GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Customers stroll into Tanganyika Market, a one-stop-shop of Central African goods. There’s fish out of Tanganyika Lake, racks of vibrant African dresses, and stacks of cassava flour bags. Two men chat in Swahili near the cash registers.
The West Michigan shop is a long way from the battlefields of Congo’s central African plains. But for Congolese residents in this small U.S. enclave of refugees, the war roughly 7,500 miles across the globe weighs heavily on their minds even as they roam the aisles of plantains and spices.
“It’s kind of sad to see the things that are happening in Africa aren’t being taken seriously,” said HanGa Ngandu, who works the register at the store owned by her parents. There’s a war raging in her homeland, and she says many people brush off the conflict by saying: “Oh, stuff is always happening in Congo.”‘
Refugees from war-torn African countries of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan tell USA TODAY they feel left behind by American sentiment and spending, especially as conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine dominate U.S. headlines.
HanGa Ngandu, 27, left, and her mother Vumilia chat Tuesday, June 18, 2024, at their family’s specialty grocery store in Kentwood, Mich. They specialize in African and other international goods and foods.
Both African countries face some of the direst humanitarian disasters in the world, which human rights advocates say are driven by global inaction, and in Congo, a years-long battle for “blood minerals” used in phones, electric cars and computers.
The United States is home to 72,000 Sudanese people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, and a smaller Congolese community is rapidly growing with more than 18,000 refugees resettled in fiscal year 2023, according to the State Department.
“People from Gaza, they deserve safety and protection,” said Dr. Yves Kaduli, a Congolese refugee now living in Alexandria, Virginia. “People from Ukraine, they deserve safety. People from Congo too, my region from Kivu, everywhere, we deserve safety and protection.”
Shock of Sudan war reminiscent of early pandemic days
Alaa Suliman had just started a two-week break from teaching in the Bay Area when her mother called on the morning of April 15, 2023, and turned her world upside down.
Fighting had broken out in Khartoum, the densely populated capital city of Sudan in a war that has since killed 15,500 people and created the world’s largest child displacement crisis. Suliman’s parents were trapped in the city when the first shots were fired, her mother said, with large booms heard in the background of their tense calls.
Alaa Suliman, 42, is a Sudanese American living in the Bay Area.
“Thousands and thousands of miles away, you just don’t know what to do with yourself in that moment,” Suliman, 42, said.
The early days of the war were reminiscent of the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when people still wondered if it would just be another week or two before life resumed. “Then you realize it’s not going anywhere.”
A tense power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces erupted into war last April, and U.S. officials and human rights groups have since accused the RSF of carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign. Most recently, U.N. experts accused both sides of using starvation as a weapon of war – as humanitarian aid is blocked and ongoing fighting disrupts the harvest season – making widespread famine “imminent” in coming months.
Suliman, who has lived in the U.S. for most of her life, remembered frantically trying to help her parents and brother escape Khartoum. She and her three siblings in the U.S. would relay phone calls to their parents so someone was constantly speaking with them.
While Suliman was reeling from the trauma of wondering if her family would survive another hour, she was also mourning the abrupt end of a cherished dream. She’d been planning to move back to Sudan to support rebuilding efforts.
“I wanted to be part of that vision and part of that better Sudan. And then suddenly it was just like ‘Nope. That’s not going to happen.’ But I couldn’t even process it because we had bigger issues to deal with,” she said.
Her parents and brother eventually escaped with only carry-on bags, leaving behind their life’s possessions, Suliman said. And with several public offices burned to the ground, she said there was likely no record of their Sudanese identity or that the house they owned was theirs.
But as her own family continues to bear the weight of the war, Suliman said other conflicts in the world remain top of mind.
“It’s natural to feel some type of way when your own people are being massacred and killed and there’s kind of a silent genocide happening,” Suliman said. “But I understand how Gaza is getting all that attention and I’m extremely happy that it is getting all that attention.”
Suliman said the embattled Gaza Strip holds a big place in her heart for its religious and historic significance. And as a human, she mourned the widespread destruction.
But Suliman said she would like to see more attention on her parents’ homeland, while also maintaining focus on other conflicts. “I don’t want Gaza to be covered like Sudan. I want Sudan to be covered like Gaza.”
Advocating for end to Congo conflict from Virginia town
Kaduli frantically sits by the phone in Alexandria, Virginia, waiting to hear from his family. Sometimes months pass before it rings.
Kaduli, 38, said he left behind a prestigious career as a general physician and the company of loved ones three years ago. He said he had been beaten at the hospital where he worked in Kalonge, a village in Congo’s South Kivu, for speaking out against the government.
“I was putting it in my mind that if I reach the United States, I will be safe, and I believe that my dream became a reality.”
Yves Kaduli, 38, moved from the Congo to Virginia in 2021.
With phone and internet communication severely limited in Congo, Kaduli said he hasn’t been able to locate his mother but last heard she was in Goma, where fighters have recently stormed. His 10-year-old son, Ivan, is sheltering in a Catholic church, Kaduli said.
Coming to the U.S. presented its own challenges. Kaduli said some people viewed him as a criminal based on the fact that he was an immigrant and refugee from a foreign country.
But the chance to speak out for peace in Congo has motivated him to stay, Kaduli said. He now assists national immigrant advocacy groups CASA and African Communities Together while working at a senior living facility. Kaduli’s medical degree didn’t transfer to the U.S., but he said he hopes to stay in the medical field in some capacity.
“I believe that this country will help me to change the world, and to change my life too,” he said.
But Kaduli said over years of advocacy, his pleas have largely been met with silence – which he viewed as a stark contrast to responses to other conflicts.
When Ukraine was attacked, Kaduli said Western countries rushed to act while his people have been left behind. A recent analysis by ONE Campaign found the share of aid by G7 countries to Africa has reached its lowest point since 1973.
In fiscal year 2023, the U.S. provided $677 million in humanitarian aid to the Democratic Republic of Congo and nearly $596 million to Sudan through international organizations and NGO partners, a spokesperson for the State Department told USA TODAY. In that same time period, the U.S. provided more than $16 billion to Ukraine, according to federal data.
Kaduli also said he is trying to shine a light on technological business interests behind the conflict devastating his homeland and is worried that if he doesn’t keep trying to shine a light on it, the disaster will only grow worse.
“If we don’t speak out and show what is in Congo no one will be educated, or no one will act positively in order to change it,” Kaduli said.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC, has faced decades of overlapping crises with ties stretching back to the Atlantic slave trade, according to humanitarian aid organization Concern Worldwide U.S. National conflict in the late 1990s has shifted into localized fighting centered around battles for land, resources and power, the group said. Violence has escalated since 2021 when M23 rebels backed by Rwanda resurfaced in eastern DRC and attacked the Congolese army.
But human rights groups for years have also highlighted shrouded ties between the conflict and a decades-long fight over highly sought-after natural resources.
While many people in Congo such as Kaduli’s mother don’t have easy access to smartphones, the country’s minerals power millions of screens across the world. Over 70% of known cobalt comes out of Congo’s mines, an essential material used in technology.
Most recently, a group of international lawyers on behalf of Congo raised questions to Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook about the California-based tech giant’s sourcing of “blood minerals.” This refers to materials such as cobalt that the group says armed factions and outside actors have historically benefited from while contributing to chronic violence against Congolese people.
The State Department did not say whether it agreed with the assertions against Apple when reached by USA TODAY but said the company has a “longstanding public record of proactive engagement on issues related to supply chains that connect to eastern DRC.” The department noted it regularly engages with Apple and other U.S. companies on mineral issues.
“Governments, corporations, workers, and consumers all play a role in preventing and ending the worst forms of child labor and other human rights abuses that can occur at points of a global supply chain,” a spokesperson for the State Department said. “No mine site anywhere in the world should tolerate child labor, forced labor, unsafe conditions, or other violations of workers’ rights.”
The State Department deferred to Apple and the Securities and Exchange Commission for further comment. Spokespeople for Apple and the SEC declined to comment when reached by USA TODAY.
Trip to refugee camp haunts Sudanese American
Running into old friends and relatives clinging to life at a disparate refugee camp is one of the “harshest experiences” Abdelillah Douda said he has ever experienced in his 58 years.
“They told me, frankly, that ‘You came from America, but Americans forgot us,'” Douda recalled.
A Sudanese American who has been outspoken about immigration and anti-war advocacy efforts in his hometown of New Haven, Douda has had a front row seat to decades of agonizing conflict.
Abdelillah Douda, 58, is a Sudanese American in New Haven, Connecticut.
But his November trip to Chad, a bordering country of Sudan where over 553,000 Sudanese refugees have fled, was unlike anything he’d seen before. Newcomers to the camps used grass, wood and whatever else they could find to build shelter, Douda said. Clean water and bathrooms were sparse, creating filthy, unhealthy conditions.
Douda worked with nonprofit organizations such as U.S.-based Sudan Sunrise to raise funds for a makeshift hospital in the camps, staffed by doctors and nurses who were forced to flee their home country. But after sending requests to several aid groups, Douda was shocked to see only a fraction of them respond with an offer of support.
And while Douda grapples with the frustration of advocating for an end to the war with little support, he is also mourning the death of his mother, who didn’t survive the evacuation when the war began.
Douda said he is trying to apply for the rest of his family to join him in the U.S. as the fighting forced them to scatter from El Geneina, a city where human rights groups have documented crimes against humanity.
Human Rights Watch, an international research and advocacy group, released a report in May that said the Rapid Support Forces, an independent military force in armed conflict with the Sudan military, and allied militias carried out an ethnic cleansing campaign against non-Arab populations in El Geneina, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more.
Pastor finds solace, hardship in Grand Rapids community
Banza Mukalay had never heard of the word “refugee” until he became one in 1998 when he was forced to flee from Congo to a crowded camp in Tanzania with his wife, mother and 1-year-old daughter.
Refugees were only allowed to stay within the camp boundaries, Mukalay said, recalling sticky red mud and makeshift shelters made out of trees and plastic sheets. Some people were born in the camps, including his three younger children. Others died in them while waiting for a way out, like Mukalay’s mother.
“We fled because of war, to be safe, because they were killing us,” Pastor Banza Mukalay says, Tuesday, June 18, 2024, during an interview at the Restoration Community Church in Wyoming, Mich. Mukalay and his family fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1998, and lived in a Tanzanian refugee camp for fifteen years before coming to the U.S. He was a social worker in Tanzania. He worked a few years in construction when he came to the U.S. before his calling to the ministry.
After 15 years of drudgingly passing the days in the makeshift shelters, where he made $10 a month as a social worker, Mukalay made his way out of Tanzania to the U.S. with his wife and children.
He soon established the Restoration Community Church in a small basement room in Wyoming, Michigan, filled with neat rows of navy-blue chairs and walls embellished with draping gold curtains. Mukalay now runs the church alongside his former camp neighbor.
“I feel like I’m living,” he said of his new life in the U.S. “In a refugee camp, you feel like you’re not living.”
He also championed Grand Rapids as a supportive community that had met him with kindness, noting his unique appreciation for America as an immigrant who found refuge after years of struggle and was now able to freely speak out for his people.
But on April 4, 2022, a single gunshot reverberated through his community.
Patrick Lyoya, a Congolese man Mukalay considered almost as a son, was fatally shot by a Grand Rapids officer during a traffic stop. Christopher Schurr was charged with second-degree murder after shooting Lyoya, who was face down on the ground. The death fueled a national outcry about police violence.
Some Congolese people began wondering why they had come to the U.S. if their children could be killed here, too, Mukalay recalled.
“As a refugee from Congo, we are very sensitive to see someone to be killed,” Mukalay said, noting the collective trauma people continue to grapple with after years of war.
Even in the refugee camp, where people had to build their own houses out of trees and ate only beans and peas for years on end, Mukalay said at least they were safe, which his community no longer felt in West Michigan.
But, he said, his friends and neighbors drew hope from the solidarity they received from people outside the Congolese community who also decried Lyoya’s killing.
“We are not alone.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: They fled genocide. In America they found safety — and apathy.
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