The Mission Song (17 page)

And here it is. The stick. The very one. It lies before us on the green baize table, a miniature House of Commons mace. The delegates have examined its magic markings, and tested it for lightness in their palms. For old Franco, it is an object of significance—but is the significance of the right kind? For Haj it is a piece of merchandise. What materials have they used? Does it work? And we can sell them cheaper. Dieudonné’s response is less easily read. Will it bring peace and equality to my people? Will our prophets approve of its powers? If we make war for it, will it protect us from Franco and his kind?

Maxie has skewed his chair to the table so that he can stretch his legs. His eyes are closed, he leans back like an athlete waiting his turn, hands clasped behind his neck. My saviour Philip of the wavy white hair wears the quiet smile of an impresario. He has the eternal English actor’s face, I have decided. He could be anything from thirty-five to sixty, and the audience would never know. If Tabizi and the Dolphin are listening to my rendering they show no sign of it. They know the Mwangaza’s speeches the way I knew André’s. By contrast I have acquired an unexpected audience in the three delegates. Having been harangued by the Mwangaza in Swahili, they have come to rely on my less emotive French replay for a second hearing. Haj the academic listens critically, Dieudonné thoughtfully, meditating upon each precious word. And Franco listens with his fists clenched, ready to strike down the first man who contradicts him.

The Mwangaza has ceased to play the demagogue and assumed the rôle of a lecturer in economics. I trim my interpreter’s sails accordingly. Kivu is being robbed, he informs us sternly. He knows what Kivu is worth and what it isn’t being paid. He has the figures at his professional fingertips and waits while I jot them on my notepad. I discreetly smile my thanks. He acknowledges my smile and reels off the names of Rwandan-backed mining companies that are plundering our natural resources. Since most have French names, I do not render them.

‘Why do we let them do it?’ he demands angrily, voice rising again. ‘Why do we stand by and watch our enemies grow rich on our mineral wealth, when all we want to do is throw them out?’

He has a map of Kivu. The Dolphin has pegged it to the whiteboard and the Mwangaza is standing beside it, assailing it with his magic stick: clap, smack, as he rattles along, and I rattle along after him from my end of the table, but softly, tempering his words, defusing them a little—which in turn causes him to identify me if not as an active member of the resistance, at least as somebody who needs to be won over.

He stops speaking, so I do. He stares directly at me. He has the witch doctor’s knack, when staring, of contracting his eye muscles to make himself more visionary and compelling. It’s not my eyes he is looking at any more, it’s my skin. He studies my face, then in case there’s any change, my hands: mid to light tan.

‘Mr Interpreter, sir!’

‘Mwangaza.’

‘Come up here, my boy!’

For a caning? To confess my shortcomings to the class? Watched by all, I walk down the table until I am standing before him, only to find that I am the taller by a head.

‘So which are you, my boy?’—very jocular, stabbing a finger first at Maxie and Philip, then at the three black delegates—‘Are you one of
us
or one of
them
?’

Under such pressure, I rise to his rhetorical heights. ‘Mwangaza, I am one of both of you!’ I cry back in Swahili.

He roars with laughter and renders my words into French for me. Clapping breaks out at both ends of the table, but the Mwangaza’s booming voice effortlessly bestrides it.

‘Gentlemen. This fine young fellow is the symbol of our Middle Path! Let us follow the example of his all-inclusiveness! No, no, no. Stay here, my boy, stay here one moment longer, please.’

He means it as an honour, even if it doesn’t feel like one. He calls me fine young fellow and stands me beside him while he hammers the map with his magic stick and extols the Eastern Congo’s mineral wealth, and I for my part clasp my hands behind my back and render teacher’s lines without benefit of a notepad, thereby incidentally providing the conference with an example of my powers of memory.

‘Here at Mwenga,
gold
, my friends! Here at Kamituga: gold, uranium, cassiterite, coltan and—don’t tell anybody—diamonds too. Here at Kabambare, gold, cassiterite and coltan.’ His repetitions are deliberate. ‘Here coltan, cassiterite, and here’—the stick lifts, and drifts a little uncertainly in the direction of Lake Albert—‘
oil
, my friends, unmeasured, and perhaps unmeasurable quantities of priceless
oil
. And you know something else? We have a little miracle that is hardly known about at all, though everybody wants it. It is so rare that diamonds are like pebbles in the street by comparison. It is called Kamitugaite, my friends, and it is 56.71 per cent uranium! Well, what on earth could anybody want
that
for, I wonder?’

He waits for the knowing laughter to rise and fade.

‘But who will profit from all these riches, tell me?’

He waits again, smiling up at me while I ask the same question, so I smile too, in my newfound rôle as teacher’s pet.

‘Oh the fatcats in Kinshasa will get their pay-off, sure! They will not forgo their thirty pieces of Rwandan silver, oh no! But they won’t be spending them on schools and roads and hospitals for Eastern Congo, oh no! In the fine stores of Johannesburg and Nairobi and Cape Town, maybe they will spend them. But not here in Kivu. Oh no!’

Pause again. Smile this time not at me, but at our delegates. Then ask another question.

‘Do the people of Kivu get richer every time another truckload of coltan rolls across our borders?’

The magic stick moves inexorably eastward across Lake Kivu.

‘When the oil begins to flow into Uganda, will the people of Kivu be better off? My friends, as the oil is drained away, they will grow poorer by the day. Yet these are
our mines
, my friends,
our oil, our wealth
, given to us by God to tend and enjoy in His name! These are not water wells that fill up again with the rains. What the thieves take from us today will not grow again tomorrow, or the day after.’

He shakes his head, muttering
Oh no
several times, as if recalling a grave injustice.

‘And who, I wonder, sells these stolen goods at such vast profit, not one cent of which is restored to the rightful owners? The answer, my friends, is known to all of you! It is the racketeers of Rwanda! It is the carpetbaggers of Uganda and Burundi! It is our corrupt government of loquacious fatcats in Kinshasa who sell our birthright to the foreigners, and then tax us for our trouble! Thank you, my boy. Well done, sir. You can sit down now.’

I sit down and reflect upon coltan, not in real time for I am rendering the Mwangaza non-stop, but in the way a news flash rolls along the bottom of a television screen while the main action continues up above. What is coltan? It is a highly precious metal once found exclusively in the Eastern Congo, ask my commodity-dealing clients. If you were unwise enough to dismantle your cellphone, you would find an essential speck of it among the debris. For decades the United States has held strategic stockpiles of the stuff, a fact my clients learned to their cost when the Pentagon dumped tons of it on the world market.

Why else does coltan have place of honour in my head? Go back to Christmas in the Year of Our Lord 2000. Play Station 2, the must-have electronic toy for every rich British kid, is in desperately short supply. Middle-class parents are wringing their hands, and so is Penelope on the front page of her great newspaper:
WE SET OUT TO NAME AND SHAME THE GRINCHES WHO STOLE OUR CHRISTMAS
! But her anger is misplaced. The shortage is due not to the incompetence of the manufacturers, but to a tidal wave of genocide which has engulfed the Eastern Congo, thereby causing a temporary interruption in the supply of coltan.

Did you know that the Mwangaza is a professor of our Congolese history, Salvo? He knows every detail of our horror by heart. He knows who killed whom, how many, and on what date, and he is not afraid of the truth, which so many of our cowardly ones are.

And I am one of the cowardly ones, but at this bare green table where I am sitting there is no hiding place. Wherever the Mwangaza dares go, I must go too, conscious of every word I render. Two minutes ago he was talking production figures. Now he is talking genocide, and once again he has his figures off pat: how many villages razed, how many inhabitants crucified or hacked to death, suspected witches burned, the gang rapes, the endless back-and-forth of East Congo’s internecine slaughter fomented from outside while the international community bickers and I turn off the television if Penelope hasn’t turned it off already. And the dying continues even as the Mwangaza speaks, and I render. With every month that passes, another thirty-eight thousand Congolese die from the ravages of these forgotten wars:

‘One thousand, two hundred deaths a day, my friends, including Saturdays and Sundays! That means today and tomorrow, and every day next week.’

I glance at the faces of my delegates. They are hangdog. Perhaps it is they for once who are on autopilot and I am not. Who can tell what they are thinking, if they have consented to think at all? They are three more Africans seated at the roadside in the midday heat and nobody on earth, perhaps not they themselves, can fathom what is in their heads. But why is the Mwangaza telling us all this with time so short? Is it to beat us down? No. It is to embolden us.

‘Therefore we are
entitled
, my friends! We are
twice
,
three times
entitled! No other nation on earth has suffered such disasters as our beloved Kivu. No other nation is in such desperate need of rebirth! No other nation has a greater right to seize its wealth and lay it at the feet of its afflicted ones, and say: “This is not
theirs
any more. This, my poor people—
nous misérables de Kivu!
—is
ours
!”’

His magisterial boom could have filled the Albert Hall, but the question in all our hearts is clear enough: if Kivu’s wealth has fallen into the wrong hands, and the injustices of history entitle us to get it back, and Kinshasa is a broken reed, and everything from Kivu is exported eastwards anyway, what do we propose to do about it?

‘Take a close look, my friends, at our great nation’s politicians and protectors, and what do you see? New policies? Oh yes—
very
new policies, you are right. Quite pristine, I would say. And new political parties to go with them, too. With very poetic names’—
des noms très poétiques
. ‘There is so much new democracy in the whore-city of Kinshasa that I am afraid to walk down Boulevard 30 Juin in my old shoes these days!’—
cette ville de putains!
‘So many new political platforms going up, and built of the very best timber too, at your expense. So many beautifully printed, twenty-page manifestos that will bring us peace, money, medicine and universal education by midnight next week at the latest. So many anti-corruption laws that you can’t help asking yourself who has been bribed to draft them all.’

The laugh is led by the smooth-skinned Dolphin and the rugged Tabizi, and backed by Philip and Maxie. The Enlightener waits sternly while it fades. Where is he leading us? Does he know? With Père André there was never an agenda. With the Mwangaza, though I am too slow to sense it, there has been agenda all the way.

‘But take a closer look, please, at these brand-new politicians of ours, my friends. Lift up the brims of their hats, please. Let a little good African sun into their hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes limousines and tell me what you see. New faces full of optimism? Bright young graduates ready to offer up their careers in the service of our Republic? Oh no, my friends, you do not. You see the same old, old faces of the same old, old crooks!’

What has Kinshasa ever achieved for Kivu? he demands to know. Answer, nothing. Where is the peace they preach, the prosperity, the harmony? Where is their inclusive love of country, neighbour, community? He has travelled all Kivu, north and south, and failed to find the smallest evidence of it. He has listened to the People’s tales of woe: Yes, we want the Middle Path, Mwangaza! We pray for it! We sing for it! We dance for it! But how, oh how, will we obtain it? How indeed? He mimics their pitiful cry. I mimic the Mwangaza: ‘Who will defend us when our enemies send their troops against us, Mwangaza? You are a man of peace, Mwangaza! You are no longer the great warrior you used to be. Who will organise us and fight with us and teach us to be strong together?’

Am I truly the last person in the room to realise that the answer to the People’s prayer was lounging at the head of the table with his scuffed suède boots stuck out in front of him? Evidently I am, for the Mwangaza’s next words jolt me out of my reverie so fast that Haj swings round and peers at me with his comedian’s bubbly eyes.

‘
No name
, my friends?’ the Mwangaza is yelling at us indignantly. ‘This strange Syndicate that has dragged us here today has
no name
? Oh, this is very bad! Where can they have put it? This is all very fishy and mysterious! Maybe we should put on our spectacles and help them look for it! Why on earth should honest folk conceal their names? What have they to hide? Why don’t they come out with it straight and say who they are and what they want?’