The American Mission

by Matthew Palmer

  “Well, I’m here now and I’ve brought reinforcements. What’s going on?”

  “Rwandans. There’s a fair number of them, but not enough it seems to take us head-on. The boys are fighting well and for now we are holding. If we can discourage them, maybe they’ll go look for an easier target.”

  Marie was skeptical. Busu-Mouli had not been chosen at random. The genocidaires had been sent here for a purpose.

  As if to confirm her suspicions, a rocket-propelled grenade flew swiftly overhead and punched a hole through another house on the far side of the square. The mud-brick-and-wattle construction simply fell over on its side. An elderly man climbed out from the rubble, calling for help. His wife, he shouted, was trapped under the corrugated tin roof. Two of Jean-Baptiste’s militia ran to his aid.

  “They are not going away,” Marie said insistently. “You may have surprised them, but they’re going to come in after us.”

  “You might be right,” Jean-Baptiste admitted. “Wait for the bastards,” he shouted to the defenders. “Don’t waste your bullets on the trees. You,” he said to Marie, “get someplace safe.”

  Marie, trailed by Mputu and Kikaya, ran to her father’s home, where she found the Chief of the Luba sitting on a carved ceremonial stool, cradling an ancient shotgun. Three men from the village had been left there to guard their chief. Marie ran to her father and kissed him on the cheek. “Papa, go inside.”

  “No, my only child. I am Chief. My people must see me as they fight for their homes. I will not cower in the kitchen like a woman. These Rwandans are womanly. They thought they would have an easy night of it. Now they have to work up the courage for an attack against men.”

  Marie recognized that this was not the right moment to try to push her father’s thinking on gender roles in a more progressive direction.

  “I think they are about ready.”

  “I think so too.”

  They didn’t have long to wait.

  A red flare went up over the village, bathing the town in an eerie light. All along the tree line, Marie could see the white flashes from the muzzles of the attackers’ Kalashnikovs. A scream of defiance from one of the defenders served as a counterpoint, and the village guard returned fire. Some were disciplined in their use of ammunition. Others just sprayed a full magazine into the jungle. If they hit anything, it would only be by blind luck.

  From the porch, Marie had a good overview of the battle and, for the moment at least, was relatively safe. Teams of Rwandan guerillas appeared from the jungle and moved toward Busu-Mouli in a leapfrog fashion, with the teams up front giving covering fire to those coming up from behind. Although the genocidaires were more experienced than the village guard, they were assaulting entrenched positions manned by people defending their homes and families. None of the defenders had any doubt what would happen to them if they were overrun.

  Marie saw one genocidaire cut almost in half by a burst of fire from a machine pistol. Another collapsed when a bullet slammed through his right eye and out the back of his head. The defenders too were taking casualties. A teenage boy ran past holding a bloody shirt to his arm.

  The porch was a good firing position, and when the attackers got close enough to be within range, Marie switched her AK to semiautomatic and started shooting at the guerillas. Mputu, his sons, and the three guardsmen followed suit. Not being under direct fire themselves and standing above the attackers, Marie and her kinsmen were able to keep up a withering assault. She saw at least four genocidaires go down almost immediately, although it was impossible for her to tell whether it was her shots that had hit home.

  For a moment it looked like the Rwandans might break. They were killers but not real soldiers. The genocidaires preferred their targets helpless and unarmed. Then one of the Rwandan teams managed to make it around the far side of one of the houses on the right flank of the defenders’ line. When the guardsmen realized that they were being shot at from behind, they panicked and broke cover. Genocidaire guerillas flowed through the gap in the lines. Busu-Mouli was on the verge of being lost.

  Suddenly, Tsiolo leaped off the porch, shouting a piercing and incomprehensible war cry. Marie, Mputu, and the others followed, racing to keep pace with their much older chief.

  “Luba, to your king,” Tsiolo cried, as he closed in on the gap in the lines.

  One Rwandan attacker turned to face this new threat just in time to have his face blown off by a blast from Tsiolo’s shotgun. The Chief shot a second attacker in the back. Without any time to reload, he swung the now useless gun like club, catching a third attacker across the bridge of the nose and driving him to his knees.

  Marie and the others were only a few paces behind, firing from the hip to keep the attackers back from their chief. But Tsiolo had gotten too far out in front and a burst of fire from an AK-47 hit him in the shoulder and the belly. The Principal Chief of Busu-Mouli fell to the ground and lay still.

  “Papa!” Marie screamed. She tossed her rifle aside and ran to her stricken father. Mputu led his sons in a countercharge that pushed the Rwandans back. The defenders had seen their chief fall and attacked the genocidaires with a previously unknown ferocity. Now it was the Rwandans’ turn to run, and they broke for the jungle pursued by the citizen soldiers of Busu-Mouli hell-bent on vengeance.

  Marie knelt in the dust, cradling her father’s head in her lap.

  “Don’t die, Papa,” she pleaded, as tears streamed down her cheeks. “You can’t die.” She choked back a sob.

  “Kikaya,” she called. “Get the red medical bag from my house. Hurry.”

  Mputu’s oldest son leaped to obey. Within moments, he was helping her unpack the limited stock of basic medical supplies from the first-aid kit. There was no doctor in Busu-Mouli, and the traditional healers with their herbal remedies and sympathetic magic would be of little use in treating gunshot wounds. Most did as much damage to their patients as the conditions they were supposed to be treating. Marie’s basic first-aid training with Consolidated Mining had made her probably the most accomplished medical professional in a hundred-mile radius.

  She did what she could, but Marie was painfully aware of the limitations of both her skills and the contents of her medical kit. Mercifully, the bullets had passed in and out. There was a pair of clamps in the first-aid bag, but she did not relish the idea of poking around inside her father’s body, hunting for pieces of a spent bullet. The most important thing was to control the bleeding. She directed Kiyala to hold a clean pad of gauze firmly against the wound in her father’s shoulder while she did the same for his abdomen. The shoulder injury was of tangential concern. It was the wound in the abdomen that she knew was life-threatening.

  “Do not worry, daughter,” her father said, and she could hear the pain in the strain of his voice. “Your Uncle Katanga hit me harder than this when he caught me kissing your mother in the manioc field before we were married. I hit him back too. Just as hard. I’ll bet your mother never told you that story.”

  “Yes, she did. I believe it ended with her grabbing you both by the ears until you shook hands.”

  The Chief closed his eyes.

  “I think I’m going to rest for a few minutes,” he said.

  “Yes, Papa. Get some rest.”

  Slowly, they got the bleeding under control. Mputu and his sons carried the Chief into the house, where Marie made him as comfortable as possible with clean sheets on the bed and a traditional herbal concoction that she knew from experience actually did help manage pain. The bleeding had stopped. There was no way of knowing, however, what kind of internal damage the bullet might have done. As a precaution, she had started her father on a course of amoxicillin. The drugs in her medical kit were all well past their expiration dates, but they were all she had.

  Her father slept for fourteen hours, and Marie had begun to fear that he had slipped into a coma until he awoke and asked to see Katang
a.

  Marie waited in the front room while her uncle and father spoke for nearly two hours. When Katanga emerged from the Chief’s room, he looked grim. There was a determined set to his jaw, as if he were a man who had just shouldered a heavy burden.

  “What did you do to poor Katanga?” Marie asked her father, as she changed his bandages.

  “I gave him a job. A difficult job, but one I am sure he is up to.”

  “Do I want to know what it is?”

  “You do not.” Her father tensed abruptly as a sudden stab of pain made him draw a deep breath. The area around the hole in his belly was tender and swollen, and his skin felt hot to her touch. Marie feared that despite the antibiotics, infection had already set in.

  “Marie,” the Chief continued, after the pain had subsided. “When I am gone . . .”

  “Stop that, Papa,” she interrupted. “You are not going to die. I won’t allow it.” Marie could hear the fierce urgency in her own voice as she blinked back tears. “We need you. I need you.”

  The next day, Katanga brought a visitor to see the Chief. Mbusa Lamala was one of the major subchiefs, and the Lamalas had an alliance with the Tsiolos that stretched back generations. Mbusa was one of her father’s strongest supporters on the tribal council. Marie was excluded from the conversation, but she had no doubt what the three were discussing: succession to the position of Principal Chief. Over the next several days, Katanga brought three more subchiefs to the house to call on Chief Tsiolo. Marie knew them all well. She had known them since she was a girl. It did not escape her notice that those summoned to see the Chief were among the most powerful personalities on the council.

  Despite Marie’s best efforts, her father’s condition continued to worsen. He developed a fever that neither the limited supply of Western medicines in her kit nor the traditional healers’ best herbal remedies could control. The wound in his belly began leaking a mixture of pus and blood. Her father was dying before her eyes, and there was nothing Marie could do to help him.

  On the fourth day after the genocidaires had attacked Busu-Mouli, Marie sat at her father’s bedside, holding his hand and telling him stories about the exploits of legendary Luba warriors, the same stories that he had told her when she was a young girl. It was nearly midnight when the fever broke and her father looked at her lucidly.

  “Daughter, I am dying.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Katanga will need your help for what I have asked him to do.”

  “Of course. Anything.”

  “You are quick to promise. What will be asked of you is not easy.”

  Tsiolo took Marie’s hand and pressed it against the raised circular scar on his chest.

  “When the time comes, remember this. Trust this.”

  Marie grasped his wrist lightly with her fingers, and she could feel his pulse, weak and thready.

  “I love you, Marie.”

  “I love you, Papa.” She laid her hand across his chest.

  Chief Tsiolo, the last male in his line, coughed once, closed his eyes, and died.

  • • •

  Marie buried her father in the family plot next to her mother. There were two days of mourning in the village, followed by a feast. On the third day, the subchiefs from the surrounding villages who had sworn fealty to her father gathered in Busu-Mouli to choose a new principal chief.

  Katanga served as the host of the tribal council, acting in his late brother-in-law’s stead. He sat in Tsiolo’s traditional seat at the long dining table in the Chief’s house. Marie’s house now. Jean-Baptiste sat on his left. Marie sat on Katanga’s right, studiously ignoring the mutterings of those who believed that women did not belong at a tribal council. There were about a dozen subchiefs present or represented by proxy, most of those by their eldest sons.

  “Good afternoon, chiefs of the Luba people,” Katanga began. “We gather today in the wake of a tragedy, the untimely death of our principal chief. This is a difficult time. We are all of us under siege and none of us more so than Busu-Mouli. But we cannot wait to choose a new leader. Who among us is fit to lead?”

  The bargaining began in earnest. One by one, the most ambitious of the subchiefs put forward their candidacy. One by one, their rivals shot them down. Food and copious amounts of alcohol were served as the afternoon stretched into the evening.

  Finally, Mbusa Lamala rose to speak. “I propose that Katanga be appointed Chief of Busu-Mouli and elevated to Principal Chief. He has proven his leadership abilities in his oversight of the mining operation that his brother-in-law championed to such great effect. The young men look up to him and they will, I believe, follow him willingly.” Mbusa sat, and there was a generally positive buzz among the subchiefs. The choice of Katanga seemed popular. This is what Marie had been expecting. A tribal council, her father had once explained to her, was an elaborate stage play. If the leader was wise and capable, the outcome was known in advance, not to all, of course, but to those whom the Principal Chief could count on to make it so. Her father had done his usual thorough job in laying the groundwork for Katanga.

  Katanga rose and raised one hand palm outward to ask for silence. “Chief Lamala, you honor me. But it is an honor of which I am not worthy. A man should know his limitations, and I am not meant to be Chief. Fortunately, there is one among the citizens of Busu-Mouli who, I believe, is ready for that responsibility. One who has demonstrated the skills and character of a true leader.”

  This was not at all according to the script that Marie thought Katanga and her father had written. She saw Jean-Baptiste straighten in his seat. He was evidently confident that Katanga was speaking of him. She felt a momentary flash of anger at the thought, but kept her face expressionless. Could this be what her father meant when he told her that she would be asked to do something difficult?

  “I would follow this person to hell,” Katanga continued. He paused as though for effect. “I speak, of course, of Chief Tsiolo’s daughter, Marie.”

  Jean-Baptiste scowled and looked fiercely at Katanga, but he bit his tongue. Marie simply looked startled.

  The chiefs murmured among themselves angrily. One of the minor subchiefs blurted out, “A woman as Chief? It’s an affront to the ancestors.” Some of the older and more conservative chiefs noisily agreed.

  “Hold on a moment,” said Kabika Abo, the chief of the small village of Ikonongo and one of those who Katanga had brought to see her father before he died. “Have you forgotten the vilie, the first female spirit? Is she not the founder of the Luba clan? Is she not the guarantor of the fertility of our chiefs and the guardian of our lineage? I believe she is still with us. I believe she has been incarnated in Marie Tsiolo, who I know to be a true avenging angel.” Abo was not normally an especially eloquent speaker, and Marie was certain that he had practiced this speech many times before he delivered it. He spoke well, however, and it was an argument that would carry weight with the clan leaders.

  “I realize that it is unusual,” Katanga said, “but these are unusual times. The outside world presses in upon us as never before in our history. Who among you knows this world? Didier?” he asked, pointing at the chief who had objected to Marie’s gender. “Have you ever been as far as Kinshasa? Marie has studied at one of the finest universities in South Africa. She is a trained engineer and it is she—not I—who designed and built the mine and the smelter that represent the future of our people. Tsiolo himself wanted Marie to take his place. It is admittedly a modern idea, but if we insist on clinging to our old ways, I assure you that the modern world will destroy us.”

  Mbusa Lamala again took the floor. “Katanga is right,” he said. “And I recognize the wisdom in the words of Chief Abo. I am persuaded. This is the best course for our people. I second the call for Marie Tsiolo to be made Principal Chief and I exercise my right to demand a vote.”

  Katanga and Lamala were moving quickly in locks
tep. It was clear to Marie that the fix was in from the beginning. Lamala’s original nomination of Katanga was a tactical ploy, a bit of misdirection. It was a classic move on the part of her father. She also understood why the Chief had kept her in the dark. She did not want her father’s job, and both he and Katanga knew it.

  “Chief Lamala has the right to call for a vote,” Katanga agreed. “The vote will be by secret ballot. Red stones for yes, black for no.”

  Most of the chiefs were illiterate, making written ballots problematic. The Luba tradition was to cast secret ballots with colored stones. One at a time, each chief rose and approached a simple wooden box on the table in front of Katanga. One at a time, each chief put a pebble into the box. Katanga held eye contact with each as they voted. Finally Katanga cast his vote as Tsiolo’s proxy.

  Jean-Baptiste counted the stones. There were eight red stones and five black stones in the box.

  One at a time, the subchiefs came forward to greet their new leader and pledge their loyalty. Marie Tsiolo was the new Principal Chief of Busu-Mouli.

  Now what the hell am I supposed to do? she wondered.

  20

  JULY 13, 2009

  KINSHASA

  Antoine’s enthusiasm was infectious. It always had been. Now he was pitching Alex on Albert Ilunga as a possible savior for the Congo. He argued with both passion and logic, and Alex thought that the priest had missed his calling. He should have been a Jesuit. Despite the cane, or perhaps because of it, Antoine enjoyed walking, even in Kinshasa’s tropical heat. Ilunga’s house, a comfortable villa that was all he had left of a once-considerable family fortune, was in the Kintambo district, not too far from the church. Antoine had insisted they walk.

  The streets were crowded with cars, motorcycles, and just about every other conceivable form of wheeled transportation. Even the sidewalks had their own frenetic energy. Stalls on the side of the road hawked everything from Coca-Cola to dried bonobo penises, which were marketed rather literally for their alleged “medicinal” properties. Women in bright print dresses with matching head scarves badgered them to buy fruit from wicker or plastic containers piled high with guava, bananas, pineapple, and grapes. Victims of the Congo’s wars, many missing arms or legs, begged for spare change. Antoine gave a handful of francs to one young boy whose left leg had been amputated below the knee. The boy had a crutch made from a forked tree branch. A strip of car tire was tied to the fork for the boy’s armpit to rest on, and a stick bound to the branch with thick twine served as a handgrip.