The Boy in the River (24 page)

He took of his thick glasses and polished them. Without them he looked older and wearier. I wondered how long he could go on with this sort of work before the awful weight of what he saw every day finally crushed him.

‘You know the Congo, Richard. You speak the language. You have lived here for many years. You know that the family holds society together against all trials and hardships. Only family. It is the cement which binds us.’

‘And that’s breaking down? Why now?’

He eyed me steadily. ‘You said you were going to visit a church pastor. Perhaps you should put your question to him.’

‘I don’t follow, Remy. Do you mean the church is involved?’

‘Not every church. The new revivalist churches. If there are fifty thousand children running wild on the streets, at least another fifty thousand are held in church compounds throughout the city.’

I frowned. ‘They’re prisoners?’

‘Effectively. Parents in Kinshasa cannot afford to keep their own children, not with so many orphans. Many go onto the streets. But many more are taken into the church compounds. Some pastors try to help them. Others are dishonest. They hold the children to ransom, forcing their parents to pay for their keep, and pay more to get them out. Most cannot afford to, so the children stay there and the parents go on paying. Some pastors spread this idea of
kindoki
.’

‘But
kindoki
isn’t that serious, is it?’

‘That is not what the new churches preach. The pastors claim it is witchcraft, the work of the devil. They say that only they can help children infected with
kindoki
, and refuse to set them free until they have been exorcized. All the while the parents must pay and pay.’ Remy sighed. ‘Richard,many of these pastors may really believe this witchcraft nonsense. But whether they believe it or not, the effect is the same. Thousands and thousands of children are held awaiting exorcism.’

I thought of Andrew, waiting fearfully in London. ‘What form does this exorcism take?’

‘That, I think, you must see for yourself.’

His compound was far more substantial than Remy’s, with evidence of a new roof and fresh building work. About the only thing it had in common with Remy’s place was the presence of children, though the ones here were far more subdued.

The problems only began when Pastor Henri sat me down on a bench by a wall and produced a shoebox full of trinkets.

‘You see the kind of trouble we have,’ he said, showing me the contents. ‘We have confiscated these things from children infected with
kindoki
.’

I stared into the box and saw a few pieces of broken mirror, a toy car, a comb.

‘They use this’, he said, holding up a piece of mirror, ‘to see into other worlds. And the car – they travel to Europe in it at night.’

I forced myself not to say anything.

‘Oh, yes, many, many children are infected with
kindoki
,’ he went on, his voice taking on a steely edge. ‘They have eaten
kindoki
bread or drunk water tainted with it. Now they must be exorcized. The boy in England, too, this Andrew. He must come here to be exorcized.’

‘And how will he be exorcized, Pastor Henri?’

‘He must fast for up to four weeks. Water only. He must be kept alone. And then there is the ceremony, the casting out of demons. That is deliverance.’

‘And this is in the name of Jesus Christ?’

‘Certainly.’ He looked puzzled. ‘Who else?’

Over the next few days Pastor Henri allowed me to witness several exorcisms and gave me introductions to see others in other churches. He was completely open about the practice, which he considered commonplace. But these Kinshasa exorcisms were brutal and terrifying affairs. Children were starved, shut up alone in the dark, shouted at, beaten and traumatized. Some had chilli peppers rubbed in their eyes – the same torture that Child B had endured. Others were cut with razors. In Britain, the practitioners would have been jailed for child abuse, and somebody – I hoped – would have thrown away the key.

I managed to speak to some of the children in private. They showed me their scars and told me their harrowing stories. Several had been denounced by priests as infected with
kindoki
, so that their own families disowned them and they became virtually the property of the church that had stigmatized them.

‘They’ve destroyed my life,’ one girl told me simply.

It moved me to tears.

Afterwards I went back to my room and tried to process what I’d seen and heard. I ate very little during the next few days and chain-smoked constantly. At night I sprawled sweating on my bed and wondered what the good and politically correct council social workers would think if only they could see this. And I asked myself how much of it was going on. Were other British children being sent to Kinshasa to be tortured in this way?

What bewildered me most was that this was so utterly un-African. In all my years in the Congo, moving in and out of Kinshasa and living in the city for lengthy periods, I had never come across it. The idea of
kindoki
has existed in Africa for centuries, probably millennia, but this taste for exorcism was something new. It seemed to have sprung up in recent years as a result of a fatal cocktail of desperate poverty and the new revivalist brand of Christianity that was sweeping Africa.

JP drove me south out of Kinshasa to a rural area called Mbetenge, which was well known as a centre for traditional healing. It was a gruelling twelve-hour trip over roads almost as ruinous as the ones I used to travel when I first lived up-country in Bolobo. The roadside was dotted with huts with palm leaf roofs, market stalls and beaming children selling roasted cane rat on skewers. Wrecked vehicles lay rusting in the lush undergrowth. Several times we had to dig the car out of soft sand. This was the Congo I knew and loved. I felt at home here, and almost as soon as we arrived I felt some of the tension slip away from me.

We were made welcome by the head man in a village at the centre of the Mbetenge region, and very soon word of my arrival and news of my interests had spread. The next morning half-a-dozen traditional healers –
ngangas
– had gathered. They were keen to speak to me and I didn’t need to prompt them. They were as outraged as I was.

‘In the old days,’ said a wizened old man with a nap of white hair, ‘we would never have said
kindoki
could affect a child. To us, that’s ridiculous. And even for a person who did have
kindoki
, we would never go in for all this beating and shouting. We would just make up a potion of plant extracts and the sufferer would drink it for a few days and be cured.’

He and the other
ngangas
were anxious to make the point that
kindoki
was nothing to do with demons. There was no question of sufferers being possessed, so there was no need for anything to be driven out. And they all condemned the idea of beating, hurting or frightening children. Such behaviour was totally alien to them. I knew this was true: when I had lived here I had never once seen an African mistreat a child.

‘It’s these new churches,’ the village headman said. ‘They spread these stories so that simple people will pay them to drive the demons out of their children. Then they can hold the kids to ransom for as long as they like. It’s a racket! A corrupt racket!’

I returned to Kinshasa with my resolution firmer than ever. Andrew must not be subjected to this nightmare.

I had to tread carefully, though. If his family in Kinshasa insisted on his return, and the London relatives remained firmly committed to the idea, there would be huge pressure on the British authorities not to hold the boy. He was not, after all, a British citizen.

I met Andrew’s family in the pastor’s church, with its sand floor, red-brick half-height wall, rotting wooden pillars and heat-inducing corrugated iron roof. It was stiflingly hot.

A grandmother, an elder brother, at least three aunts, an uncle and a cousin or two clustered on a couple of benches. Pastor Henri sat to one side, smiling like a Buddha. They had all greeted me courteously, and warmed to me further when I sent out for Coke and peanuts. As soon as everyone had a bottle in their hand I described the situation from my perspective. Andrew was probably unhappy, I said, because life in London was stressful and it was hard to settle there. Perhaps that accounted for his behaviour. There were nods from the relatives. It looked as if they could buy that. I seemed to be making progress.

‘If he really does have
kindoki
,’ I said, ‘well, that’s a traditional affliction, and maybe it could be cured by traditional medicine. I could give him this.’

With something of a flourish I produced an amulet of herbs I had obtained from one of the
ngangas
in Mbetenge. ‘Oh, no,’ Pastor Henri broke in severely. ‘That is
juju
medicine, the work of the devil. The Bible tells us we must turn our back on such superstitions.’

I backed off. ‘Have you heard the story of Jesus and the centurion?’

Pastor Henri said nothing. The others looked at me warily.

‘It’s in the Bible,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you.’

Someone produced a Bible and I found the passage.

‘A centurion comes to Jesus and tells him that his son is sick,’ I began. ‘Jesus says he will go with him to his house. But the centurion replies, “There is no need, Lord. You have only to speak the word and the child will be cured.” And Jesus is overjoyed, and says that he has never yet encountered such faith in the whole of Israel, and the child is healed.’

I had their attention now.

I said, ‘Surely the lesson here is that if we all pray together and ask Jesus to help young Andrew, then Jesus will be pleased with our faith and will cure him. Then there will be no need to bring him all this way to go through an exorcism. Do you believe God is powerful enough to heal this boy from a distance? If you do, the only question is whether you have as much faith as that centurion.’

The family members were divided about this. A stricter faction thought it was all very irregular and that there could be no substitute for the ministrations of Pastor Henri, who sat in disapproving silence. Others felt the gauntlet had been thrown down: to see if they really had faith. In a few moments we had all joined hands and, kneeling on the crumbling concrete floor, we prayed aloud for the boy’s deliverance.

I called Sarah Beskine as soon as I arrived back in London.

‘There’s no way this boy should be sent back. I don’t think the family over there will insist.’

‘I don’t quite know how you swung that,’ she said.

‘Don’t ask.’

She told me she’d already informally advised the council they’d be on very shaky ground. And better still, the boy had suddenly shown a remarkable improvement in behaviour over the last couple of days.

35

London, April–July 2004

I was pleased with this small victory, but sensed a wider battle looming over the whole question of
kindoki
, of witchcraft and exorcism. I began to express my concerns more and more frequently in articles and interviews.

‘This might be the tip of the iceberg,’ I said, and I must have repeated the phrase once too often, because one reporter dubbed me ‘Mr Tip-of-the-Iceberg’. I tried to back off a bit then, for fear of weakening my case by overstating it, but the epithet stuck.

I passed my fears on to the police working on the Child B case. They wanted hard evidence of what was happening here in London, and as luck would have it, a young Congolese man called Claude phoned me soon afterwards.

‘I’ve seen your stuff in the press, Dr Hoskins,’ he said. ‘You’re on the right track with what you’re saying. About the kids, I mean. And
kindoki
, and deliverance rituals. All that.’

I was cautious at first, but his outrage was plain. We met at a café in Islington.

Claude was an engineering student at London University, having hauled himself out of the hopeless morass of his native Kinshasa with brains, guts and relentless persistence. What I liked most about him was his compassion. He was Catholic, although not particularly religious, and his indignation sprang mainly from a profound sense of outrage at what he saw as the abuse of children in some revivalist churches, and of the damage this would do to the reputation of Africans and African beliefs.

‘This should never be happening, Dr Hoskins,’ he said. His voice was gentle but urgent. ‘Children should not be put through this. Most African people in London who know about it are horrifed. Ashamed, even. And you know what it will do to the way the wider community looks at us. There are a lot of us who would do something about it, if anyone would listen.’

He said that he wanted to expose these practices, that he knew of my research and thought that maybe he could help me.

‘It would be easier for me as a Congolese to approach the right people and ask the right questions,’ he said.

I told him I wanted to find out more about revivalist churches in London, and that I’d like someone to go along to some of their services and tell me what was really going on.

He took out a small spiral-bound notebook and wrote in it, then looked up at me. ‘OK,’ he said, as if I’d asked him to drop by the corner shop and pick up a pint of milk. ‘Anything else?’

I hesitated. ‘One other thing keeps nagging at me. I just came back from Kinshasa. I was looking into the case of a London boy whose parents wanted to send him back to the Congo for . . . deliverance. Maybe that was a one-off. But then again, maybe it wasn’t. I’d like to know if other children in London are in the same danger.’

Claude closed his notebook. ‘I’ll look into it.’