The Mission Song

by John le Carré

  A word here regarding the psychology of your multi-linguist. People who put on another European language, it is frequently observed, put on another personality with it. An Englishman breaking into German speaks more loudly. His mouth changes shape, his vocal cords open up, he abandons self-irony in favour of dominance. An Englishwoman dropping into French will soften herself and puff out her lips for pertness, while her male counterpart will veer towards the pompous. I expect I do the same. But your African languages do not impart these fine distinctions. They're functional and they're robust, even when the language of choice is colonial French. They're peasant languages made for straight talk and good shouting in argument, which Congolese people do a lot of. Subtleties and evasion are achieved less by verbal gymnastics than by a change of topic or, if you want to play safe, a proverb. Sometimes I'll be aware, as I hop from one language to another, that I have shifted my voice to the back of my throat to achieve the extra breath and husky tone required. Or I have a feeling, for instance when I am speaking Kinyarwanda, that I'm juggling a hot stone between my teeth. But the larger truth is, from the moment I settle into my chair, I become what I render.

  Philip has ended his speech of welcome. Seconds later, so have I. He sits down and rewards himself with a sip of water from his glass. I take a sip from mine, not because I'm thirsty, but because I'm relating to him. I steal another look at the mountainous Franco and his neighbour the emaciated Dieudonne. Franco boasts a single scar running from the top of the forehead to the end of the nose. Are his arms and legs similarly marked as part of the initiation ritual that protects him from flying bullets? Dieudonne's brow is high and smooth as a girl's, and his dreamy gaze seems fixed on the hills he has left behind. The dandy Haj, lounging on Franco's other side, appears wilfully unaware of either of them.

  • • •

  “Good morning, my friends! Are your eyes all turned towards me?”

  He is so small, Salvo. Why is it that so many men of small stature have more courage than men of size? Small as Cromwell Our Chief of Men was small, pushing out double the energy per cubic inch of everyone around him. Light cotton jacket, washable, as becomes your travelling evangelist. Halo of grizzled hair the same length all round: a black Albert Einstein without the moustache. And at the throat where the tie should go, the gold coin that Hannah has told me about, big as a fifty-pence piece:

  It is his slave collar, Salvo. It tells us he is not for sale. He has been bought already, so bad luck. He belongs to the people of all Kivu, and here is the coin that purchased him. He is a slave to the Middle Path!

  Yes, all our eyes are turned to you, Mwangaza. My own eyes also. I no longer need take refuge in my Perrier bottle while I wait for him to speak. Our three delegates, having afforded our Enlightener the African courtesy of not staring at him, are now staring at him for all they're worth. Who is he? Which spirits guide him, what magic does he practise? Will he scold us? Will he frighten us, pardon us, make us laugh, make us rich, make us dance and embrace and tell each other all we feel? Or will he scorn us and make us unhappy and guilty and self-accusing, which is what we Congolese, and we half-Congolese, are threatened with all the time? — Congo the laughing stock of Africa, raped, plundered, screwed up, bankrupt, corrupt, murderous, duped and derided, renowned by every country on the continent for its incompetence, corruption and anarchy.

  We are waiting for the rhythm of him, the arousal, but he keeps us waiting: waiting for our mouths to go dry and our groins to shrivel up — or that at least is what the secret child is waiting for, owing to the fact that our great Redeemer bears an unearthly likeness to our Mission's pulpit orator Pere Andre. Like Andre, he must glower at each member of his congregation in turn, first at Franco, then Dieudonne, then Haj and finally at me, one long glower for each of us, with the difference that I feel not just his eyes on me, but his hands as well, if only in my hyperactive memory.

  “Well, gentlemen! Since your eyes are now upon me, don't you think you have made a pretty big mistake coming here today? Maybe Monsieur Philippe's excellent pilot should have dropped you on a different island.”

  His voice is too big for him, but true to my usual practice I render my French softly, almost as an aside.

  “What are you searching for here, I am asking myself?” he thunders across the table at old Franco, causing him to grit his jaw in anger. “You are not searching for me, surely? I am not your fellow at all! I am the Mwangaza, the messenger of harmonious coexistence and prosperity for all Kivu. I think with my head, not with my gun, or my panga, or my penis. I don't mess with cut-throat Mai Mai warlords like you, oh no!” He transfers his scorn to Dieudonne. “And I don't mess around with second-class citizens like the Banyamulenge here either, oh no!” — a defiant lift of the jaw at Haj — “and I don't mix with rich young dandies from Bukavu, thank you very much” — an insider's smile nonetheless for the son of Luc his old comrade-in-arms and fellow Shi — “not even if they offer me free beer and a job at a Rwandan-run goldmine — oh no! I am the Mwangaza, the good heart of the Congo, and honest servant of a strong, united Kivu. If that is the person you have truly come to see — well, just possibly — but let me think about it — maybe you have landed on the right island after all.”

  The oversized voice descends to the confiding depths. Mine clambers down after it in French.

  “Are you by any chance a Tutsi, sir?” he enquires, peering into the bloodshot eyes of Dieudonne. He asks the same question of each delegate in turn, then of all of them at once. Are they Tutsi? Hutu? Bembe? Rega? Fulero? Nande? Or Shi, like himself?

  “If so, will you please kindly leave the room now. Forthwith. Immediately. No hard feelings.” He points histrionically at the open French windows. “Go! Good day to you, gentlemen! Thank you for your visit. And send me a bill, please, for your expenses.”

  Nobody moves except the kinetic Haj, who rolls his eyes and peers comically from one to other of his incongruous comrades.

  “What's stopping you, my friends? Don't be shy, now! Your pretty aeroplane is still out there. It has two reliable engines. It is waiting to take you back to Denmark at no charge. Away with you, go home, and nothing will be said!”

  Suddenly he is smiling a radiant, five-star, all-African smile that splits his Einstein face in two, and our delegates are smiling and chuckling with him in relief, Haj the loudest. Pere Andre knew how to play that trick too: switch off the heat when his congregation is least expecting it, and make you grateful to him, and want to be his friend. Even Maxie is smiling. So are Philip, the Dolphin and Tabizi.

  “But if on the other hand you are from Kivu, from the north or the south or the middle” — the too-big voice reaches out to us in generous welcome — “if you are a true God-fearing Kivutian, who loves the Congo and wishes to remain a Congolese patriot under one decent and efficient government in Kinshasa — if you wish to drive the Rwandan butchers and exploiters back across their borders one and all — then kindly stay exactly where you are. Stay, please, and talk to me. And to one another. And let us, dear brothers, identify our common purpose, and decide together how we can best pursue it. Let us tread the Middle Path of unity and reconciliation and inclusiveness under God.”

  He stops, considers his words, is reminded of something, starts again. “Ah, but that Mwangaza is a dangerous separatist, you have been told. He has crazy personal ambitions. He wishes to break up our beloved Congo, and feed it piecemeal to the jackals across the border! My friends, I am more loyal to our capital city of Kinshasa than Kinshasa is to itself!” A high note now, but we shall go higher, wait and see. “I am more loyal than Kinshasa's unpaid soldiers who pillage our towns and villages and violate our women! I am so loyal that I want to do Kinshasa's job better than Kinshasa ever did! I want to bring us peace, not war. I want to bring us manna, not starvation! To build us schools and roads and hospitals and give us proper administration instead of ruinous corruption! I want to keep all of Kinshasa's promises. I even want to keep Kinshasa!”

 
; • • •

  He gives us hope, Salvo.

  She is kissing my eyelids, giving me hope. I have my hands round her sculptured head.

  Can you not understand what hope means to people of the Eastern Congo?

  I love you.

  Those poor Congolese souls are so tired of pain they no longer believe in the cure. If the Mwangaza can inspire them with hope, everyone will support him. If not, the wars will go on and on and he will be one more bad prophet on their path to Hell.

  Then let's hope he gets his message over to the electorate, I suggest piously.

  Salvo, you are a complete romantic. For as long as the present government is in power, any elections will be incompetent and totally corrupt. People who are not bought will vote on ethnic lines, results will be falsified and tensions will increase. First let us have stability and honesty. Then we may have elections. If you had listened to the Mwangaza, you would agree.

  I'd rather listen to you.

  Her lips leave my eyelids and look for more substantial fare.

  And I suppose you know that the Monster used to carry a magic stick around with him that was too heavy for any mortal man to lift, except the Monster himself?

  No, Hannah, that gem of knowledge escaped me. She is referring to the late and pitiful General Mobutu, supreme ruler and destroyer of Zaire and her only known hate-figure to date.

  Well, the Mwangaza also has a stick. It goes with him everywhere, just like the Monster's, but it is of a special wood chosen for its tightness. Anyone who believes in the Middle Path may pick it up and discover how easy is the journey to its ranks. And when the Mwangaza dies, do you know what will happen to this magic stick?

  It will help him walk to Heaven, I suggest drowsily, my head upon her belly.

  Don't be facetious, please, Salvo. It will be placed in a beautiful new Museum of Unity to be built on the banks of Lake Kivu, where all may visit it. It will commemorate the day when Kivu became the pride of Congo, united and free.

  • • •

  And here it is. The stick. The very one. It lies before us on the green baize table, a miniature House of Commons mace. The delegates have examined its magic markings, and tested it for lightness in their palms. For old Franco, it is an object of significance — but is the significance of the right kind? For Haj it is a piece of merchandise. What materials have they used? Does it work? And we can sell them cheaper. Dieudonne's response is less easily read. Will it bring peace and equality to my people? Will our prophets approve of its powers? If we make war for it, will it protect us from Franco and his kind?

  Maxie has skewed his chair to the table so that he can stretch his legs. His eyes are closed, he leans back like an athlete waiting his turn, hands clasped behind his neck. My saviour Philip of the wavy white hair wears the quiet smile of an impresario. He has the eternal English actor's face, I have decided. He could be anything from thirty-five to sixty, and the audience would never know. If Tabizi and the Dolphin are listening to my rendering they show no sign of it. They know the Mwangaza's speeches the way I knew Andre's. By contrast I have acquired an unexpected audience in the three delegates. Having been harangued by the Mwangaza in Swahili, they have come to rely on my less emotive French replay for a second hearing. Haj the academic listens critically, Dieudonne thoughtfully, meditating upon each precious word. And Franco listens with his fists clenched, ready to strike down the first man who contradicts him.

  • • •

  The Mwangaza has ceased to play the demagogue and assumed the role of a lecturer in economics. I trim my interpreter's sails accordingly. Kivu is being robbed, he informs us sternly. He knows what Kivu is worth and what it isn't being paid. He has the figures at his professional fingertips and waits while I jot them on my notepad. I discreetly smile my thanks. He acknowledges my smile and reels off the names of Rwandan-backed mining companies that are plundering our natural resources. Since most have French names, I do not render them.

  “Why do we let them do it?” he demands angrily, voice rising again. “Why do we stand by and watch our enemies grow rich on our mineral wealth, when all we want to do is throw them out?”

  He has a map of Kivu. The Dolphin has pegged it to the whiteboard and the Mwangaza is standing beside it, assailing it with his magic stick: clap, smack, as he rattles along, and I rattle along after him from my end of the table, but softly, tempering his words, defusing them a little — which in turn causes him to identify me if not as an active member of the resistance, at least as somebody who needs to be won over.

  He stops speaking, so I do. He stares directly at me. He has the witch doctor's knack, when staring, of contracting his eye muscles to make himself more visionary and compelling. It's not my eyes he is looking at any more, it's my skin. He studies my face, then in case there's any change, my hands: mid to light tan.

  “Mr Interpreter, sir!”

  “Mwangaza.”

  “Come up here, my boy!”

  For a caning? To confess my shortcomings to the class? Watched by all, I walk down the table until I am standing before him, only to find that I am the taller by a head.

  “So which are you, my boy?” — very jocular, stabbing a finger first at Maxie and Philip, then at the three black delegates. “Are you one of us or one of them?”

  Under such pressure, I rise to his rhetorical heights.

  “Mwangaza, I am one of both of you!” I cry back in Swahili.

  He roars with laughter and renders my words into French for me. Clapping breaks out at both ends of the table, but the Mwangaza's booming voice effortlessly bestrides it.

  “Gentlemen. This fine young fellow is the symbol of our Middle Path! Let us follow the example of his all-inclusiveness! No, no, no. Stay here, my boy, stay here one moment longer, please.”

  He means it as an honour, even if it doesn't feel like one. He calls me fine young fellow and stands me beside him while he hammers the map with his magic stick and extols the Eastern Congo's mineral wealth, and I for my part clasp my hands behind my back and render teacher's lines without benefit of a notepad, thereby incidentally providing the conference with an example of my powers of memory.

  “Here at Mwenga, gold, my friends! Here at Kamituga: gold, uranium, cassiterite, coltan and — don't tell anybody — diamonds too. Here at Kabambare, gold, cassiterite and coltan.” His repetitions are deliberate. “Here coltan, cassiterite, and here” — the stick lifts, and drifts a little uncertainly in the direction of Lake Albert — “oil, my friends, unmeasured, and perhaps unmeasurable quantities of priceless oil. And you know something else? We have a little miracle that is hardly known about at all, though everybody wants it. It is so rare that diamonds are like pebbles in the street by comparison. It is called Kamitugaite, my friends, and it is 56.71 per cent uranium! Well, what on earth could anybody want that for, I wonder?”

  He waits for the knowing laughter to rise and fade.

  “But who will profit from all these riches, tell me?”

  He waits again, smiling up at me while I ask the same question, so I smile too, in my newfound role as teacher's pet.

  “Oh the fatcats in Kinshasa will get their pay-off, sure! They will not forgo their thirty pieces of Rwandan silver, oh no! But they won't be spending them on schools and roads and hospitals for Eastern Congo, oh no! In the fine stores of Johannesburg and Nairobi and Cape Town, maybe they will spend them. But not here in Kivu. Oh no!” Pause again. Smile this time not at me, but at our delegates. Then ask another question. “Do the people of Kivu get richer every time another truckload of coltan rolls across our borders?”

  The magic stick moves inexorably eastward across Lake Kivu.

  “When the oil begins to flow into Uganda, will the people of Kivu be better off? My friends, as the oil is drained away, they will grow poorer by the day. Yet these are our mines, my friends, our oil, our wealth, given to us by God to tend and enjoy in His name! These are not water wells that fill up again with the rains. What the thieves take from us tod
ay will not grow again tomorrow, or the day after.”

  He shakes his head, muttering Oh no several times, as if recalling a grave injustice.

  “And who, I wonder, sells these stolen goods at such vast profit, not one cent of which is restored to the rightful owners? The answer, my friends, is known to all of you! It is the racketeers of Rwanda! It is the carpetbaggers of Uganda and Burundi! It is our corrupt government of loquacious fatcats in Kinshasa who sell our birthright to the foreigners, and then tax us for our trouble! Thank you, my boy. Well done, sir. You can sit down now.”

  I sit down and reflect upon coltan, not in real time for I am rendering the Mwangaza non-stop, but in the way a news flash rolls along the bottom of a television screen while the main action continues up above. What is coltan? It is a highly precious metal once found exclusively in the Eastern Congo, ask my commodity-dealing clients. If you were unwise enough to dismantle your cellphone, you would find an essential speck of it among the debris. For decades the United States has held strategic stockpiles of the stuff, a fact my clients learned to their cost when the Pentagon dumped tons of it on the world market.

  Why else does coltan have place of honour in my head? Go back to Christmas in the Year of Our Lord 2000. Play Station 2, the must-have electronic toy for every rich British kid, is in desperately short supply. Middle-class parents are wringing their hands, and so is Penelope on the front page of her great newspaper: WE SET OUT TO NAME AND SHAME THE GRINCHES WHO STOLE OUR CHRISTMAS! But her anger is misplaced. The shortage is due not to the incompetence of the manufacturers, but to a tidal wave of genocide which has engulfed the Eastern Congo, thereby causing a temporary interruption in the supply of coltan.

  Did you know that the Mwangaza is a professor of our Congolese history, Salvo? He knows every detail of our horror by heart. He knows who killed whom, how many, and on what date, and he is not afraid of the truth, which so many of our cowardly ones are.