Hema Erotic

The Hema are a people of Ituri, the highland, gold-rich northeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, living on the plateaus west of Lake Albert. They don't share one language. What holds them together is a common name, a sense of shared descent and a long history of keeping cattle. Their roots run east across the lake to the herding world of western Uganda, where the related Hima still keep long-horned cattle. For generations, a Hema family counted its wealth and standing in cows.

Language is where the Hema story takes a turn. The southern Hema of Irumu territory speak Kihema, a Bantu language close to Runyoro and Rutooro across the border. The northern Hema, usually called Gegere, speak Lendu instead. Lendu is a Central Sudanic language from a different family altogether, and it is the mother tongue of the neighbors that politics would later set them against. That switch reflects a long history of intermarriage, trade and farming the same hills. Swahili and French cover everything else, in the markets of Bunia and in school. Most Hema today are Christian, some Catholic and some Protestant, and several rural chiefdoms in Djugu and Irumu still carry the Bahema name.

The twentieth century hardened what had been a loose relationship. Belgian administrators believed the discredited Hamitic theory, which cast herding peoples as a superior stock, so they favored Hema in schooling and in appointing chiefs. Later, under Mobutu, new land laws let well-connected buyers register large ranching concessions. Many of those buyers were Hema, and much of the land was ground Lendu farmers considered theirs. The disputes simmered for decades. In 1999, in the middle of the wider Congo war, they turned into open fighting that killed tens of thousands of people. Militias formed on both sides. The mostly Hema Union of Congolese Patriots was led by Thomas Lubanga, and his 2012 conviction for using child soldiers was the first verdict the International Criminal Court ever issued. Lendu and Ngiti fighters massacred Hema villagers, including at Bogoro in 2003. The violence came back after 2017, when attacks by the CODECO militia drove large numbers of Hema into displacement camps.

It is easy to reduce the Hema to one side of a war, but that misses most of their lives. They are ranchers, traders, teachers and farmers, many of them in Bunia. The neat split between herders and farmers that outsiders draw over Ituri was always looser in real life than on the map.