsided by the developing measles catastrophe, while the nation’s ailing infrastructure and healthcare system stymied an effective response. And now, the coronavirus pandemic has been unleashed on the world, complicating an already challenging situation. “It’s obvious the priority will be given to COVID-19 in the coming weeks and months,” said Vincent Sodjinou, the head of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) measles response. “The priority [before] was on Ebola, and it wasn’t easy to mobilise funds,” he added. “For measles, it was difficult for us to fight. It was a daily fight.”"

"Close to a quarter of a million people have been infected this year alone. The World Health Organization (WHO) says this is the world's largest and fastest-moving epidemic. Measles in DR Congo has now killed more than twice the number who have died of Ebola there in the last 15 months. The Congolese government and the WHO launched an emergency vaccination programme in September that aimed to inoculate more than 800,000 children. But poor infrastructure, attacks on health centres and a lack of access to routine healthcare have all hindered efforts to stop the spread of the disease. Four million children have been vaccinated, but experts warn that this amounts to less than half of the total in the country - and not enough vaccines are available."

"“We’re fighting the measles epidemic on two fronts - preventing infections and preventing deaths,” said UNICEF Representative in the DRC, Edouard Beigbeder. “Along with the government and key partners, UNICEF has been racing to vaccinate children against measles, and at the same time, supplying clinics with medicines that treat symptoms and improve the chance of survival for those already infected.”"

"“We’re facing this alarming situation because millions of Congolese children miss out on routine immunization and lack access to health care when they fall sick,” said Beigbeder. “On top of that, a weak health system, insecurity, community mistrust of vaccines and vaccinators and logistical challenges all contribute to a huge number of unvaccinated children at risk of contracting the disease.”"

"An outbreak of measles that began in early 2019 in the southeast corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has now spread to all 26 provinces. Over 180,000 cases and more than 3,000 deaths have been reported. The outbreak has disproportionately affected young children under five years of age. Similar outbreaks occurred previously in the DRC in 2011 and again in 2015. This is the largest and most fatal of the large measles outbreaks across the world this year. These have occurred in the Ukraine, Philippines, Brazil, US, New Zealand, Madagascar and Nigeria. While the details of each individual outbreak vary, the root cause of measles outbreaks is always the same: too few children receive timely and effective vaccination."

"Many specific challenges in the DRC compound the already difficult task of vaccine delivery. Years of internal conflict have displaced millions from their homes, limiting their access to preventive health services. The country has an estimated population of 87 million, of which more than half are children. About two thirds live in rural areas and 40% of mothers report distance to health facilities as a challenge when getting health care. In addition, inherent mistrust of government-run programmes prevents some from seeking care. Those who do are met by health-care workers who want to help, but are hampered by stock outages or unstable refrigeration necessary to store vaccines in the prescribed temperature range. Many are understaffed or simply don’t have sufficient vaccines available due to the fragility of cold-storage and supply chain in remote areas."

"Even when cases of measles are detected in clinics, limited diagnostic and communication infrastructure can cause significant lags in triggering the outbreak response. The DRC currently has only one reference laboratory that can run the blood tests necessary to confirm a measles outbreak. Transporting and processing samples can take weeks. Add to this the competing demands of a health system combating two Ebola outbreaks in the past two years, and these lags can become larger."

"Since the start of 2019, the DRC’s measles epidemic has infected more than 341,000 people and killed some 6,400, taking almost three times as many lives as Ebola over the same period. “The actual mortality rate might be much higher, up to four or five times higher than what we see in official numbers because there are a lot of health structures that are not functioning properly,” said Karel Janssens, Doctors Without Borders’ (MSF) head of mission in the DRC. “So, there’s a lot of community deaths that are not reflected in some of the official reports.”"

"Last year, the DRC’s Ministry of Health led an effort to vaccinate 18 million children against the measles across the country, using $22m of donor funding – excluding MSF’s contribution. In comparison, USAID alone has spent $569m since the start of the Ebola outbreak, according to the US State Department, while the total funding for the Ebola response is unclear."

"In countries with advanced healthcare, the measles vaccine works upwards of 85 percent of the time, according to Patricia Tanifum, a measles expert at the WHO. But in remote corners of the DRC, where the health system and road network have suffered decades of conflict, underfunding and neglect, the virus thrives. Some five million children in the DRC are acutely malnourished, which means the effectiveness of the vaccine is reduced. When vaccinated, malnourished children are less able to devel-op the immunoglobulin against measles, leaving them vulnerable, Sodjinou said. Meanwhile, about 1 percent of rural areas have access to electricity from the national grid, making it hard to deliver and store temperature-sensitive vaccines such as measles that need to be kept between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius (35.6 and 46.4 Fahrenheit). “If not kept in the right range of temperature … it would be correct to compare it to a water injection given to children,” said Philippe Mpabenda, MSF’s head of measles response in Boso Manzi."

"The challenge of transporting an effective vaccine from a factory to a village like Macau is a logistical nightmare. The DRC is about seven times the size of Germany but has less than 0.5 percent of the paved roads compared to Germany. “Sometimes you can find a village which is 100km (62 miles) from the health centre, and they don’t have a motorbike or cold-chain,” said Sodjinou."

"DAKAR (Reuters) - Democratic Republic of Congo’s government has declared an epidemic of mea-sles, which the latest health ministry figures show has now killed at least 1,500 people, more than a hundred more than have died of Ebola. While health officials have focused on the hemorrhagic Ebola virus in Congo’s east, about 87,000 suspected measles cases have been reported across the coun-try so far this year, more than the 65,000 recorded in the whole of last year. Congo’s health minis-try announced the measles figure when it declared the epidemic on Monday."

"A viral outbreak has killed more than 6,500 children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and is still spreading through the country. The foe isn’t the feared coronavirus, which has only just reached the DRC. It’s an old, familiar and underestimated adversary: measles. Cases began to spike here in October 2018. Children became weak, feverish and congested, with red eyes and painful sores in their mouths, all with the telltale rash of measles. “We have been running after the virus ever since,” says Balcha Masresha, an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization (WHO) regional Africa office in Brazzaville in the neighbouring Republic of Congo. The situation has mushroomed into what WHO experts say might be the largest documented measles outbreak in one country since the world gained a measles vaccine in 1963 (see ‘Measles cases on the rise’). The highly contagious measles virus continues to spread around the globe. In 2018, cases surged to an estimated 10 million worldwide, with 140,000 deaths, a 58% increase since 2016. In rich countries, scattered measles outbreaks are fuelled by people refusing to vaccinate their children. But in poor countries, the problems are health systems so broken and underfunded that it is nigh-on impossible to deliver the vaccine to people who need it. The DRC’s flood of cases shows why measles will keep flaring up despite efforts to control it. And the situation will only worsen with the COVID-19 pandemic: more than 20 countries have already suspended measles vaccination campaigns as healthcare workers scramble to deal with coronavirus."

"The DRC has difficulties on a number of levels. The country has such a high birth rate — 3.5 million children are born each year — that it needs to conduct mass vaccination campaigns every two years. Those campaigns, in which tens of thousands of health workers fan out across this vast country, are a logistical nightmare. First, the government has to get the vaccine from the capital, Kinshasa, to remote villages that can be reached only by helicopter — or through bloody conflict zones in the eastern part of the country. The vaccine must be kept between 2 °C and 8 °C from the time it leaves the warehouse until it is administered — a challenge in a tropical environment where power outages are frequent. Health workers must be trained to inject it safely, a much more difficult task than dropping liquid polio vaccine on a child’s tongue. The vaccine comes as a powder, which must be reconstituted with an accompanying solution of sterile diluent and then used within 6 hours. It also comes in ten-dose vials; worried about wastage, vaccinators are sometimes hesitant to open one when just a few children show up to a session, so the children go unimmunized."

"Money is a major problem. Vaccination campaigns cost around US$1.80 per child in the DRC, says Masresha; international donors foot some of the bill, but the country is expected to pay a share. In 2010, the DRC couldn’t muster the funds and cancelled a scheduled campaign. An outbreak that hit at the end of the year raged for more than 30 months. Further campaigns in 2013–14 and 2016–17 didn’t reach enough children. In June 2019, after cases soared to more than 3,500 a week at the start of the year, the DRC government declared an epidemic, opening the door to further international aid. By the end of the year, 18.5 million children had been vaccinated. The WHO estimates that there have been more than 348,000 cases and 6,500 deaths, but Francisco Luquero, an epidemiologist at Epicentre, the research arm of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, also called Doctors Without Borders) in Paris, thinks the outbreak is much worse. The case count reflects only people who go to health centres, he says; many don’t in the DRC. As for the mortality estimates, “they count deaths that happen right after a measles case. They should look out for the next five years,” he says, because of immune amnesia. “The outbreak will have a profound impact on public health.”"

"The modern Democratic Republic of Congo remains poor because its citizens still lack the economic institutions that create the basic incentives that make a society prosperous. It is not geography, culture, or the ignorance of its citizens or politicians that keep the Congo poor, but its extractive economic institutions. These are still in place after all these centuries because political power continues to be narrowly concentrated in the hands of an elite who have little incentive to enforce secure property rights for the people, to provide the basic public services that would improve the quality of life, or to encourage economic progress. Rather, their interests are to extract income and sustain their power. They have not used this power to build a centralized state, for to do so would create the same problems of opposition and political challenges that promoting economic growth would. Moreover, as in much of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, infighting triggered by rival groups attempting to take control of extractive institutions destroyed any tendency for state centralization that might have existed."

"Of course colonial governance can only return with the consent of the country in question. The nationalist leaders in developing countries are probably not eager to see this happen. But the people- given those decades of ‘anti-colonial disaster’- possibly are."

"So bongo, bongo, bongo. I don't want to leave the Congo, oh no no no no no! Bingo, bangle, bungle! I'm so happy in the jungle, I refuse to go!"

"What we’ve been hearing from the panelists is how the global food system works right now... It’s based on large multinational companies, private profits, and very low international transfers to help poor people (sometimes no transfers at all). It’s based on the extreme irresponsibility of powerful countries with regard to the environment. And it’s based on a radical denial of the economic rights of poor people... We’ve just heard from the Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many point a finger of blame at the DRC and other poor countries for their poverty. Yet we don’t seem to remember, or want to remember, that starting around 1870, King Leopold of Belgium created a slave colony in the Congo that lasted for around 40 years; and then the government of Belgium ran the colony for another 50 years. In 1961, after independence of the DRC, the CIA then assassinated the DRC’s first popular leader, Patrice Lumumba, and installed a US-backed dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, for roughly the next 30 years. And in recent years, Glencore and other multinational companies suck out the DRC’s cobalt without paying a level of royalties and taxes. We simply don’t reflect on the real history of the DRC and other poor countries struggling to escape from poverty. Instead, we point fingers at these countries and say, “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you govern yourselves properly?”"

"One of the biggest threats to biodiversity is the continued loss of virgin forests. Every year, an area of forest corresponding to the size of Hungary disappears. However, the rate of deforestation has fallen by 40 per cent since the 1990s, according to the FAO. Deforestation has ceased in rich countries. In the United States and Europe forested areas are increasing. In China and India, too, forests are now growing, suggesting that rising populations and economies do not have to cause overexploitation. Were it not for deforestation in seven countries – Brazil, Paraguay, Angola, Congo, Tanzania, Indonesia and Myanmar – the world’s forests would have grown in the 2010s. That is not much of a comfort, given the unique natural values lost with those forests. But it shows that the notion that we are experiencing a relentless global deforestation does not hold."

"How long is this independence of ours going to last anyway? When are the Belgians coming back?"

"Our country, our nation is built by two institutions, the state and the language. A language whose epicenter today is no longer on these banks of the Seine, but probably much more towards the Congo River basin."

"China is operating in Congo in a brutal way that smacks of slavery. Congolese work in mines for very low wages. China is not concerned with sustainability and often commits a predatory economy. The country also does not respect human rights. Still, the developing country's government is letting itself be wrapped up, because the Chinese don't make moral demands like the West does. China works with a closed stock exchange in Congo. For example, they build 20 schools in exchange for being able to operate 10 copper mines for 1 year. But that is often peasant deception: the value of the school buildings is sometimes only 10% of the value of the extracted raw materials."

"It is difficult to stop aid for human rights violations without the population suffering. That is why we continued to offer help through reliable NGOs. Preference was given to Belgian NGOs, because the domestic NGOs were often under the influence of the Congolese government. The importance of human rights has only increased, partly due to the introduction of the International Criminal Court, which tackles violations of human rights."