Authors: Tim Butcher
Those killings were just a continuation of what had gone
before. In the early 1990s when Mobutu's rule began to crumble,
Kisangani suffered as much as any Congolese city from what locals refer to as the Mass Lootings or Grands Pillages. These were
the episodes of anarchy sparked by the growing sense that
Mobutu's corrupt rule was spiralling towards collapse, when the
army and police followed the example of the country's leader and
simply helped themselves to whatever could be pillaged. Local
people in Kisangani cannot agree on how many Mass Lootings
took place there. Some say three, others four. And no-one agrees
how many bodies, yet again, were collected from the streets of
Kisangani and cast into the river.
And in the decades before - the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s - the
city suffered bouts of anarchy, captured by V.S. Naipaul in his
book A Bend in the River. He described the bloodletting when
ancient tribal anger clashed with the modern regime of `The Big
Man', the soubriquet given by Naipaul to the African dictator,
who plundered the riverside city deep in the jungle, allowing
mercenary forces to run amok, killing with impunity.
But the most notorious violence to grip the city came when it
was still known as Stanleyville, in the turbulent years just after
the Belgians reluctantly gave independence to the Congo. Here
was established one of the most brutal, even cliched, snapshots of
African violence: the slaughter of missionaries and the rape of
nuns. And the person who gave me an account of exactly what
happened was a venerable, timeworn Belgian missionary with a
throaty chuckle, who had lived through the whole horrible
episode.
Father Leon has called the Congo his home since arriving here in
1947 at the age of twenty-six. Born in Brussels, he followed a
well-trodden path exporting Christian enlightenment to his
country's African colony. Historians have found plenty of
evidence of collusion between Belgium's established Church and
the colonial authorities in the Congo, of the Church being used to
justify cruel acts of subjugation, but I was prepared to believe the
man I met in the Kisangani headquarters of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was just a well-meaning foot soldier in
Christianity's long battle for the soul of Africa.
I met him in strange circumstances. After five nights at the
Palm Beach Hotel in Kisangani my cash had begun to run low and
I had grown fed up with the din from hookers, aid workers and
assorted hangers-on who gathered nightly in the hotel restaurant.
I needed to find a place to stay that was cheaper and more
peaceful.
The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus were one of the
first Christian communities to reach Stanleyville. They arrived
here shortly after the turn of the twentieth century and have
witnessed every subsequent episode in the history of the city.
Other missions had come and gone, but the Missionaries of the
Sacred Heart of Jesus were still hanging in there in 2004, running a
skeleton operation, but obstinately refusing to surrender a
century's work. They ran the last, large mission in the city and they
had a few guest rooms at the back of their property where I was
offered accommodation. On the first afternoon in my new digs, I
heard a chuckle in the courtyard and went out to investigate.
Father Leon was having his snow-white hair cut by Father
Wilson, a tall, strapping Brazilian missionary in his late forties.
The old man looked tiny as he bent his head forward meekly so
that his colleague could get at his neck, and the pair were clearly
in high spirits. I could see the shoulders of Father Leon
shuddering as he laughed.
`Yes, of course I remember what happened in those dark days
in 1964,' Father Leon said later as we shared a bottle of Primus on
the steps of the mission station. His sharp, spiky haircut made
him look younger than his years.
'By that time I had been in the Congo for almost twenty years.
When I first arrived as a missionary, I was met by my brother, who
was already working in the Congo as a colonial officer. For my
first year or so I lived at the mission station in Ponthierville. It
was very peaceful, very pleasant.'
His description made me think of what I had found when I
had passed through what was once Ponthierville, the ruined
town I knew as Ubundu and from where I had been told to flee
for my own safety. I struggled to recognise Father Leon's
description.
'And then I was moved here to Stanleyville to teach. The
Church decided where we would go and when I received my
orders, I would go.'
He was describing an almost military hierarchy for the
missionaries, who were deployed hither and thither from his
headquarters in the city. The missionaries were expected to obey
instructions like soldiers, sent off into the forest at a moment's
notice, often for years at a time. It fitted with what I had already
seen in the centre of Kisangani of the Church's main building, a
vast, fortress-like brick structure right next to the river's edge.
More of a bunker than a spiritual centre, it had survived all the
riots, pillages and street battles that the city had seen.
'After five years' service, we are given six months' leave and I
remember it must have been after my third leave that I got back to
Stanleyville in 1963. My colleague, a Belgian missionary called
Heinrich Verberne, was meant to go to the mission at Opiange, a
very remote place many days' travel from the city. But he was ill
and I was sent instead.'
For the first time, the twinkle dimmed in Father Leon's eye as
he got to the point of his story.
'It cost Father Heinrich his life. I was sent to Opiange and he
stayed behind here in the city and was caught up in the rebellion.'
He was beginning to lose his now, so I tried to prompt him
gently back on course.
'Which of the rebellions are you talking about?' I asked.
'The big one, the Mulele Mai rebellion after independence,
when the Congo began its big decline.'
Weeks earlier, back in Kasongo, I had seen the graves of
Belgians who died in the Mulele Mai rebellion. Here in Kisangani, the bloodletting had been much worse. Father Leon
explained.
'We heard on the radio there were problems, but we did not
know how bad. I was with an Irish missionary out at Opiange and
we thought we were safe because we were so remote, but then one
day in October or November of 1964 some Congolese men with
guns came and said they had orders to bring all missionaries to
Stanleyville. This must have been at the end of the rebellion
because, by the time we got here, the other missionaries like
Father Heinrich who had been caught here in the city had been
taken by the rebels from the city centre to the left bank of the river,
just across the water there.
`We were held in a room, along with other white people for a
few days, but the situation was not that bad. We had water and a
bit of food. But then came the day of the twenty-fourth of
November 1964. I can remember it like it was yesterday.
`It was a Tuesday. The Belgian paratroopers arrived, dropped
by American planes, and the rebels just disappeared from the city
centre here on the right bank of the river. There was some
shooting in the city, but within a few hours we were free. But over
on the other side of the river, the left bank, the rebels were still in
control for another day or so. That was where the massacre
occurred. That night they killed all the missionaries they had and,
after they raped the nuns, they killed them too.'
I sat in silence, but Father Leon had found a second wind.
'Come, I will show you something.'
He led me inside the mission house, past the refectory table
where the missionaries ate their meals and through a large salon
lined with dusty books.
'It's in here,' he said, walking to a side-room that was full of
furniture. 'This used to be a chapel, a long time ago, but we use it
now for storage. Help me move this, will you.' I joined him
heaving at a cupboard and, as it moved, I could see the wall had
been decorated with hand-painted portraits of men's faces, each in a tile-like square, which were arranged in the shape of a cross.
Some of the faces were young, others old; some with glasses,
others with beards; and one was wearing a topi, in the style of
Tintin.
`These were painted to Honour all those who died that day, that
evening on the twenty-fourth of November 1964.'
Right at the centre of the cross was the portrait of a man with
round spectacles and a goatee-beard and moustache. Straining his
eighty-three-year-old eyes, Father Leon settled on this image and
pointed with his finger.
'That is Father Heinrich. If he had not been unlucky enough to
be too ill that time, perhaps it would be my picture up there.'
My days in Kisangani entered a grim routine made all the
grimmer by my not knowing how long I would have to stay there.
My priest's cell at the mission house was small, with a cement
floor and a single light bulb hanging from the roof. As the days
passed, I tried to make it feel more homely. On the chair I
propped the photograph Jane had presented me with before my
trip. It was of her and our dogs sitting outside our Johannesburg
home in bright sunshine. It was creased across the middle from
where I had tucked it into my notebook. No photograph has ever
given me more pleasure.
I would be woken at dawn by the sound of Joseph, the housekeeper, noisily scraping the charcoal burner clean before he
prepared to light it for another long day of boiling water and
preparing food. No matter how early I rose, I never managed to get
up before the Brazilian priest, Father Wilson, who seemed to get
even taller and more healthy-looking the longer I spent there. His
energy levels were stunning. Each morning I would see him
clean-shaven and in a fresh T-shirt wolfing down bananas and
bread, freshly baked by Joseph, before he headed off into the
tropical heat, walking several kilometres to a piece of land where
he was preparing the ground for a primary school. And as the people of Kisangani deserted the city's dangerous streets each
evening, I would head back to the mission house for my supper of
bananas and cassava bread and find Father Wilson already
installed in the mission chapel, wearing his vestments and
readying himself for a long vigil of prayer.
Each morning I took breakfast with Father Dino, originally from
Italy and now a robust-looking fifty-year-old. You clearly had to
be physically strong to represent the Missionaries of the Sacred
Heart of Jesus in the Congo. As the days passed, I began to joke
with the priests about the special military-style selection they
appeared to need for service in the Congo.
'Well, it helps if you are fit. We had two young Polish
missionaries here back in 2000, but the first malaria bout really
got one of them and the first round of fighting got the other.
Neither came back,' Father Dino said. I thought of Father Leon
arriving in the Congo in 1947 and of the disease, hunger and
deprivation he had endured over the last six decades. `Perhaps
the young priests aren't as tough as they used to be' were Father
Dino's last words on the subject.
The priests managed to acquire fresh beans from the last dregs
of the once-thriving coffee industry in the area and they had one
of those elegantly simple Italian coffee pots, with two tapered,
hexagonal chambers screwed together. It was old and battered,
but it worked. I have one at home and when I saw the one in the
mission, steaming on Joseph's burner, it made me ache with
homesickness for my morning ritual of fresh coffee as I surfed the
Internet. Like a child in a sweet shop, I guzzled way too much on
my first morning at the mission and paid for it with a sleepless
night neurotically guessing the time between howls from a dog
chained up in a nearby yard.
Whenever I left the sanctuary of the mission I felt a degree of
fear. My Congo mantra - towns bad, open spaces good - was
reinforced daily as I got caught up in the white noise of corrupt
bureaucracy that mars life in any large Congolese town. In order to walk down a city street in the Congo you have to get your
paperwork in order. And by paperwork, I don't mean a passport
to prove who you are. You need permission from state-security
apparatus to be in a certain place at a certain time. I found it all
very tedious and coercive, but I was by now too used to it to get
angry. I plodded between the various buildings claimed by the
Congolese government machine - the provincial governor's
secretariat, the director of the immigration office, the local military commander's headquarters - and had various pieces of paper
stamped, counter-signed and authenticated. The offices were in
run-down, water-damaged buildings with no computers or
phones, but they were invariably occupied by an apparatchik
quick to frown, shake his head and demand payment.
I was warned not to take any pictures in town. UN officials had
been bundled out of cars and had their cameras stamped on by
aggressive Congolese gunmen for having the temerity to take a
souvenir photograph. So I plodded the tatty streets of Kisangani,
honing my Congo Survival Skills, looking not staring, pausing not
dwelling, chatting without questioning.
It was clear why the government apparatus extends to
Kisangani - it is a place where easy money can be skimmed from
local miners who dig diamonds out of alluvial deposits along
local river beds. During the recent wars Ugandan and Rwandan
troops had occupied the city to get their hands on its diamond
wealth. And under the terms of the peace treaty that ended the
recent war, Rwanda sought to keep hold of its diamond income
through the well-armed militiamen it kept in the city.
The diamond industry in Kisangani was as chaotic as the cobalt
mining in Lubumbashi. It relied on artisanal miners scouring
through the shingle of river beds for rough stones and then
bringing them into town to sell the diamonds to dealers. But even
if it was an industry that worked in a piecemeal, hapless, chaotic
way, it was clearly profitable.