The Boy in the River: A Shocking True Story of Ritual Murder and Sacrifice in the Heart of London

by Richard Hoskins

  Muti is a Zulu word, which literally means ‘medicine’. The practice centres on the belief that parts of certain plants, animals, and sometimes even humans, have special curative powers. Row upon row of animal parts and plants were offered up for sale in the Durban muti market. Many had been smoke-dried but the smell was still intense. Among the items on display I could identify animal organs – heads, testicles, brains, hearts. And some of the animals looked to me like primates. Under a tarpaulin, more mysterious objects were being kept away from inquisitive eyes. When my camera was spotted there were mutterings around me and a small group began jostling me.

  I backed away but couldn’t keep my eyes off the indistinct shapes I saw under the cloth. I had heard stories that human organs were regularly used in muti, and this was just the kind of place a devotee might be expected to come looking for such things. But I would not be allowed to find out.

  Now, sitting at my desk in Bath, I decided to go back to basics and to replay some of the interviews I’d recorded with sangomas, the traditional South African healers, after that market visit.

  That evening I settled in front of the TV with a pile of videos. As I put the first one into the machine, I felt suddenly uneasy under the heavily lidded gaze of the Chokwe death mask, which hung on the wall behind me. I turned back to the job in hand, cross with myself. The last thing I needed right now was to start opening the door to superstition.

  One interview proved particularly significant. Moses was a tall, wiry figure with prominent eyes and enormous hands, which he used to illustrate everything he told me. I rewound his tape and replayed it. His cramped and dimly lit house in downtown Durban appeared once more on the screen. I could see plant and animal parts stacked around the room and phials of traditional medicine ranged on shelves. In a dark corner was an altar covered in white cloth on which stood two large red candles, a bell and what looked like a tribal chief’s fly whisk. Fading pictures of international surfing champions hung incongruously on the wall alongside a portrait of Gandhi.

  ‘There are many different plant parts from all over South Africa that we put in our medicines,’ the sangoma explained. His voice was surprisingly deep for so spare a man. ‘We also use animals, which give power to us when we pray over them. Different parts have different powers. So when a man who is impotent comes to me I may use the genitals of a powerful animal in my remedy, because this will help cure him. If I grind down even a fragment of this and pray over it, he will be healed. Or suppose a woman comes to me who lacks the courage to do something for her good. I may give her some special medicine that will contain part of the heart or spleen of a particular animal like a leopard or a lion. These will give to her the courage she needs.’

  ‘How do you know the right ingredient to use?’ I heard myself ask.

  ‘It takes us years and years to get this knowledge, Richard. I myself was an apprentice for eight years under a wise elder sangoma before I began practising. Then we also pray to our spirits for discernment of the illness and its cure.’

  ‘What about human body parts?’ I said. ‘I’ve heard they are sometimes used. I’ve even heard of muti murders. Does that happen?’

  ‘It’s true that sometimes a sangoma will use human body parts,’ Moses acknowledged. ‘They will get these parts from mortuaries.’

  ‘But that isn’t always true, is it?’ I queried.

  He looked at me uncomfortably, glanced down at his lap and then back at me. ‘No. No, you’re right that there are also muti murders where a bad sangoma will kill someone for muti parts. This is very bad sorcery and I have nothing to do with it. When they kill this way, they often take the parts while the victim is still alive. They think the parts get greater power from the victim’s screams. These are very bad people who do this.’

  It took me two nights to get through all my video interviews. I finished the last one in the small hours of the morning. Perhaps unsurprisingly I found it hard to go to sleep that night.

  The next morning I telephoned DI O’Reilly from the university and asked him if the police pathologist was sure that it was the incision to the neck that had killed Adam.

  ‘As far as we know.’ He sounded surprised at the question. ‘The pathologist seemed pretty sure that the neck wound was the first, and that all the others were inflicted after death.’

  ‘What precisely did the pathologist’s report say?’

  ‘Hang on a sec. Here we are. “The instrument came into the neck from the side or slightly from the rear and was then brought forward.” That’s a very unusual manner of killing, by the way. “It was then removed and another series of cuts were made.”’

  ‘Is that all the report says?’

  ‘No, there’s more.’ I could hear him riffling through papers. ‘OK, the pathologist thinks that the instrument was probably sharpened after each cut. He believes that the body was drained of its blood, so it’s probable the child was held either horizontally or even upside down.’

  ‘God Almighty,’ I murmured.

  ‘Something here doesn’t sit right with you?’

  I could hear how much he wanted me to tell him that everything fitted perfectly, but I couldn’t do that. I fobbed him off with some vague response and a promise to call him back.

  Taking out a blank sheet of A4 paper I wrote ‘Muti murder?’ at the top. I drew a line down the middle of the page. I headed the column on the left ‘Similarities’, and on the right, ‘Differences’.

  Then on the right I wrote, ‘Manner of death: cut to the neck.’

  The fact that the incision had been so careful didn’t fit. The perpetrators of a muti killing don’t care how body parts are removed. If they had wanted Adam’s head for some ritual purpose they could even have decapitated him with an axe. In the same column I added ‘Severance of limbs’.

  Moses had told me that when bad sangomas take body parts from humans these parts are rendered more powerful if they are harvested while the victim is still alive. This was the opposite of what had happened with Adam. His limbs were hacked off after the neck had been so precisely cut.

  And then there was the question of internal organs, a third addition to my right-hand column. The body parts most keenly treasured by muti men were the internal organs such as the kidneys, heart, spleen, liver and above all the genitals. But none of Adam’s had been removed.

  4

  Kinshasa, April 1986

  Sue and I walked into the airport building past a line of scruffy soldiers and officials, who eyed us with a mixture of contempt and wariness. Most of them were armed with old French bolt-action rifles or pistols in webbing holsters.

  ‘Keep in line!’ a soldier shouted at us in French, gesticulating at the door. ‘Go straight through there!’

  I stared at him. I didn’t much like being ordered around. I’d come here to help. I hadn’t expected a welcoming committee, but I thought a degree of politeness might have been in order.

  ‘What’s the matter with these guys?’ I asked Sue. ‘Are they expecting trouble?’

  ‘You!’ the soldier shouted, getting agitated. ‘Keep moving!’

  ‘Just stay calm, Richard,’ Sue said under her breath. ‘We’re in Africa now.’

  She fixed a smile on her face, took my arm and steered me through to the terminal.

  The place was bedlam. Shouting men without uniform or insignia of any kind descended on us and demanded our papers, passports, references, vaccination certificates – and when we protested they tried to grab the documents from us. There was no telling who was official and who was not. There was no sign of any system whatsoever.

  We fought our way through to what was optimistically called the baggage reclaim area. The carousel hadn’t worked for years, and luggage was thrown to the crowd through a hole in the wall, at which point everyone would scrum down to find their bags, or, if that proved impossible, to grab someone else’s. When I finally saw one of ours I pounced on it in triumph, but so did a small fat man in a safari suit.

  ‘
C’est à moi!’ he shouted over and over again. ‘That’s my bag!’

  I had physically to wrest my suitcase from him and then fight off more predators when the rest of our luggage came through. I was sweating, outraged and confused. I had never seen anything like this. To be forced to fight and curse in defence of my own property upset me. I had never been aggressive. I had been, as they say, well brought up in the Home Counties. I thought that if you treated people with courtesy, they would, on the whole, return it. I saw now how far school, a brief spell in the Army and my whole background had protected me from what passed for real life. Kinshasa airport was a very rude awakening.

  The concourse was stiflingly hot and full of noise, jostling and barely suppressed violence. Hugging our bags we found ourselves bundled up against a frosted glass screen, from behind which someone demanded our passports.

  ‘I’m not letting you have my passport.’ I turned for help to a soldier who lounged against the wall, smoking, but he looked at me with glassy indifference.

  ‘Just give it to them, Richard,’ Sue pleaded. ‘Just do as they say.’

  A hand appeared from under the screen and seized our papers, which disappeared while another official pretended to check vaccination certificates. I felt helpless without a passport, wondering if I was supposed to bribe someone to get it back, knowing I was losing my cool, knowing I was doing everything wrong. I agonized for the best part of an hour before our papers were wordlessly returned.

  Sue handled all this much better than I did. A previous trip to Africa had given her some idea of what to expect. I had none at all. I looked around for the exit but the ordeal was not over yet.

  ‘Hey! You two – over here!’

  I turned to Sue a little wildly. ‘For God’s sake – what now?’

  ‘Richard, it’s Customs,’ she said. ‘Just do as they say and everything will be all right.’

  A bad-tempered officer in a sweat-stained uniform made us unpack everything. He held up our cameras accusingly. ‘Have you taken photographs?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘If you have taken photographs, I will confiscate these.’

  ‘No, no. We haven’t.’

  He looked at us suspiciously, itching to confiscate the cameras, then laid them aside and rummaged on through our few things. The Land Rover driveshaft caused a good deal of mirth. Apparently this was unusual even for Kinshasa Airport, and we soon had a group of grinning brown-shirted officers examining it and passing comments – presumably unflattering ones – on anyone stupid enough to bring such a thing in their hand baggage.

  It was Sue who finally extricated us: she gave the Customs officers a handful of absurd mementoes of London: fridge magnets showing Tower Bridge in a snowstorm that she had brought for just such an eventuality. The senior officer took them without comment and waved us through.

  I lugged my half-packed case out into the sweltering night.

  I looked back, still unable to believe it. ‘This whole place is completely crazy.’

  ‘After my last trip,’ Sue muttered, ‘I vowed I’d never come back. Now I remember why.’

  ‘You never told me you felt that way.’

  She gave me a significant look. ‘Right now I wish I had.’

  I realized she wasn’t concerned for herself; she was worried about me. I was still thinking about this as we stepped outside. We were greeted by a driver called Joseph, who piled our bags into a Land Rover and took us the jolting fifteen miles over nightmare roads into the city. Soon, we were installed in a second-floor apartment in the Baptist Mission compound.

  It was a plain enough place, but it was clean and there was a fan, the lights worked and there was running water. Neither of us said much until we had got inside and closed the door behind us, regaining some semblance of peace and privacy. For a few minutes we busied ourselves unpacking, then we sat at the little Formica table in the kitchen.

  ‘We don’t have to go through with this, you know,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I tried to laugh it off.

  ‘You were never supposed to be going into the bush anyway,’ she said, ‘let alone for two years. If it hadn’t been for us getting married, you’d have been working in Kinshasa for six months, and then you’d have been going home to university. Maybe that would have been OK for you. The way you were at the airport . . .’ She paused. ‘It’s not a competition, Richard. If you don’t feel right about this it would be better for everybody if we pulled out now.’

  ‘Go back to England?’

  ‘If necessary. Or maybe apply to stay in Kinshasa, the way it was originally planned. Look, it’s different for me. As a medic I was always going to be sent out into the bush. But that wasn’t what you signed up for. I won’t think badly of you. You know that. But we have to be a bit sensible.’

  We said no more about it that night, but went to bed early and clung together in the stifling darkness, listening to the sirens and horns of this alien city. There was another sound too, the dull, insistent rumble of the Congo River.

  In the daylight, some of the jaggedness had faded. It helped that the Baptist Mission compound occupied one of the most spectacular sites in Kinshasa. It was perched on the banks of the Congo, just above the start of those awesome rapids down which the river plunges for 400 miles on its way to the sea – rapids which to this day no one has conquered. Rainbow curtains of mist hung in the harsh sunlight above the falls.

  We didn’t have time for the sights of Kinshasa just yet, though. We had a meeting with Andrew North, the Church’s head of logistics, whose office was inside the compound not far from our apartment block. I hoped, I suppose, for some encouragement after the bruising my ego had taken the night before.

  His office and the lock-up next to it certainly looked the part. There was a Land Rover parked in the garage area and the floor and shelves were piled with bits of machinery, tools, drums of fuel and boxes of medical supplies. I proudly added my much-travelled driveshaft to the collection.

  The office itself was dominated by Andrew’s enormous kidney-shaped desk made of local wenge hardwood. On the wall hung a huge coloured map of the Upper Congo region, marked with villages, airstrips and tracks. Such maps, I was to learn, were worth several times their weight in gold, as Mobutu restricted their distribution for security reasons. There was also a CB radio, yellowing lists of call-codes pinned up above it, a fan circling lazily overhead and an impressive safe.

  Andrew North was a big, dark-haired, lugubrious man with heavy glasses, rather formally dressed in slacks and a light blue bush shirt. He was in his thirties and fairly recently married.

  ‘If you’d taken the original job you were offered, here in Kinshasa,’ he told me, ‘I’d have handed over to you by now and be back home.’

  I knew he wasn’t impressed with what he saw of me. I was obviously a complete greenhorn, and he took it as an insult that someone so utterly inexperienced should be sent to tackle problems ‘up country’, where life was thought to be a hundred times harder than in Kinshasa.

  ‘Don’t be afraid to say so if you can’t make it work up there.’ He looked hard at me through his heavy, dark-rimmed glasses.

  It was clear that he didn’t think I’d last two weeks. I felt myself bridle, but managed to thank him for his advice and quickly changed the subject.

  ‘While we’re here in the city,’ I said, ‘we’d like to pick up some stuff at the Kinshasa market. I’ve read you can make your own water filter with a couple of plastic buckets and—’

  He stared at me through his terrifying glasses. ‘You want to go to the Kinshasa market?’

  ‘Yes, apparently it’s a good place for—’

  ‘It’s not a good place for anything,’ he snapped. ‘You’d be mad to go there. None of us ever does.’

  ‘But we need some rice and some lamps and some other provisions,’ Sue said. ‘We heard you could get all that there.’

  ‘Yes, you can get all that,’ Andrew said abruptly and looked back at me. ‘Y
ou can also get your wife kidnapped.’

  ‘Kidnapped?’

  ‘And sold into white slavery. She’ll end up in some market in Dubai. You obviously don’t know what you’re suggesting.’

  ‘I want to go to the Kinshasa market,’ I said in a reasonably steady voice. ‘We both do.’

  He glared at me for a moment.

  ‘All right,’ he said, with a sigh of resignation. ‘On your own heads be it. At least I can send a Congolese driver to pick you up.’

  Short of white slavery, the market was every bit as alarming as Andrew had warned.

  ‘M’sieur! You like monkey?’ A toothless man grinned at us over his blood-spattered table, holding up some indescribable gobbet of meat, black with flies. ‘Try a bit of this one! Very tender! Or maybe you want crocodile?’

  People crowded around us, shoving and shouting, thrusting fruit, vegetables, handicrafts and pots at us.

  ‘I’m not sure this was such a good idea,’ Sue said anxiously as we shouldered our way through the mêlée. ‘Maybe we’ve seen enough.’

  ‘I want my plastic buckets,’ I said.

  Everything was for sale here: every shape and colour of vegetable and fruit; the butchered remains of goats and cows and forest animals I couldn’t identify; cheap tin household goods; sacks of grain; bundles of herbs; tools; bolts of brilliant cloth; bicycle components; fish and eels; carvings; sandals cut from truck tyres. Traders sold roasted maize, slices of cooked fish on skewers and globules of flour fried in palm nut oil called minkati – sweet, tasty and very, very unhealthy.

  The din was deafening and the smells exotic, pungent and often revolting.

  But I loved it.

  Sue – unflappable until that moment – did not. She had an urge to be gone, especially once we had bought a couple of hurricane lamps and some rice. Although I was just as intimidated as she was by the seething throng, I glimpsed for the first time the adventure I had come for.