In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  There was something of the rubber ball about Charles. A rolypoly figure of a man who seemed to have been born without a neck or any other superfluous links between his various body parts, he was blessed with unsquashable cheerfulness. Swat him away, one felt, and his tubby form would merely bounce off the nearest wall and come hurtling back, smile intact, perky as ever.

  Two-way conversation was an alien concept. Charles was into pronouncements: emphasised by a stubby finger, delivered with all the force and rhythm of the amateur preacher he was, they brooked no dissent. Beaming with enthusiasm, he would round them off with an emphatic ‘Merci’, signalling his point had been not only made, but proved. His colleagues had dubbed him respectfully ‘Papa Pasteur’. He had a collection of Kimbanguist religious books, attended church whenever he got the chance and would clearly have liked to be at worship every day of the week. Proudly, he showed off the little diamond-shaped badge—a portrait of the church’s spiritual head—he always wore pinned to the natty waistcoats he favoured, and fished a plastic eye-drop bottle out of his rucksack. It was full, he explained, of Holy Water from the village of N’kamba. Birthplace of the prophet who founded the church, N’kamba had become a place of pilgrimage for believers, the Kimbanguist equivalent of Jerusalem. ‘Every morning I pray and swallow a couple of drops of this. It keeps me blessed all day.’

  Yet in this picture of religious devotion one note jarred: the slight matter of his job, which, it seemed to me, might present a committed Christian with a few pangs of conscience. For Charles was what was known as a ‘protocol’. Employed by one of the few multinationals still operating in Kinshasa, his duty for the last thirteen years had been to usher employees in and out of Ndjili airport with a minimum of hassle. Essentially, that made him a professional payer of bribes. As a committed Christian, did this not present him with something of a moral dilemma?

  No job goes deeper to the heart of Article 15 than the euphemistically dubbed ‘protocol’. In most airports of the world, all but the sick, very old and very young can be trusted to show their tickets, check in their luggage and pass through customs on their own. The fact that in Congo an entire profession has sprung up to deal with these simple procedures is a tribute to the sheer inventiveness of the country’s officialdom.

  Under Mobutu, the airport was transformed into something far more challenging than a place where you merely boarded a plane. Every check represented an opportunity for poorly paid officials to exchange their co-operation and compliance for a ‘little present’. And so the checks multiplied—at one stage there were seven separate services with the right to examine your papers—as members of the rival security forces, with friends, relatives and hangers-on attached, moved into Ndjili’s peeling cupola with their snarling police dogs, metal barriers and rubber batons. The building became more than an airport, it was transformed into an intellectual contest, a real-life computer game full of hidden traps and sudden obstacles, where the punishments ranged from public humiliation to arrest and the prize—that longed-for seat on the next plane out—came with a highly variable price tag.

  The state of the airport mirrored the state of the body politic, offering new arrivals an accurate thermometer of the situation outside its walls. Every now and then, a new government flush with confidence would try to clean things up. A general would be given responsibility for the airport, the number of security services would be slashed and the human flotsam and jetsam expelled. But like hyenas lured by the smell of blood, the predators gradually crept back. As the new administrators registered the impossibility of reform, they would join the pickpockets, shoe-shine boys and beggars in the competition to see who could milk passengers most effectively. If you passed through relatively smoothly, you could count on finding some semblance of order outside. Emerge in a state of hysteria, several hundred dollars the lighter, and you knew things had gone bad again.

  I never flew into Ndjili without feeling slightly nauseous. Although I knew it was coming, my stomach would lurch when an official at the door seized my passport and plunged with it into the bedlam of the interior, a move one felt was carefully calculated to put the nervous passenger off-balance. Travellers who could not afford a protocol developed their own survival techniques. My own was to keep a layer of dirty clothes at the top of my luggage, discouraging further exploration; to travel with the smallest of bags and always keep $20 notes ready folded in my pocket, to be smoothly pressed into a palm during the simulated friendly handshake that closed the ordeal. Getting the timing of the payout right was crucial. Volunteer the first bribe—intended to cover all officialdom in your ambit—too early and the friendly official who had earlier promised to ‘arrange everything’ would suddenly disappear, to be replaced by a fresh set of uniforms, all claiming to deserve a piece of the action. Best was after you had entered the taxi and the driver had his foot on the accelerator, but before one of the soldiers circling like sharks in the parking lot noticed money was changing hands. It wasn’t always easy.

  In this jungle, the experts were the protocols. Because they were regulars, they could trade favours, knew who mattered and the real price for each service. If they were good at their job, they took on their shoulders all the sordid demands of corruption, the dirty deals and petty bargaining, allowing their charges—the Big Vegetables and expatriate businessmen—to sit in the air-conditioned VIP lounge with empty hands and quiet minds. ‘My responsibility is to make sure no one bothers my whites,’ explained Charles, with possessive solicitude.

  But it was not with this in mind, presumably, that Simon Kimbangu had taken on the might of the Belgian administration. For the founder of the Kimbanguist church was very much a rebel, deemed such a threat the colonial authorities imprisoned him for thirty years. Above all, he had very little time for the whites Charles spent his working day protecting from the more unsavoury aspects of Congolese existence. Which was why I found Charles’s religious convictions, which he happily discoursed upon as we headed for the largest Kimbanguist church in Kinshasa, so intriguing.

  Watching a religion and its myths while they are actually in the making is a curious sensation. The story of Kimbangu’s life is full of parallels to the story of Christ and is told in much the same terms: his miracles, his twelve apostles, his initial reluctance to accept his divine destiny, his eventual martyrdom and posthumous apparitions. But the stories Charles was recounting had not been slowly crafted over 2,000 years, taking on an allegorical quality through the passage of time. Kimbangu died in 1951, within the memory of many living Zaireans, and the tale is dotted with disconcerting references to such modern inventions as trains, revolvers, ferries and motorcades. This is the Christian myth, replayed in the twentieth century.

  Blurred photographs of Kimbangu exist. They show a man in a prison tunic, surprisingly stout despite his repeated bouts of fasting, frowning into the bright African sun. His scowl is deep and there is no discernible hint of charisma. But if you believe, as the church followers do, that Simon Kimbangu is not just a prophet sent to spread the word but the Holy Spirit itself, then here is that mysterious Christian entity, captured incarnate on film for the very first time.

  He was born in 1887 in N’kamba, a village west of Kinshasa, where the river breaks up into a series of cataracts on its descent to sea level. The region of Bas Congo has always been imbued with a strong spiritual streak, thanks to its proximity to the coast, which meant it was the area the Portuguese missionaries first came into contact with. According to the legend, Kimbangu began receiving messages from God in his teens. By the time he married he knew a special destiny awaited him. In the 1920s, word spread that he was healing the sick, raising the dead and restoring the sight of blind people in the name of Jesus Christ. At first, the white missionaries had welcomed the efforts of a man who could convert local villagers to the Christian faith with such ease. But as it became clear that Kimbangu was challenging what he regarded as an attempt to establish a white monopoly on the Christian religion, a message bound to find
a ready audience in a population smarting at its colonial subjugation, the Belgian authorities realised they were facing a potentially dangerous rebellion.

  As Kimbangu’s message that a black Messiah was coming who would expel the whites gathered pace, workers abandoned factories, refused to pay taxes and challenged the rules of forced labour. They flocked to N’Kamba in their thousands. ‘The whites will become black and the blacks will become white,’ Kimbangu preached, spreading a gospel in which anti-colonialism, black pride and personal salvation were inseparably interwoven.

  Alarmed by a movement spreading faster than they could control, the authorities arrested him after a long game of hide and seek. At the end of a trial regarded by Kimbanguists as the equivalent of Jesus Christ’s appearance before Pontius Pilate, Kimbangu was condemned to death after being found guilty of threatening state security. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment and Kimbangu was sent to what was then Elizabethville and is now the southern city of Lubumbashi.

  While he served time, the Belgians tried unsuccessfully to wipe out the phenomenon, outlawing the movement, arresting its followers and deporting thousands of Kimbanguist families, a tactic that merely served to spread the word beyond Bas-Congo and further across the country. After thirty years in jail, where punishments included plunging the prisoner into saltwater after a beating, Kimbangu expired. While the colonial authorities ascribed his death to dysentery, believers say it was a death foreseen by the prophet himself. It was only when independence loomed on the horizon in December 1959, that the Belgians, accepting the unquenchable popularity of the movement, agreed to decriminalise Kimbanguism. In 1960, the prophet’s body, which witnesses said showed no signs of corruption after nine years, was exhumed and taken to N’kamba for reburial, receiving full military honours on the way from the army that had once hunted him down.

  Kimbanguism is the antithesis of humility. Despite the puzzling absence of references to him in the Scripture, to millions of followers in Congo and neighbouring African countries, Kimbangu ranks alongside the Son and the Father as a constituent part of the Holy Trinity, a claim that must surely make the Vatican cringe. And what Jesus could do, worshippers like Charles make clear, Kimbangu did better, even if, to the outsider, the tales possess a certain wackiness that suggests symbolic reinterpretation needs to run its course if the story is ever to rival the New Testament and reach a wider audience.

  Kimbangu, we are told, once foiled a plot to kill him with a slice of poisoned chikwange, that dietary staple, the local equivalent of trying to poison someone with a chip butty. Promenading himself on the River Congo, he not only walked on water but actually went one better. Soap and towel made a miraculous appearance, and he washed and dried his hands. When the colonial authorities were about to take him to prison, the train engine stalled for a symbolic three days while he said goodbye to his children. (‘Three days, Madam,’ exclaimed Charles, jabbing his finger at me. ‘Three days! And no one could understand why.’) And when the colonial authorities performed an autopsy on his body they found internal organs such as intestines, liver and lungs were missing, which makes the paunch captured by the camera all the more puzzling.

  Such eccentricities did not stop Mobutu recognising a useful icon for a young nation when he saw it, and he sought to appropriate Kimbangu in much the same way that he had appropriated Lumumba. The first stone of the church’s administrative centre in Kinshasa was laid by Mobutu. He also maintained cordial relations with the church’s leadership, whose members were believed to enjoy special privileges as a result. In the eyes of some Congolese, the Kimbanguist clerics’ disinclination to join the Catholic and Protestant churches when they started putting pressure on Mobutu to institute real democratic reform tainted the church.

  But such charges left Charles indifferent. ‘No man is a prophet in his own country,’ he said with a shrug as we entered the gates of the Kimbanguist compound. ‘People come all the way from Angola and Zambia to meet our spiritual head. But there are people in N’kamba village itself who don’t believe in Kimbangu. Can you believe it?’ Indeed, a half-hearted Kimbanguist, a Kimbanguist who didn’t attend church, seemed hard to find. Maybe because of its clever interweaving of spirituality with the touchy issues of race and power, Kimbanguism seemed to have a knack for tapping a well of fanatical fervour in a population that had supped deep on the cup of humiliation. ‘God is black,’ explained Charles. ‘The Pope said so when he visited Lagos in the 1960s. He said “God is black and he can be found in Africa”. Well, we know who he was talking about. He was talking about us.’

  As we wandered across the grounds, climbing through the scaffolding of what would eventually be a massive 4,000-seat Kimbanguist theatre hall, matching an equally massive hospitality suite next door—as genuine an example of African presidential kitsch, with its ice-cold air-conditioning and rows of chintz sofas, as any I had seen in my time in Kinshasa—I kept trying to bring the conversation round to the tricky subject of Charles’s job. It was like trying to peel a mango with a knife and fork—at each attempt the subject skidded away as Charles skilfully rerouted the conversation back to his true interest: religion.

  Things really were much better at the airport, he insisted when pressed, now that the Kabila administration had taken over. The airport had been cleaned up, the scum had been thrown out of the building and anyone paying a bribe risked arrest by the undercover agents working at Ndjili. As long as he was wearing his badge proving he was one of the several hundred accredited protocols—he proudly brandished his card—then there really was no problem. ‘The Congolese want to change mentally. They are sick of what happened in the past. God is watching us and saying “the moment has arrived”. The black man must learn to know himself.’

  Well, yes, he said, it was true that there were still five separate security services operating in the airport. And yes, their officials did still often ask for money, just to buy a ‘Sucré’—a sugared drink. ‘But you would have to have a heart of stone to refuse when a man who tells you his children can’t afford to go to school asks for just one Coke. As a Christian, I can’t see suffering and not be moved by it.’ Yes, he acknowledged, entry to the air-conditioned VIP lounge still required a ‘little present’. How much? Oh, quite a hefty present, $30 dollars or so. And yes, it was true that the expatriates who passed through his hands wanted the present to be paid rather than risk having their luggage inspected by officials. The most obvious question hung unspoken in the air between us: if Article 15 had really been banished from Ndjili airport, why should anyone need a protocol? If the new system was so clean, why wasn’t Charles redundant?

  There was a pause while Charles indulged in a little uncharacteristic squirming. ‘Look, there are things I have to do for my job which, as a Christian, I clearly shouldn’t be doing. But our spiritual leader has told us, “your work is your mother and your work is your father”. So if it is done in the context of your job, there’s no problem.’

  Once again, the stout prophet of N’Kamba was echoing Christ. ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,’ the Messiah had said, authorising his followers to pay Roman taxes and work alongside a terrestrial regime whose values they theoretically abhorred. The Kimbanguist version of that instruction for the twentieth century was as pragmatic as the prophet’s miracles and as hard-headed as Mobutu’s own advice: ‘Article 15 is acceptable, as long as it’s done for professional reasons.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The importance of being elegant

  ‘It seems that our country has been

  Abandoned to its sad fate

  Why did we fight against the white man’s rule?

  Did we shed our blood for independence

  To listen to the sterile quarrels of our new masters

  Fighting solely for their political privileges?

  The country is in ruins.

  What a humiliation before the world!

  A country so rich, with leaders so careless of its future

>   The time has come

  Kasavubu, Lumumba, Bolikango, Old Tshombe

  Why have you turned your backs on your country?’

  —Song by

  Tabu Ley Rochereau

  If Article 15 was the pragmatist’s reaction to privation, not everyone chose to follow the route of scrimping and scraping, making do and making it up as you went along. For some, mere survival was too small-minded an ambition. Their way of dealing with desperation was the path of sublimation, escaping into parallel intellectual or spiritual worlds where the rules were benign and self-fulfilment, grandeur, dignity—those qualities so missing in their daily lives—finally became possible.

  You could hardly take two steps in Congo without stumbling upon a meeting of Seventh Day Adventists, a Moonie reunion, Jehovah’s Witness get-together or a gathering by one of the US-imported fundamentalist sects that blossomed into new life in Congo’s fevered climate. But the secular forms sublimation could take were more interesting. One case, in particular, first intrigued and then thoroughly alarmed both the Mobutu and Kabila administrations.

  It came to public attention with a small march on Kinshasa’s broadcasting centre, about a year after Mobutu’s overthrow. The thirty or so members of the procession came from Makala, the working-class district in which Kinshasa’s notorious prison was located, and they wanted national radio to transmit their simple message: President Laurent Kabila was to step down, return to his native Shaba province, and make way for the only man with the moral authority to rule: Mizele the First, the King of Kongo.

  The security services broke up the procession without difficulty, but their antennae were now emitting loud bleeping noises—just what was going on in Makala? There was talk of some kind of royal court operating out of a modest local home. An army unit was sent to explore and took the precaution of staging a dawn raid. Not enough of a precaution, it transpired, for its soldiers were met with a volley of shots from those inside, who appeared to be sitting on a sizeable weapons cache. In the resulting day-long firefight between members of the ‘royal court’ and the security forces, which sent thousands of Makala residents running from the district in terror, at least eight people, including two ‘kadogos’—the young boys making up the mass of Kabila’s army—were killed.