The Boy in the River (12 page)

When the monstrance containing the sacrament was held aloft in front of us in an act of solemn blessing it felt both sensual and surreal. Though I didn’t make the connection at the time, it was in its way very African, right down to the fearsome lion, prowling beyond the circle of firelight, scenting his prey. I could never sit through this service in the ancient chapel without experiencing a sense of something supernatural, numinous, beyond the mere comfort of ritual. Intellectually, I tried very hard to argue myself out of it, but nothing quite worked.

Sue was pleased with my academic achievements, but she saw very little of me at this time and couldn’t really see what my quest was about. For her faith was simply faith: it didn’t need to be justified by rational arguments, nor did it find expression through clouds of incense. As a result, my studies at Oxford drove the wedge more and more deeply between us.

I left Oxford with a Double First and went on to a doctorate at King’s College London. After that I considered a position as an academic theologian through the church, but finally decided I didn’t have the temperament, nor really the faith, for it. In mid-1999 I was offered a lectureship in African religions at the University of Bath Spa, and I accepted. But my move there, while opening up a new direction for me, also signalled the formal end of our marriage. Sue and I had been living almost as strangers under one roof for some time, and we both knew a separation was now inevitable. We had agonized over it, trying to spare the children the worst of the pain, but in the end I moved to Bath without the family for the start of the first semester in 1999.

16

Lower Congo, April 2002

For a few weeks around Easter I was able to take a breather from the Adam case.

While Will O’Reilly and Andy Baker were in South Africa, Faith and I were planning a research trip of our own in central Africa. I wanted to take a closer look at a black Messiah movement known as Kimbanguism, which had its heartland in the south of the Congo, and Faith would accompany me as my research assistant. We scheduled an additional fortnight at the end of the trip so that she could pursue her own research into bonobos, the rare primates that survive in the Congolese rainforests.

I knew the problems of the Congo had worsened even since our visit the previous year. President Mobutu Sese Seko, whose praises I had sung under the bare flagpole that first morning sixteen years earlier, had fallen from power some years before. A brutal, half-mad despot, he survived only with the covert backing of Western powers. They – we – had turned a blind eye to human rights atrocities in return for cold war support and minerals.

With the end of the cold war came the end of Mobutu’s usefulness to the West, and in 1997 Laurent Kabila’s forces from Rwanda swept him from power. Mobutu fled to Morocco, leaving behind in his palace a pathetic detritus of imported Western luxuries and porn magazines, but not much else. He died of cancer a few months later.

Mobutu’s disappearance had created a power vacuum, and now, five years on, the country was still embroiled in civil war that had dragged in a host of neighbouring nations. Many parts of the country that I’d freely traversed in the Eighties and early Nineties were under the control of rebel soldiers. Even places that Faith and I had visited the year before were now off limits. Dark rumours of atrocities filtered out of the country, and someone who had been into rebel territory had recently told me tales of cannibalism in the interior. For Faith it was to be very tough – the rebel area coincided with the only natural bonobo habitat in the world. If humans were eating other humans, there was little hope for our ape cousins.

Even as we cleared customs in Kinshasa it quickly became obvious that the country was in chaos. There were new bullet holes in the walls of the arrivals lounge. The airport officials wore weariness on their faces and apparently no longer struggled to repel would-be intruders from foreign lands. The noisy aggression of my first arrival here had been replaced by despair.

As we walked out of the remains of the terminal, something resembling a taxi approached. It might have been yellow once; now it was many shades of rust-brown. The rear of the car scraped along the ground, like a dog with worms. By pointing the nose at a forty-five-degree angle the driver kept to a mostly straight line. We said very little in the cab, but stared out towards the distant city, where a deadly fume-laden fog hung over the corrugated rooftops.

Kinshasa had sunk into abject squalor and lawlessness. In the city centre, mounds of garbage towered skywards, blocking roads and pavements. There were people everywhere. Wiry and wild-eyed from hunger, they stalked the streets in search of something . . . anything. Something to eat, something to steal. Most, I knew, would find little enough before disease or violence cut short their miserable lives.

And now a new killer moved among them, more deadly than any of the diseases that had already ravaged the Congo. Roughly 20 per cent of the population of Kinshasa was estimated to be HIV-positive, of whom half had full-blown AIDS. Some 10 per cent of all Congolese people were thought to be infected, and across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa there were at least a million AIDS orphans.

The children, of course, shocked me most profoundly. As we drove into the city centre they lined the roads. Everywhere. Children on their own or in feral packs, orphaned or simply abandoned. Evening was falling and we could see them under the dim city lights, rummaging through piles of rubbish in search of food, or curled up exhausted under sparse trees or in the gutters, presumably hoping the rain would hold off. It would not.

Most distressing of all, some of them – as young as five or six years of age – offered themselves to us, seeking to barter their bodies for a day or two of survival.

At length we reached the Kimbanguist visitors’ centre in the middle of Kinshasa. It was oddly reminiscent of arriving at the Baptist Mission sixteen years before. Two wrought-iron gates, the right one hanging precariously, opened onto a cracked concrete drive, which led to a large house with a green tin roof. There was a parched lawn in front and a couple of fishponds behind, with a prayer ground to the left.

We were shown to one of a row of single-storey rooms to one side of the main house. There was a small anteroom with a broken overhead fan, a bedroom and a bathroom. There was no running water but someone had kindly put a full bucket in the bath for us. Despite swarms of mosquitoes there was no net, but thankfully we’d had the sense to bring our own.

By the time we got this far, I was uncharacteristically depressed and angry – emotions I now seldom afforded myself in Africa. We unpacked in silence. After a while, Faith straightened up from her task and looked at me very directly.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘Talk about it?’ I burst out, startling both of us. ‘It’s an outrage!’ I happened to be holding my shoes at that moment and I hurled them against the wall. ‘Did you see those kids? Does anyone give a damn what happens to them?’

I stared out at the city, its lights quivering in the stifling tropical air. I wondered what atrocities were going on out there right now in those filthy streets. I thought again of the investigation back home, and determination surged inside me. If I could do something, no matter how small, to help solve this case, would it not bring some justice to the landscape?

We set off for the headquarters of the Kimbanguist movement, which was located in a tiny forest village called Nkamba, two days’ drive to the southwest of Kinshasa. I had to use my most languid Lingala to avoid some potentially nasty situations at roadblocks. We also drank some decidedly dodgy water and were both sick as a result.

Worse still, the minibus I had hired broke down a couple of hundred miles out of Kinshasa, and after repair it was commandeered by our Kimbanguist hosts, who took off with it, leaving us stranded for several days. Throughout all this Faith remained her implacable, unflappable self.

The Kimbanguists fascinated me. The Movement claimed a membership of 25 million, mostly in West Africa and the Congo, and although that was surely an exaggeration, the number of believers must certainly have stretched into the millions. Officially designated a Church – at the time, at least, it was a member of the World Council of Churches – the movement blended Christianity with traditional African beliefs into an extremely seductive cocktail.

Kimbangu, the group’s charismatic founder, died in 1951 in a Belgian colonial jail, where he was imprisoned for sedition. The movement was continued after his death by each of his three sons in turn. On my field trip the year before I had been granted an audience with the last of these, a strange man called Dialungana Kiangani. As a test of my faith I had had to recite parts of the Bible in French while kneeling before him, an experience for which the British public school system had only partly prepared me. From his point of view, Papa Dialungana had cause for demanding such obeisance: he had decided he was not just the herald of a new African Christ, as his more modest father had claimed, but that he was Jesus Christ himself. He had even changed the date of Christmas to coincide with his own birthday in May.

If he appeared distinctly mad, there was no doubt that under his leadership the movement had seen incredible growth. A vast temple complex seating 35,000 people had sprung up in the rainforest at Nkamba, built entirely with Kimbanguist money. The temple was regularly packed for religious festivals. Significantly too, and perhaps conveniently, Dialungana claimed to have had a vision in which he saw huge numbers of African-Americans joining the Kimbanguist Church and migrating to the Congo, presumably bringing their dollars with them. In preparation, he had Western-style apartments built on a nearby hillside at a place called Kendolo, and this was where we were lodged.

Dialungana had died since my last visit, and been succeeded as head of the Kimbanguist movement by his son, Kiangani Kimbangu Simon. I took to Papa Kiangani straight away. His beliefs were not as extravagant as his father’s and I found him to be a gentle, thoughtful man of considerable insight. We were invited to breakfast at his house on our first morning at Nkamba, although Papa Kiangani himself was at prayers elsewhere.

Faith and I were greeted by an array of baguettes, margarine, peanuts, omelettes, jam and wedges of processed cheese. This was luxurious stuff for the middle of Africa, but better was to come. After the meal I was drawn to one side by Charlie, one of Papa Kiangani’s aides.

‘Richard,’ he said quietly, ‘Papa has invited you both to come and pray at the tomb of his grandfather, the founder of our Church. He would count it a great honour to share this with you.’

‘Thank you. We’re the ones who are honoured.’

He smiled at us and moved away, leaving me and Faith raising our eyebrows at one another. To be invited to pray at the Kimbanguists’ Holy of Holies – Kimbangu’s shrine – was an extraordinary privilege. I was not sure whether any other outsider to the movement, far less a white man, had ever been asked, and for Faith to be included was a particular mark of respect.

The mausoleum was a domed stone building no bigger than a modest single-storey house. It stood among the trees within a simple perimeter fence, surrounded by lesser tombs and dwarfed by the nearby Kimbanguist temple, but it possessed an aura of authority and power. Big men in white uniforms and green sashes stood impassively at the entrance with carbines held across their chests.

Papa Kiangani met us and, once we had removed our shoes, led us through the outer gate. As soon as the guards saw their leader approach they drew back and smartly presented arms.

There were several of us in a slightly awed group, led between the outer tombs to the entrance, climbing two shallow steps to green doors set in white stone. Papa Kiangani unlocked them and ushered us into a very small, dim anteroom in which someone had placed flowers from the rainforest.

We all grew very quiet as he unlocked the second door, a plain wooden one. He entered the shrine alone, closing it behind him. After a few moments, during which we could hear his voice murmuring, he emerged smiling and beckoned me to follow him in. I did, and he once again closed the door softly behind the two of us.

It was very dark inside and the only light filtered down from small openings in a cupola above. The atmosphere was stale and musty. As my eyes adjusted I saw that on a stepped dais stood a great sarcophagus of brown-flecked granite. On top of it, rather incongruously, were two vases of dusty plastic flowers. The dais was covered with a thick red carpet and Papa Kiangani gestured for me to kneel.

‘Teacher,’ he addressed me with gravity, his words echoing in the dark chamber, ‘I invite you to pray before the remains of my grandfather. You may wish to ask him something special.’

I had not prepared anything. I hadn’t known what to expect and I wanted to be driven by the mood of the occasion. In the event I had no doubt what I should ask for, and I heard myself saying, in a strong, clear voice, ‘Oh, Papa Simon Kimbangu, on earth you were a force for good. You have great power. I ask you now, for the sake of Africa’s children, to help. We need guidance and strength if we are to help solve the case of Adam. This continent deserves better than to have its name dragged down by this evil act against this boy. Please, Papa Simon, help bring justice.’

17

Bath and The Hague, May 2002

We got back to England in May, by which time the Scotland Yard team were home from South Africa. I wasn’t surprised to learn that no solid new leads had emerged – I don’t think Will himself was much surprised either.

But the visit had shown just how serious the police were, and it had dramatically raised the profile of the case. Nelson Mandela’s call for information was seen on television all over the world. The two police officers were also filmed visiting the
muti
market in Johannesburg and surveying the wares on offer, and they went on to visit a famous
sangoma
, Credo Mutwa. I didn’t know it at the time, but they had sounded him out about my sacrifice theory.