Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  During the 2002–2006 transition, the églises du réveil experienced enormous growth, particularly in the cities. Kutino’s example inspired imitators everywhere. Under lean-tos, on city buses, and at busy intersections self-proclaimed pastors preached the word with verve. In Kinshasa one began finding stores that sold only lecterns, wooden or glass pulpits from behind which one could spread the good word. A new prophet arose every weekend. By 2005 there were an estimated three thousand Pentecostal churches in Kinshasa.50 Most of them were quite modest, a few were massive. “Full Gospel” filled the stadiums for marathon sessions lasting three days or more. Preachers from Nigeria and the United States came by with fiery confessions of faith. The songs of praise and actions de grace (thanksgiving) came raining down. An ad on the front page of Le Potentiel promised a “festival of miraculous healing” in the huge Stade des Martyrs, with Reverend Dr. Jaerock Lee, a South Korean: “The dead are raised, the dumb speak, the blind see, and the deaf hear. All manner of incurable illnesses, including AIDS, cancer, and leukemia, can be healed. With tangible proofs that God is alive: you yourself can be where the miracles happen. Free admission.”51

  The churches tried to outdo each other with bellicose names like l’Armée de l’Eternel, l’Armée de la Victoire, Combat Spirituel and la Chapelle des Vainquers. It made one think of the warlike titles of the pop albums and the struggle for leadership in commerce and politics. Normally believers were faithful to a single church, but now the turnover was large. There arose something like serial monotheism. “If your God is dead, then try mine,” was the slogan of Pastor Kiziamina-Kibila, as though speaking of detergent. Many people shopped among the various churches. After Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope and adopted the name Benedict XVI, Koffi Olomide adopted a new stage name: Benoît XVI. When the Catholic Church reprimanded him for that, he simply changed it to Benoît XVII.52

  But this was more than mere rivalry. In fact, it was about the struggle between good and evil, between Christ and Satan, between the true faith and sorcery. The églises du réveil held a simple, binary worldview that helped people place the contradictions in their lives within a framework. Adversity could be blamed on evil spirits in a world of shadows; good fortune was a gift from God. At l’Armée de l’Eternel, young women paid ten, twenty or fifty dollars to have the preacher, Général Sony Kafuta “Rockman,” perform the laying on of hands and so help them to find a husband, become pregnant, or get a visa for Europe. Wasn’t that brazen moneygrubbing at the expense of desperate people? “We want schools to be built too,” that church’s spokesman explained to me. “We feel that people need to work to earn money and not just pray. We organize free AIDS tests and teach young parents how to raise their children.”53 For a hardworking orphan like Beko, the church provided a social safety net. Religion rushed in where government failed. Some pastors were able to establish peace between rival youth gangs, something the police never tried.54 They took “witch’s children” off the street and tried to “cure” them.55 Like the multinationals, they filled the vacuum that had arisen when the state withdrew. Desperate people found a cozy shelter amid the warmth of fellow believers. Shops were rechristened La Grâce, Le Christ, Le Tout-Puissant, cybercafés became “Jesus.com,” exchange offices “God Is My Bank.” A new generation of first names even came into fashion: children were now called Touvidi (from Tout vient de Dieu, everything comes from God), Plamedi (Plan Merveilleux de Dieu, God’s marvelous plan), Emoro (Éternel Mon Rocher, the Eternal my rock), and the unlikely Merdi (from Merveille Divine, divine marvel, which had to be explained to me as well).56

  On November 2, 2008, I attended a Sunday morning service of Parole de Dieu in Yolo-Sud, a poor neighborhood in the capital. More than a thousand people were there in the courtyard, packed in close together beneath a zinc roof. They sang, they danced, they shook homemade rattles. It was then that I understood something of the success of these churches: the atmosphere was incredible. No collection was held. Anyone wishing to make a donation could do so at the church entrance. Wearing sneakers, the prophet Dominique Khonde Mpolo sat on the podium. Simplicity was his motto. Not every pastor is a money-grubber. During his extremely lengthy sermon he railed against “Jésus Business” and suggested it be replaced by “Jésus Verité.” “All these other churches that promise people money . . . We have no need of luxury, we don’t even eat meat. No one here wears a suit. We need to work for our country rather than for our own self-image.” He himself specialized in resurrections. He claimed to have raised four people from the dead already. The first one had been the hardest, but now he had a magic potion. All you had to do was brush it onto the dead person’s lips.57

  Abbé José Mpundu, the Catholic workingman’s priest who had helped to organize the March of Hope, considered it a disturbing development. “These new churches only rock people to sleep. They do nothing to liberate. They promise an easy kind of happiness in the form of ‘miracles,’ but they call no one to account. Nzambi akosala, the people say, God will take care of it. Let me be perfectly frank: those churches are a blessing for the regime. They make things easy for the politicians. That’s why the regime supports them so generously. Sony Kafuta, the one who calls himself ‘Rockman,’ is quite close to Kabila and his mother; he is their spiritual leader.”58

  Sucking up to the powers that be, that was at least one thing of which Kutino could not be accused. In the course of his career, he had run up successively against Mobutu, Kabila père and Kabila fils. While the Kabilas had handed “Rockman” an appointment as head chaplain of the national army, Kutino had started Sauvons le Congo, the “Save Congo” campaign. Guests on his TV channel delivered straightforward diatribes against the 1 + 4. That made his organization one of the few critical voices heard from Pentecostal circles. Sharp criticism was leveled at what he called the anti-valeurs (the un-dignitaries). The tenor was extremely anti-Rwandan. Following insinuations that Joseph Kabila was letting himself be led by the Rwandan lobby—or, even worse, was himself a Rwandan Tutsi—the station was shut down and the “bishop” fled to Europe. He returned only in 2006.

  But that was not the end. In May 2006, six weeks before the elections, Kutino—known by now as the Archbishop—landed at Kinshasa and held a huge rally in the Stade Tata Raphaël. He wore a scarlet bishop’s robe and hung out of a jeep, waving to great crowds of supporters. He continued to rant against “foreign” influences and accused Kabila of a lack of congolité. Sowing doubt about the president’s origins (his mother was not his real mother, he was Rwandan, etc.) became an approved tactic for the opposition. Not that there was proof of any such thing.59 The service was broadcast without interruption on the channel belonging to Kabila’s major rival, Jean-Pierre Bemba. As soon as it was over, Kutino was handcuffed and led away, and Bemba could go to visit him in Makala. One month later Kutino was sentenced to twenty years’ hard labor, including ten years’ probation. He was found guilty of the illegal possession of firearms, conspiracy, and attempted murder, but it was clearly a settling of accounts. International human rights organizations condemned the extremely shaky judicial process.60 On the website of Sauvons le Congo is a dramatic film clip of the prophet’s “last words,” filmed on the closing day of the trial. In it Kutino speaks more hesitantly than ever. There is nothing left of his legendary flux de bouche. The footage is mixed with the bloodiest scenes from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. This prophet, too, was crucified: that is the message. But in the courtroom he still wears a neat, tailored suit and pocket handkerchief. A martyr in a bespoke suit, that perhaps is the entire ambivalence of les églises du réveil.

  AND SO A COUNTRY that was no country at all dragged itself toward its first free elections in forty-one years, as agreed in the Accord Global et Inclusif. Companies and churches—la bière et la prière—had co-opted the public spaces, befogging and gladdening the people’s minds. In the run-up to the proverbial “high day of democracy,” set for July 30, 2006, after much dragging of feet, the population consisted mor
e of consumers and obsequious believers than alert citizens. In colonial days, the super-alliance of church, state, and industry—the notorious colonial trinitas—had seen to it that the population remained servile and obedient. Something similar was going on now as well. The state, it is true, was much weaker, but still fond of snuggling up to the two remaining pillars. The “post-colonial trinity” consisted of a corrupt political caste that entered an alliance with newfangled religions and pop stars raised on high by the business world. President Kabila, who had not distinguished himself during the transition by any excessive amount of dash, made full use of these alternative power blocs.

  As early as April 2002, during his concert at the Zénith, Werrason had called on the people to support Kabila because of his “efforts for peace.”61 An invaluable piece of promotion, for Kabila enjoyed little support in Kinshasa’s working-class neighborhoods, where Bemba was toujours leader. At the signing of the Sun City peace agreement in 2003, Werrason, ambassadeur de la paix after all, gave a concert for the delegates.62 In 2004, when Nkunda took Bukavu and the the people turned against the UN blue helmets, he was even called in to quiet things down. The pop artist made great by a multinational was now charged with keeping the masses in line.

  On January 25, 2005, Kabila invited all the greats of Congolese music to the presidential palace for a glass of champagne. Werrason and J. B. Mpiana were there, as were Papa Wemba and Koffi Olomide and a few other archrivals. The president was able once again to play the great conciliator, the one who had brought peace not only to the eastern hill country but also to the bars of Kinshasa. A photograph taken at that party was seen around the world. It was an exact copy of the snapshot Jamais Kolonga had shown me, when he and Franco and Kabasele stood with raised glasses beside Mobutu. In Congo close ties had always existed between politics and music. Hadn’t Kabasele gone along to the round-table conference in Brussels, when he composed his “Indépendance Cha-Cha”? Hadn’t Franco been closely involved in Mobutu’s policy of authenticité? Hadn’t Papa Wemba sung along when Kabila’s new currency was introduced? Yes, they had all done that.

  But now things went a step further. In the 1990s it had become fashionable for private persons to pay artists to use their name in a song’s lyrics. For a fistful of dollars, Mpiana, Werrason, and their colleagues were willing to do a little name-dropping. With Mpiana, the results looked something like this: “Love, love, what’s that get us, Ruphin Makengo? / They start with love and that’s where it ends, Jean Ngendu. / Is it just a matter of pride, or what, Lidi Ebondja?” With Werrason, it sounded like: “You should have told me before, Hugues Kashala. / You’re wasting my time, all my friends are married, Chibebi Kangala. / Even my little sisters. / Claudine Kinua, she’s mad.”63 The phenomenon was referred to as kobwaka libanga, tossing pebbles, to draw attention. It has since become a regular feature of Congolese pop music. The second half of the song, the sebene, is the instrumental part in which guitar solos move the dancers to a climax, swept along by the animateur who belts out a whole list of names. Politicians and prominent figures not only pay journalists for an article, but also pay pop stars for a mention. If you go out to Le 144 on Louizalaan in Brussels, the chicest Congolese disco in town, you will even hear the DJ screaming to be heard above the music, telling the audience whose birthday it is and how many bottles of champagne they have ordered. In Kinshasa things occasionally got out of hand. “Treize ans” by Werrason contains no fewer than 110 names, “Lauréats” by Mpiana actually mentions two hundred.64 This was no longer simply the paying of tribute; this was serial product placement. Artistic autonomy? Of no importance, on the contrary. The real deadbeat was the one who couldn’t refer to the rich or powerful. That was proof of social isolation, and therefore deadly for an artist who wanted to be the leader. Werrason’s opportunistic collaboration with Kabila and his entourage was so obvious, as was Mpiana’s sympathy for Bemba by the way, that the Haute Autorité des Médias, the Congolese FCC, felt obliged in the weeks before the elections to ban broadcasts of their all-too-sectarian pop songs. Before that, however, they were aired nonstop. By that time, however, the popular singer Tabu Ley, a friend of Kabila father and son, had already been appointed vice governor of the city of Kinshasa, and Tshala Muana, one of the few female pop stars, had a hit with: “Vote, vote for Kabila / Everybody vote for Kabila / We’re all going to vote for Kabila, our boss / He’s the only right leader for Congo.”

  The Pentecostal churches, too, with the exception of Kutino’s, hopped on the presidential bandwagon. “All authority comes from God,” the believers heard on Sunday morning, “so pray for your leaders.” And as if that weren’t explicit enough, the prophet of the moment would gladly add: “Let everyone who loves Jesus and Kabila stand up and clap.”65 The army chaplain Sony Kafuta became so caught up in his Kabila mania, both at his temple and on TV, that the communications authorities had to reprimand him for hate mongering.66 The Catholic Church watched it all from a distance and shook its head. This was a far cry from the critical role it had played in the struggle against Mobutu.67

  IT WAS JULY 27, 2006, three days before the big day and Kinshasa was buzzing with electoral fever. That the elections were coming at all was due to the international pressure exerted by the CIAT, but above all to the brilliant work done by the Commission Électorale Indépendante (CEI), led by the inspirational priest Abbé Malu Malu. The preparations were truly impressive. Congo had become a country without an infrastructure. It was impossible to cross the country by car. Even the major urban centers were no longer connected. Congo was more an archipelago than a pays-continent, an archipelago whose islands could be reached only by plane, helicopter, or canoe. No one knew how many people lived there, no one kept track of the births, no one had an ID. The last forms of personal identification were the MPR membership cards from the Mobutu era. But on June 15, 2005, the CEI succeeded in registering twenty-five million voters, an overwhelming success. The outline of a new constitution was established by referendum on December 19, 2005. The new electoral law was ready on February 21, 2006. The campaign could begin. Tshisekedi, the opposition’s historical leader, boycotted the process from the start and fell victim to his own obstinacy. Vice President Ruberwa, who was still seen as Rwanda’s puppet, did not stand a ghost of a chance. After Operation Artémis in Bunia, the European Union launched a second military initiative: EUFOR, a 1,400-man European intervention force to keep the peace in Kinshasa; African elections, after all, tend to result more in rows than in democracy.

  On July 27, Jean-Pierre Bemba, the man from Équateur, the fellow whose troops had practiced cannibalism, made his triumphal entry into Kinshasa. He was received with open arms: he was the mwana ya mboka, the country’s son, the true Congolese. More than a million people accompanied him on the classic route from airport to city center, the same twenty-kilometer (twelve-mile) route taken, amid loud cheering, by Baudouin, Mobutu, Tshisekedi, and Werrason. Bemba was going to speak to his followers at the Stade Tata Raphaël, the arena bound up with so many historic moments in Congolese history, ranging from the riots in 1959 by way of the heavyweight bout of 1974 to Kutino’s sermons in 2006. A group of drunken boys had brought a dog along with them, which they decked out with a campaign sweater bearing Kabila’s likeness. Always good for a laugh. The animal was completely unnerved and barked at its own tail. Others carried a gigantic portrait of Mobutu, that other strongman from Équateur, for by now a generation had arisen that only knew about Mobutism by word of mouth. Even the old green MPR flag waved over the stadium. Bemba represented the promise of a restored state and powerful leadership. Like Mobutu, he could easily deliver a ninety-minute speech without resorting to notes. His sturdy frame and direct language made him much more popular in a Kinshasa gone wild than timid Kabila with his fractured Lingala and his French, which still bore a trace of an English accent. To many Congolese, Kabila seemed a youthful pawn of the international community (he was only thirty-four, Bemba was forty-three), not someone who could infuse t
he country with new pride.