Bunia

Bunia grew where the Ituri forest gives way to the open grassland of a plateau above Lake Albert, country long shared by Hema herders, Lendu farmers, Alur, Bira and other communities. The Belgian administration established a post here early in the twentieth century, and the discovery of gold in the Kilo-Moto belt from around 1903 turned the district into a mining region worked commercially from 1905. Bunia became its administrative and supply centre, with an airstrip, mission schools and a trade route east to Uganda.

Independence left the gold economy in decline and much of the extraction in the hands of artisanal diggers. From 1999 competition over land, cattle and mining ground between Hema and Lendu communities, deepened by the armies and factions involved in the Second Congo War, turned Ituri into one of the most violent parts of the country. Bunia changed hands repeatedly, and in 2003 heavy fighting in the town prompted a European Union force to deploy there before a larger United Nations presence took over. In 2012 the Ituri militia leader Thomas Lubanga became the first person convicted by the International Criminal Court.

Violence revived from 2017 with the CODECO militia and, from the south-east, the Allied Democratic Forces, and army operations against the armed groups have continued. Through all of it Bunia has grown rapidly, its population swollen by families displaced from the countryside, and it has become the base for the United Nations mission and the aid organisations working in the province.

Ituri is one of the most ethnically complex parts of the DR Congo, and Bunia is where its communities meet. Hema, Lendu, Alur, Bira, Nyali and others live in the town, along with traders from Uganda and from across the country, and the Mbuti hunter-gatherers of the forest to the west come to the markets. Swahili is the shared language, a legacy of the eastern trade routes, with French in official use.

The province's cultural inheritance is partly pastoral and partly of the forest. Cattle-keeping shapes Hema life and gives the plateau its dairy tradition, while farming communities mark harvests and funerals with drumming and dance; Mbuti polyphonic singing, performed in the Ituri forest, has drawn musicologists for decades. Churches — Catholic, Protestant and revival — are the strongest civic institutions, running schools and clinics and organising much of social life.

Communal identity is a delicate subject here, because the conflict has been fought largely along those lines, and residents tend to treat questions about origins with caution. What the town shares instead is a practical, mobile culture built around trade, remittances and the constant movement of people: Congolese rumba and East African music mixed in the bars, football watched wherever there is a screen and a generator, and a way of conducting business quickly because circumstances can change.

Bunia has grown quickly in recent decades, its population swollen by displacement from the surrounding territories. Camps and informal settlements of displaced families sit on the edges of the town, and many households shelter relatives from villages they can no longer farm.

Gold underpins the economy. Artisanal miners dig around Mongbwalu and other sites in the province, and the metal is traded through Bunia towards Uganda; the industrial mines of the Kilo-Moto belt have a longer, more troubled history. Alongside that the plateau produces beans, maize, cassava, bananas and vegetables, Hema herders keep cattle, and fish comes up from Lake Albert. Cross-border trade, provincial administration, the aid sector and the United Nations mission account for most salaried employment.

The rhythm of the day is early and busy: markets from dawn, motorbike taxis shuttling through the centre, business concluded well before dark because movement at night is avoided. Electricity is intermittent and generators are widespread, water supply is uneven, and health services are stretched by displacement and by epidemic response. Insecurity on the roads, the cost of food, and the length of the crisis are the constant subjects of conversation.

Bunia eats like the East African highlands rather than the Congo basin. The daily staple is ugali, a stiff dough of maize or cassava flour, eaten with beans, stewed greens or vegetables and, when a household can afford it, goat, chicken or beef. Sweet potatoes, cassava, bananas and plantain from the plateau farms fill out the plate, and groundnuts appear in sauces and as a snack.

Fish is carried up the escarpment from Lake Albert, fresh or smoked and salted, and grilled or stewed with tomato, onion and chilli. Cattle-keeping by Hema families makes milk and beef more common here than in most of the country, and roadside grills of goat and beef skewers are a feature of the town's streets in the evening. Cassava leaves stewed with palm oil, known as pondu or sombe, arrive from the forest side of the province, and rice is eaten in town.

Tea taken with sugar and often with milk is the everyday drink, a habit shared with Uganda across the border, alongside strong coffee. Banana and sorghum beers are brewed at home in the surrounding countryside, palm wine comes from the forest areas, and bottled lager, much of it trucked in from Uganda, is drunk in the bars of the centre.