In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (18 page)

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.'

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.

When peace was finally restored a bizarre picture emerged. For years rather than months, the security services discovered, a little old man who made up in charisma for what he lacked in coherence, had been beavering away in the small house in Makala, busily setting up the structures of a state within a state. His plan was to recreate the ancient Kongo nation, that sophisticated kingdom discovered by the Portuguese explorers of the fifteenth century and destroyed by the slave trade and civil strife, with him as its first monarch.

Bernard Mizele Nsemi's efforts were already known to the local authorities but had been brushed aside as the ravings of a lunatic. But if the authorities had refused to take him seriously, his followers had not been so dismissive. They numbered in the thousands and came from all ages and social classes. They held ID cards issued in the name of the Kingdom. Fathers signed up their children, uncles their nephews, often, it later emerged, without the knowledge or approval of the individuals concerned. They even paid minimal levels of tax, a gesture of recognition and respect most Congolese citizens had long ago stopped according the state.

With the Congolese delight in hierarchy and status, the constituent parts of a nation had been identified and the top jobs distributed, from the Royal Prime Minister to the Interior Minister, Central Bank Governor to the Mayor of the port of Matadi. There
were even bizarre echoes of Mobutu's divide-and-rule tactics in the multiplicity of security forces created and army chiefs nominated. In the short time that the royal court had existed, one felt sure that the Head of the mythical Royal Army had already been at loggerheads with the Chief of the Royal Police Force, who no doubt was bickering with the General Army Commander, who felt he couldn't trust the Royal Police Commander and suspected the Head of the Mixed Kongolese Army of plotting a
coup
.

When the military court convened on 9 July 1998 to try the 118 suspects on charges of murder, criminal association and plotting to overthrow an established government, the crowd that gathered to watch proceedings was so large the overwhelmed magistrate at one point thought of holding the session in camera. If idle curiosity played its part, another factor helped explain such keen attendance. Here was a group, the onlookers recognised, which had gone from complaining about the hardship of daily existence and dreaming vaguely of a better life—the bread-and-butter of every Congolese citizen's existence—to trying to bring about that future with the directest of methods.

Like David Koresh's Branch Davidians, they had at some point crossed the line dividing harmless fantasy from violent action. As in Waco, the authorities were about to signal just what they thought of such alternative worlds by crushing them. The government had moved from poo-poohing King Mizele as a comic irrelevance to attributing the entire movement to a European-backed destabilisation attempt, before concluding that this was in fact a home-grown rebellion, similar in nature to their own recent uprising, endowed with dangerous mystical overtones and fully capable of capturing the imagination of at least part of the population.

The trial, which received saturation coverage in the press, was a major organisational challenge. Mizele and the other suspects either refused or could not afford to defend themselves, so a team of eleven defence lawyers was appointed by the state. When the suspects were assembled in one spot they looked, in their glossy blue
shirts—emblazoned with a giant ‘P' for ‘prisoner'—rather like an oversized football team limbering up for a match. But the crowd did not come to see the nobles of the royal court. They came to size up King Mizele the First, the man responsible for all the trouble.

He looked mild-mannered enough, a grey-haired old man, everyone's favourite uncle. But he had the single-mindedness of visionaries and madmen, making up in certainty what he lacked in royal blood. King Mizele did not base his claim on descent from any traditional chief. ‘He told the court he was inspired by God,' said his attorney. ‘He said he was in touch with our ancestors, including Simon Kimbangu and Joseph Kasavubu, Congo's first president.' Challenged by a lawyer to substantiate this claim, the King offered to take him to meet his ancestors. That was when the defence asked for a medical examination to assess whether the King could be held responsible for his actions.

Mizele was far from being a first-time offender. A similar incident had occurred in 1996, under Mobutu, when employees from the water board went to the Royal Court to chase up some overdue bills. They were beaten and held hostage and in the stand-off that ensued between the court officials and soldiers sent to free the water board workers, one man died. The King was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but he was out in no time, one of the detainees who scampered from their cells when Makala's guards abandoned their posts during the rebel takeover of 1997.

He had returned smoothly to his old activities and claimed to have been in touch repeatedly with Kabila. The former rebel chief, King Mizele's lieutenants explained, had promised to hand over power six months after toppling Mobutu in exchange for their previous support. The royal court had decided to march on the radio station only when it became clear that Kabila was not planning to honour his commitments. Given Kabila's readiness to make promises to all and sundry in the run-up to his seizure of power, the audience found this part of the story easy to believe. But the jeers and boos began when the xenophobic nature of King Mizele's fantasy state
emerged. The Kongo Kingdom was to unite King Mizele's own Bas-Congo province with Kinshasa and the province of Bandundu. Tribes from these three western regions—and in particular, from Bas-Congo—would enjoy special privileges. Those signing up for the Royal Army must come from within the area, said the King, as he did not want ‘mercenaries' in his forces. ‘Outsiders' were invited to leave Kinshasa of their own free will.

In the decades of Mobutu's rule, the Congolese had seen ethnic cleansing used repeatedly as the Leopard ruthlessly stoked up tribal hatreds for political gain. Scarred by the massacres and expulsions, Kinshasa's population did not want to pass that way again. For those born outside the favoured three provinces, the Kongo Kingdom only promised a repeat of old nastiness. When the King and his personal secretary were condemned to twenty years in jail, with lesser sentences and fines for other notables, there was a general sense of relief. ‘We tried to argue that because the King was away in Bas-Congo at the time of the shooting, he could not have given his followers any direct orders or be held responsible,' said one of the unsuccessful defence lawyers. ‘But the authorities decided that having told Kabila to quit power in the first place was responsibility enough.'

In an attempt to prevent any further resurgence, the authorities have done their best to wipe out all evidence of this national embarrassment. The Royal Court's activities have been outlawed, the family home King Mizele used as his base seized and converted into a police station. The King's personal secretary died in prison but Mizele himself, placed in the wing reserved for those convicted of military offences, seems to be thriving. He has put on weight, is said to be cheerful and is given to telling visitors he soon expects to be a free man. It is not clear whether he hopes to be pardoned or is planning to take part in one of the all-too-frequent escapes in which, even the chief warden admits, Makala specialises. Perhaps King Mizele's cheerfulness is based on the understanding—the same realisation that made both Mobutu and Kabila belatedly sit up and take
notice—that there will always be those exasperated enough to listen to a siren voice speaking of mystical vocations, ancient rights and a brave new world.

 

King Mizele's
thwarted citizens had looked to the past for relief, weaving their dreams around the folklore of an antique kingdom. A music rehearsal in the heart of Kinshasa revealed how many Zaireans turned their gaze inwards to escape reality, resolutely embracing the trivial in their quest for self-fulfilment.

It was hard not to wince as a series of electronic whines shrieked from the stage, followed by the monotonous ‘Hallo, hallo, testing, testing, hallo, hallo'. Wenge Musica 4X4, as the pop group called itself, was trying out its system ahead of a concert scheduled a few days hence. The equipment was rudimentary, the amplification turned too high and the result a fuzzy roar in which voices and instruments all blended into one painful, deafening mess.

It was a shame, because there are few sounds sweeter to the ear than the music known across Africa by the generic term ‘Lingala'. If Congo has failed in most sectors, music must qualify as its one, most glorious exception. Across the continent and in the Afro-Caribbean nightclubs of Paris, Brussels and London, fans snub home-grown bands to dance to the lilting melodies coming out of Congo's slums.

The mystery is how conditions so depressing can give birth to tunes so infectiously light-hearted, so innocent in tone. But somehow they do. As a music expert once wrote, if the critics' jibe that Congolese guitarists often only play three notes has an element of truth to it, the fact that those three notes have managed to entrance a continent for more than thirty years is something of an achievement. Formulaic though it may be, Lingala is Congo's greatest export, its commercial success the most reliable escape strategy ever made available to its youth. The goal is to be recognised by a promoter scouring the hundreds of tiny nightclubs in Kinshasa, flown to Paris or Brussels to record a first cassette, break into the international music scene and—following the pattern set by such stars as Papa
Wemba, Koffi Olomide, Tabu Ley Rochereau and the late Pepe Kalle—start a new life abroad, only occasionally returning to Kinshasa to perform for grateful fans back home.

Wenge had been one of the latest groups to go through that routine, fulfilling most of the industry clichés in the process. Mirroring the country's political parties, Congolese bands have a tendency to fracture within split seconds of forming, as the most talented members vie for the limelight. Each dissident faction, realising the importance of the recognition factor, then claims the original band name. And so the offshoots confusingly proliferate. What had started out as good old Wenge Musica now came in four rival versions: Wenge Musica 4X4—that day's performers—Wenge Musica Maison Mere, Wenge Musica BCBG, Wenge Musica Kumbela and Wenge Musica Aile Paris. No doubt there would soon be more.

As dusk fell, and a flock of herons flew over the white-washed compound in neat formation, the band was practising its moves, the desire for clarity constantly losing the battle against the quest for added volume. The cost of the tickets for listening to the stop-start renditions of Wenge's hits was minimal, but it was still too high for many of the fans milling outside the open-air venue. The balconies of nearby apartments were crammed with people watching for free and despite organisers' attempts to shoo them away, the phaseurs were out in force on the corrugated roofs of nearby shacks.

Wenge Musica 4X4 seemed to be following the recent trend of downplaying the role of griot—the angelic voice which traditionally sang the king's praises—in favour of the fog-horn voiced ‘animateur', who was once limited to shouting out one-word choruses. At his bidding, the performers were now standing in line, legs bent. A pelvic thrust was passed from one singer to another like a bad case of the flu, until six hips were grinding in unison. Then the group suddenly fragmented, each youth wheeling away in apparent confusion, to reassemble in a different formation.

While Wenge's musicians practised, a different kind of choreography was becoming apparent in the young men arriving to help with the rehearsal. Almost willing the crowd to watch them, each
crossed the floor alone, sauntering the length of the compound with the diffident self-consciousness of court débutantes, heads high, toes turned outwards, shoulders rolling. There was nothing spontaneous about this gathering. Each wore at least one item of clothing that could qualify as ‘tape-à-l'oeil'—designed to leave its image lingering on the retina—a white shirt whose collar wings fell to nipple-level, a pinstripe jacket with a giant diaper pin in its lapel, a black fishnet T-shirt, a drawstring top with one hood in front and one behind, a top and pair of trousers in ice-lolly colours bright enough to make the teeth ache.