Pierre Mujomba: A Writer in Exile

by Mary Jo Curtis

Award-winning Congolese playwright Pierre Mumbere Mujomba thought the day the book of his best-received play, La Derniere Envelope (The Last Envelope), was published would be a happy one. Instead, he remembers it as "the day my troubles began."

Mujomba (left) answered numerous questions from the press and public at a reception in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that day in January 2003 - including one about where he lived from an agitated man who seemed to take issue with the play's treatment of deposed President Mobutu. The following day, unidentified men arrived at Mujomba's home and demanded that his landlord tell them where they could find the writer. The landlord was soon discovered to be missing and was presumed kidnapped; a relative quickly sent warning to Mujomba that he was in imminent danger, and the playwright went into hiding in Kinshasa.

Looking for a way out of the country, Mujomba turned to some American friends planning a production of La Derniere Envelope in New York City. After hearing of his plight, they called upon PEN, the international human rights and literary organization, but it wasn't until August that the group was able to make arrangements for him to travel to California. Mujomba, soon joined there by his wife and three children, began a one-year residency at Villa Aurora, a foundation for European-American relations.

The family knows there is no turning back for them now. They came to Providence last July when Mujomba was named Brown's second International Writers Project Fellow; in November they were formally granted asylum. They never learned what became of their landlord.

"We have no information about him," said Mujomba. "I wrote the play when President Mobutu was in power, but by [2003] he was dead, so I thought there would be no problem. But his way of governing never changed."

A man with a quick smile and warm manner, Mujomba converses with colleagues and students in slow, measured English, occasionally interspersing a word or phrase in his native French. His writing draws heavily from the political unrest of his homeland, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). Ruled by dictatorship, the country's 58 million people have been plagued by war, corruption, poverty, and disease. More than one million are afflicted with AIDS; the average life expectancy is just forty-nine years.

Yet the Congo also has an abundance of copper, gold, silver, zinc, diamonds, and petroleum. Despite its vast potential wealth, the economy has declined drastically since the mid-1980s.

"My country is potentially rich, but the people are very poor," said Mujomba. "We have a saying: 'People die of hunger while sitting on money.' The Congo can be developed, but there is exploitation of the minerals; all the money belongs to the government, and there's nothing for the people. That's the problem."

The austerity of his life in the Congo is reflected in Mujomba's office at the Watson Institute for International Studies. It holds only the basics - a desk, a chair, and a computer for his writing; a small table and additional chair for guests. The bookshelves and desktop are bare; there are no family photos or mementoes to provide familiarity or comfort as he works in his temporary surroundings. He doesn't know yet where he will go when his fellowship here at Brown ends in June.

Still, the year has been a busy one for Mujomba. He's written two new plays - Isengoma, about an artist who struggles against society and family, and Fifty-Fifty or the Macrosalary of Kalemba, the story of a teacher who refuses to accept the corruption of his school director. He is also expanding a short story he wrote in the Congo into what he says will be "a short novel" about the plight of African immigrants in Europe.

And he's developed a plan, inspired by his time at Brown, that reveals his heart is still in the Congo with other struggling writers. In his country, the central government runs all services and programs, from education to medical care, he explained; there are no fellowships or internships such as the ones that have enabled him to devote himself exclusively to writing for the first time in his life.

"In the Congo, writing is never one's first activity - you write a little at a time. There are no publishers and you won't be published, so most people don't have the courage to write," Mujomba said. Now he wonders, "Why don't we do this by ourselves, at our universities? Why do we wait for the government?" He now hopes to help organize such programs from afar.

"I want to connect the Congolese writers abroad with those in Kinshasa. It is possible to build a bridge between us." - Mary Jo Curtis

Photo by Nancy Hamlin Soukup