BUKAVU, EASTERN CONGO

The heart of darkness, in one boy’s story, is a human organ eaten raw.

“When you kill a Tutsi, you remove his heart and mix it with special potions, like a medicine,’’ explains Popy Matenda, rather blandly. “Other parts of the body can be eaten too but the heart is special. It gives you the strength of the person you killed, like you are sucking in his spirit. It’s a kind of magic.’’

A reporter, listening to this macabre tale, scoffs. It sounds like the fanciful invention of an over-active imagination, or the brazen lies of a teenage boy; akin to telling ghost stories ‘round the campfire.

Except Matenda, and the other youths with him this afternoon, are all residents of a child soldier repatriation facility in Bukavu, rescued from the bush. The compound is situated behind a tall red-brick wall topped off with razor wire, from which laundry hangs drying. No sign at the gate identifies the humanitarian agency that runs the place or who lives inside — though everybody in town is aware of its tenants and will cross the road to avoid the boys when they loiter out front. They fear them.

Cannibalism is the dirty secret of the Congo, an historical fact — the Pygmy Peoples most ruthlessly targeted — yet also, in the modern era, a grisly consequence of ongoing guerrilla warfare among rebel groups. The practice has been confirmed by field workers for aid organizations and is the subject of several reports released by Human Rights Watch.

Given the deep-rooted Congolese belief in sorcery and magic, it should probably come as no surprise that Mai-Mai tribal warriors and rebel fighters who’ve survived in the jungle for years — Hutu and Tutsi guerrillas still preying on each other in an imported war — would adopt the ritual of devouring one’s enemies.

It’s really about instilling fear in the populace and submission in abducted children. Kidnapped kids might not be kept forever — their adult commanders frequently leave the youngest behind when they flee from pursuing government troops — but the children will never really be able to go home again. For them, childhood is a distant country that can’t be revisited.

“It didn’t make me sick or anything, eating humans,’’ continues 15-year-old Matenda as he slurps up a cola, when what he’d really wanted was a whiskey. “You couldn’t even taste the flesh because it was all ground up with the medicine.

“But, yeah, I’m sorry now that I did it, that I ate people.’’

He doesn’t look sorry. He doesn’t look like he’s lying either. But how to tell with teenagers in general and these, rescued from indenture to savage men, in particular?

Matenda was abducted when he was 9 by a Mai-Mai cadre whose leader, Gen. Yanzi, took a special shine to the child, or so the youth tells it. “He made me chief escort,’’ Matenda claims proudly. Then, less boastfully, adds: “I grew up fast.’’

At the Mai-Mai camp, deep in the wilderness, Matenda was taught how to load and shoot a Kalashnikov, how to escape quickly through heavily concealed footpaths when threatened by the Congolese Army or rival factions and, by puberty, how to rape little girls stolen from their villages. Abductees, says Matenda, were kept docile with alcohol and drugs.

Two months ago, he slipped up and was caught by regular army soldiers, handed over to child soldier reintegration specialists and brought to this facility in Bukavu.

Whatever violence was done to him by his abductors, Matenda has no desire to recount.

His new friend, Prince Jamarie — at least, that’s the name he gives — is not so reluctant to describe the physical abuse he absorbed in six years with a Hutu Mai-Mai group. “I was in primary school but not a very clever student,’’ he admits of his former 10-year-old self. “So I took a job as a porter at the market in my town. The Mai-Mai came and ordered me and two other boys to carry their big sacks and crates back to their camp. They forced us to do this for them.

“When we got to their base, they put me in a pigsty for three days with my arms tied behind my back. Every day they would come in and beat me. They wouldn’t give me any food. On the fourth day, a man pointed his gun at me and said, you can either work for us or I can kill you — which do you choose?’’

There was no choice. Like other child soldiers, Jamarie was indoctrinated into the Mai-Mai subculture, trained on weapons and instructed on village-looting. As a rite of passage, he too was given girl slaves for sex. “They were not very good workers. Girls always cry and get sick. Then we’d leave them behind.’’

A Congolese Banyanga by ethnicity, Jamarie has absorbed the Hutu revulsion for Tutsis. “I hate Tutsis. They came here from Rwanda and took our land. Okay, some of them were born here but they’re still Tutsis and they should all be killed. I have no pity for them.’’

Jamarie has been at the facility for only two weeks. It’s unclear how he came to be rescued except that he ended up first at a transit station run by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Jamarie says he would now like to go home. “I’m sure my parents will be very happy to see me. We will hug each other and they will be so amazed that I’m still alive. Parents don’t ever stop loving their children, even if they’ve done bad things.’’

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Another 16-year-old, Bahati Cerish, recounts his own wretchedly similar narrative — abducted at 12 while on his way to school in the village of Kavumo, kept shackled and tied to a tree, scared out of his skin. “When they untied me, they said I could run but they would shoot me down. They said, ‘What makes you think you’re so special? You’re no better than us.’ They beat me with their belts.’’

Resistance, as they say, was futile. To his own surprise, Cerish became, he says, a good fighter, though never quite understanding who they were fighting against except the gunfire skirmishes were frequent and the pillaging of villages even more so. He rolls up his trouser leg to show where he was struck by a bullet. “But I killed many enemies.’’

Within a year of his abduction, Cerish was put in charge of a dozen younger children. “It was like graduating up to a higher class.’’

Cerish claims he sneaked away from the group after deciding he’d had enough of living in the jungle and that, by then, he knew his way through the wilderness. He ran to a Congolese army encampment.

Finally, there’s Riziki Sloyamungu, also 16 but small for his age. What was distinct about his abduction at 13 was that it came, he says, at the hands of government troops, regular army soldiers. Being gang-pressed into army service is a not infrequent occurrence in the Congo, where widespread desertion means that companies replenish themselves by force from the local population.

“They came right into the church in my village, Shabunda, and took away 10 of us,’’ says Sloyamungu. “The priest didn’t even try to stop them.’’

There was a lot of fighting the first two years, he continues, less later on. A double-scar on his neck shows where a bullet went through-and-through.

Sloyamungu explains he was “demobilized’’ late last year when UN troops forced his unit to release all their underage soldiers. At the facility in Bukavu, he learned that both his parents had been killed in the years he was away. But Sloyamungu has two brothers and four sisters he would like to rejoin, if officials can find them. They’re likely in a displacement camp.

Asked what he wants to do next with his interrupted life, the teenager says: “Go back to school. Become a doctor.’’

There is as much chance of that happening as flying to the moon.

But that these boys are even here now, sipping Coke and slapping each other in the way of male teenagers, is almost as much of a miracle.

They’ve been to the dark side and come back.