The world’s least blessed cheesemakers are in Congo

EASTERN CONGO is best known for producing coltan, a mineral used in mobile phones, and refugees. But it also makes rather good cheese. At his dairy on the hillside of Masisi in North Kivu, Lambert Sinamenye churns out 12 rounds a day. After maturing for 21 days they taste like Gouda, only more salty, and are named “Goma”, after the provincial capital, 55km away.

The verdant hills of this region, dotted with Friesian cows and known as “Africa’s Switzerland”, are ideal for caseiculture. Some Belgian monks who arrived in the 1970s soon began crafting camembert. Italian missionaries whet appetites for mozzarella. In their heyday, dairies in Masisi also churned out butter, cream and yogurt.

Now, however, farmers are lucky to eke out a few dollars a day. War and lawlessness have curdled their business. Twice a week Mr Sinamenye sells his cheeses for the equivalent of $3 each to a trader who straps them onto the back of a motorbike and braves the muddy track to Goma. There they are sold to shopkeepers, who in turn sell them for $5 each.

Mr Sinamenye could make bigger profits selling milk. But, as in most of Congo, there is no electricity to pasteurise it or keep it cool on the way to market. The only way of preserving it is to cast it into sturdy rounds. A few villagers come and buy fresh milk in plastic jerrycans, but most of it is turned into cheese.

Making a profit is something of an achievement. Mr Sinamenye, whose family has managed a dairy farm here since 1976, recalls how it once supported a herd 4,500-strong. Then chaos spilled across the border. After the genocide against Tutsis in neighbouring Rwanda in 1994, the Hutu militias that had perpetrated it fled into Congo (then called Zaire), where they terrorised civilians and slaughtered cows, which were seen as symbols of Tutsi wealth.

“Twice a week we’d flee at the sound of their gunshots,” he remembers, “and return to find more cows were missing.” Many of the carcasses were left to bloat in the fields. Over the following few years armed groups would loot the farm, killing cows to eat or for meat to sell. By 1998 all the cattle were dead and Mr Sinamenye had fled to Goma.

In 2000 he returned, leasing enough land from the farm’s owner, an army general in Kinshasa, to graze 400 cows. Business is picking up since the reopening of a nearby coltan mine: he now has hungry miners coming to the farm to buy cheese and milk. Sometimes they even buy a whole cow, which is chopped up and cooked for them by Mr Sinamenye’s wife. But he still fears the rebels who descend from North Kivu’s nearby hills, killing and kidnapping villagers. “We can only rely on God to protect us,” says Mr Sinamenye. Not all cheesemakers are blessed.