Eka Anthony never really knows if his family is safe.
When spotty telephone and internet services are working in Africa, the Akron man checks in on his mother and siblings back in war-torn Congo. But he avoids the subject of their well-being.
“I never ask,” the 22-year-old Congolese refugee said.
Anthony is Tutsi, from a Rwandan tribe nearly wiped out by genocide. His family escaped from Rwanda to the Congo before he was born.
In the Congo and other African nations, the corrupt government “used discrimination to stay in power,” dividing the people and stoking fear.
But to a Congolese teenage boy, the killing seemed indiscriminate. Men, women, children. It didn’t matter. “They just killed anybody who looked Tutsi,” he said. “My mom, she was not strong enough to protect us.”
The raids and questioning intensified. Government soldiers accused him of being an “espion” — French for spy.
So in 2007 as an adolescent boy, he fled, this time with his cousins to Uganda.
“One day, I decided to live and go,” he said. “I did not see my life there.”
For eight years, he learned another African language to survive while wondering about his future and the inexorable forces — some centuries old — that drove him away from his mother and nine siblings. French, Belgian and Portuguese colonists had laid claim to the Congo, dividing people and land.
“I feel like the Jews in 1945,” Anthony said, connecting with another group nearly wiped out by genocide and — up until a year before the end of World War II — not openly admitted by America out of government fear that Germany could use Jewish refugees to smuggle in spies. The boundaries that defined the countries where Anthony grew up were drawn by colonial powers that competed for resources in the Middle East and Africa, including regions where immigrants have been banned from the United States today by President Donald Trump.
Anthony will carry the troubled history of the Congo with him wherever he goes.
Encouraged by anti-communist fervor in America during the 1950s, military dictator Mobutu Sese Seko sought to rid the Congo of its colonial oppressors. Taking power in a 1960 coup from the country’s first democratically elected president, who was later assassinated, Mubuto — as he is commonly called — amassed vast personal wealth and power while establishing an authoritarian regime.
Anthony was a baby when Mobutu was expelled in 1997 by rebel forces, whose leader, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was assassinated in 2001.
“I don’t like politics,” Anthony said. “I had a bad experience with politicians.”
World Relief Akron, a refugee resettlement program, found Anthony a home in Highland Square, where he lives with a sister and cousin. He works as an interpreter at the International Institute of Akron, helping other refugees while studying fashion design at Stark State College. He plans to finish at Kent State.
He came to the U.S. in September 2015, just in time to witness a divisive presidential election. Not yet a citizen, he had no say in the outcome of that election — just as he had little choice in fleeing his childhood home.
And again, he has that familiar impulse to escape.
“I feel like my life is in danger now,” Anthony said of the recent executive orders temporarily banning all refugees from the U.S. for 120 days. “I feel like President Trump will wake up one day and say, ‘Everyone from Africa: Go back.’ ”
Doug Livingston can be reached at dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug .