The Boy in the River (23 page)

I found the address quite easily, but there was nothing to indicate that it had been a church. It was a shabby three-storey block in a run-down commercial street just off the main road, and it looked like a cross between a warehouse and a multi-storey car park. A ‘To Let’ sign with an estate agent’s number was fixed to the wall above the double doors.

I took out my mobile and called the estate agent’s number. I was interested in commercial property in the area, I told the woman who answered. I was outside the address right now, if she could get someone down here quickly and let me have a look at the place.

With the speed of an emergency call-out an Asian youth screamed up in a silver BMW, parked on double yellow lines and hurried across the pavement. The place appeared not to have attracted many prospective tenants.

‘I just want half an hour in the place on my own to get a feel for it,’ I told him brusquely. Feeling bad about the subterfuge I slipped him a ten pound note. ‘That way we won’t waste one another’s time. All right?’

He backed off at once,unlocked the doors and was gone. I was faintly surprised that he was prepared to let me have the run of the place, but perhaps he knew there was nothing worth stealing there.

A strong smell of urine and mould hung on the chill air inside. Tattered posters sagged from the wall. Plastic cups and plates lay scattered on the floor. I climbed the concrete stairs.

The whole of the second floor was an open area the size of a bus garage. The blue carpet was faded and stained. A wooden dais faced the door, with more squares of carpet scattered on and around it. On the walls were religious posters, many in Lingala and some in French. One read
Je Suis Conquerant!
Sheets of A4 paper with the Combat Spirituel letterhead were taped to the walls. It looked to me as if the church had decamped in a hurry.

I spent some time there, growing steadily more depressed. I wandered through to a kitchen area at the rear. A dripping tap, a split sack of rubbish, the smell of damp. More A4 Combat Spirituel letterhead on the walls. I stopped in front of a roster of some kind, perhaps for kitchen duties. Towards the bottom of the typed list a name caught my eye: Mama Sita.

33

London, February 2004

One of my first tasks after I got back home was to translate the Lingala notes made by Sita Kisanga in her Bible. Most of them referred to sermons she claimed to have heard preached by Pastor Raph. The two detectives wanted to know if the notes would help them build an unassailable case against Child B’s torturers.

At first I seemed to make little progress. I’d renewed my contacts in the Congolese community, but this had yet to bear much fruit. My enquiries focused on the revivalist churches. I knew from my experience of the Kimbanguists and other neo-Christian movements in the Congo that their influence could be profound. Combat Spirituel was no doubt a thoroughly responsible church, but I needed to make sense of the fact that Sita Kisanga had a connection with the revivalist movement, and yet had been evasive about just what that connection was. I wondered if she had been given advice on exorcism by someone purporting to speak in the name of Christianity. But material on revivalist churches in London was proving remarkably hard to find.

Before I could make much progress, events overtook me once more. Sarah Beskine, a partner in a legal firm with close links to local government, wondered if I could help her with an ‘odd request’ she had received a day or two earlier from the social services department of a London council.

Among the children in their care was Andrew, a twelve-year-old boy from a Congolese family. Apparently he had been causing problems at home. He was bright, but aggressive and disruptive at school, and he’d been involved in a lot of truancy and some petty crime. There were signs that he’d been assaulted, and his family said he was possessed by demons.

She explained that Andrew’s family were devout Christians and wanted to send him back to Kinshasa to be exorcized – at the council’s expense. Apparently such an exorcism was beyond the power of their local church in London, and they believed that only in Kinshasa would the boy get the proper treatment for his
kindoki
. Indeed, they had already been in touch with a pastor there.

The council was asking Sarah if this was appropriate from a legal point of view. She found this as staggering as I did. ‘Send a child to Kinshasa, against his will, for some religious ritual? I don’t think
legal
comes into it. It can’t be right, can it?’

We met in Hopkin Murray Beskine’s elegant offices not far from King’s College. Sarah was a smart woman in her thirties with cropped blonde hair. We talked for a while, and she repeated her concern that a child might be sent to a place as lawless as Kinshasa for an exorcism, and at British taxpayers’ expense.

I could see she was afraid that Andrew might be removed from care and sent to Kinshasa simply because no one in authority had the courage to stand up and dismiss the decision as ludicrous. Local government would be extremely wary about offending the family’s cultural sensitivities. Our worry was that they might put these concerns above the welfare of a child.

Sarah Beskine arranged for me to visit Andrew in the secure psychiatric unit. He clearly had psychological problems, but I found him articulate, intelligent and open. He had lived in London for some years; he thought of himself as a London child. The idea of being flown to Kinshasa terrified him.

‘I don’t even know what
kindoki
is,’ he protested. ‘I’ve never even heard of it. I don’t know what they’re all talking about.’

Andrew was scared and confused, and with good reason. Where his relatives saw a boy witch, I saw a child with no one to turn to. And a London council with responsibility for his care was considering sending him into the unknown out of a twisted adherence to the principle of political correctness.

Two weeks later, Sarah and I met members of the council in their shabby Fifties office block. Several of the social services team were black, and more than one of them was openly suspicious of a white academic and a white lawyer presuming to give advice on ‘black’ issues. These people worked at the rough end of life on the streets of London, and they’d had enough of white middle-class liberals who knew what was best for black communities.

But beneath the prickliness they too were concerned for the boy, and they were all painfully aware that they had very little idea of what awaited him in Kinshasa. I said that I’d been thinking about going to Kinshasa for some academic research on the Kimbanguists, and would be prepared to look into the exorcism issue for them while I was there, if the council would contribute something to the cost of the trip. Maybe I could visit members of Andrew’s extended family who still lived in Kinshasa, and the pastor who they had in mind to perform the exorcism, and report back on what I found.

They agreed at once.

34

Kinshasa, February 2004

Within a few hours of leaving King’s College I was flying over the sahara, and the following morning, somewhat bleary-eyed, I was walking through the glass doors of the Grand Hotel in Kinshasa, which had long since ceased to live up to its name.

It was violently hot. There was an air conditioning unit on the wall, but it didn’t work. Neither did the electric sockets, and nor did the toilet.

Outside, Kinshasa sweltered, cars and trucks bucking over the potholed streets, horns blaring, market traders shouting. I had bought cigarettes at Heathrow, even though I’d given up smoking years ago. I lit one now. I lay back on the sagging mattress, watching the smoke curl up towards the ceiling. I was probably imagining it, but as I drifted between sleep and wakefulness I thought I could hear the thunder of the rapids on the River Congo as I’d heard them on my first day in Kinshasa, so many years before. Now, as then, I wondered what I was doing here.

Things looked a little better in the afternoon. Fortified by a few hours’sleep, I went out into the blast furnace of the forecourt and was immediately surrounded by clamouring drivers, beggars and street women, all tugging at my sleeve and clutching for my backpack. All this felt reassuringly familiar. It was the Kinshasa I remembered.

I selected a driver with a Peugeot 404 that seemed slightly less dilapidated than the rest. His name was Jean-Pierre – he called himself JP – and after a token negotiation I hired him for the next few days.

Delighted, JP made a great show of ushering me into his cab, displaying me like a trophy to his less fortunate fellow drivers. I went along with it. I’ve always loved the African sense of theatre, and it was good to hear Lingala and French spoken again, and to speak them myself. I gave JP directions to the pastor’s compound in the Kasa-Vubu district.

As soon as we pulled away from the hotel I realized that this was not the city I had known fifteen years earlier. It was not even the city I had visited with Faith two years ago. I’d been outraged then by the lost children on the streets, begging and offering themselves for a pittance. Now the situation seemed ten times worse. The city itself had slid into crushing poverty – broken pavements, derelict buildings colonized by squatters, shuttered shops, stalls with only a few pathetic items of merchandise, and over it all a stifling pall of pollution. It was like the set of an apocalyptic movie, with desperate people forced to live like scavenging animals amid the ruins.

The occasional knots of desperate youngsters I had seen when I was here last, had given way to scores, hundreds even, some as young as four or five, begging in ragged gangs, or sorting through the hillocks of garbage piled in side alleys and on vacant lots. Others hung around on street corners, eyeing the cars and their occupants with hard and knowing eyes.

I needed some bottled water and pointed JP to a nearby stall.

‘Don’t get out, M’sieur Richard,’ he said, stopping the car. ‘Give me the money; I’ll fetch the water. You stay here.’

Except during the riots in the 1990s I’d never been worried about walking the streets of Kinshasa, at least not in broad daylight, but I did as he advised. He locked the car and went over to the stall. The taxi grew oven-hot and sweat ran down my neck. Curious faces peered in at mine. Pleading beggar children tapped on the window. I turned away to avoid their eyes.

On the far side of the street, in the gutter, lay the body of a child. The afternoon crowds stepped over and around it as if it were a bundle of old clothing. No one registered the remotest surprise.

JP reappeared with the water. He saw me staring at the tiny corpse.

‘
Chegué,
’ he said with distaste.

The Lingala word meant urchin, but without the hint of charm. Rabble. Scum.

I had some trouble taking this in. The Africa I knew didn’t abandon its children wholesale,not even in its sprawling cities. That Africa did not look down on the dispossessed and homeless with contempt. It did not let children die on the pavement, and leave their bodies in the gutter to rot. It maintained its poor and defenceless, somehow, through networks of extended family and friends. What had happened to change that?

I found my contacts book and thumbed through it, then read out another address to JP.

‘Take me to this place.’

‘We don’t go to Kasa-Vubu, M’sieur Richard?’

‘Later. Take me to this place, please.’

We found ourselves opposite the stadium where, in 1974, Muhammad Ali had fought George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle. The grandiose new stadium nearby had been built in the 1990s, as a monument to Mobutu’s ego, and, if the rumours were to be believed, upon foundations that provided the last resting place of many of his opponents. The new stadium was used on sundays by revivalist churches for noisy prayer meetings. Around it, the whole area was semi-derelict – a sinister inner-city wasteland of cement blocks and wrecked cars, with a scattering of huts and hovels.

Remy Mafu’s compound stood beside a huge stack of rusting pipes. Gaping holes served as doors, window frames hung loose, half the roof was missing and the walls had never been painted. But the floors were swept, and men and women clattered busily at old manual typewriters in what passed for offices. Boxes of dried milk, food parcels and clothing were stacked in odd spaces. There were children everywhere – perhaps fifty of them – sitting listlessly in the shade, taking lessons in a roofless courtyard, playing football in the dust.

Remy Mafu was working at an old desk in a back room. A solidly built man of about forty-five with a deeply furrowed face and thick-rimmed glasses, he looked as though he’d been carved from ebony. He listened while I told him why I was in Kinshasa, then led me to a conference room of sorts, furnished with a table and half-a-dozen mismatching chairs.

‘You have seen the situation in Kinshasa with your own eyes,’ he said gravely, speaking in French. ‘You can make your own judgment about whether this boy Andrew should be sent back here.’

I looked out through the rough window at the ragged children playing in the dust. ‘How many of these kids are out there on the streets?’

‘Fifty thousand, by the Social Affairs Ministry’s estimate, so the true figure is probably much higher.’

I goggled at him. ‘Fifty
thousand
?’

‘At the very least. A lot of them are AIDs orphans. Then, of course, four million people have died in the civil war since the late 1990s. That means a lot of children without parents.’

I knew this figure, but it never ceased to shock me. Four million dead in a war most people in the West had never heard of.

‘All the same,’ I said, ‘it never used to be like this. The war’s been going on for years, and AIDs has been here for years, too, but it was never this bad.’