Acts of faith (2 page)

UN publicists have told the journalist that this mighty exercise is the largest relief operation since the Berlin airlift in 1948, but there is a peculiar wrinkle in it, and that wrinkle is what has drawn her to this backwater. The Islamic fundamentalists who rule Sudan from Khartoum have imposed an aid blockade on those parts of the south controlled by the Infidel’s military forces—the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. UN planes are prohibited from entering these so-called no-go zones, Khartoum arguing that their cargoes would fall into rebel hands, though the actual reason is to starve the southerners into submission. The inhabitants of the no-go zones might well have perished long ago, if certain aid agencies had not decided to break the rules. Declining to serve under the UN, they operate independently and employ the services of small freight airlines to deliver food, medicine, and drinking water in superannuated planes flown by free-booting pilots willing to risk MIGs, ground fire, and dicey landings on bush airstrips.

The journalist is writing about these people—mercenaries with a conscience. The man she is interviewing, Fitzhugh Martin, is managing director of one such airline, SkyTrain Relief Services. He doesn’t fit the image of an aviation executive, or for that matter an emissary of humanitarianism. An hour ago, when she entered SkyTrain’s office, a small cinder-block building near the airfield, the journalist was greeted by a balding man wearing a rumpled T-shirt over cotton shorts, sandals, a wispy mustache, and a pair of gold earrings dangling from one ear. He looked like a beach bum or a pirate—a very big one, every inch of six-three and every pound of two-fifty, his torso resting on his brown legs like a fifty-gallon drum on sawed-off telephone poles.

Before the journalist could begin, he insisted that, contrary to what she might have heard, his business is only modestly lucrative. True, its steadiness compensates for its slender profit margins. The war, which has been going on for so long that
peace
has become a mere word, as meaningless to the inhabitants of Sudan’s febrile marshes and sun-stricken savannahs as
snow
or
ice,
promises to go on forever, producing a perpetual stream of victims in need of the things his airline delivers.

“But I’m not in this to get rich,” he declared.

“Then why are you in it?” asked the young woman.

His small black eyes squinted at her with the mistrustful look of someone who has learned not to take anything or anyone at face value. “Because there’s a vacuum of mercy in southern Sudan, that’s why!” he replied passionately. “And we help to fill it. We call it ‘flying on the dark side.’ I was with one of the first airlines to do it, Knight Air Services . . . Well, never mind, that was a long time ago. What I wish you to know is that it’s damned dangerous. A year ago a Sudanese gunship blew one of our planes out of the sky. I have to pay my pilots a premium to take such chances. And think of my insurance costs. Of course, I’m in it to make money, but that’s not the same as getting rich, is it?”

The journalist was silent, taken aback.

“I’m sorry,” Fitzhugh said. “I’m a little touchy about—”

“Look,” she interrupted, “if you’re worried that I’m going to say you guys are war profiteers, don’t be.”

Thus assured, he pulled a can of Tusker beer from the cooler at his feet. “Okay, ask me whatever you want.”

An hour later, after he’d tossed his fourth empty into the wastebasket and smoked half a dozen Embassy cigarettes, she paused to flip through her notebook and make sure she’d covered all her questions. That was when, apropos of nothing, he made his remark about the synonymousness of God and the Devil in Africa.

Now she glances at him, perplexed. To her, it isn’t clear which God and which Devil he is talking about. There are a multiplicity of divinities and demons and demon-divinities in the vast forests, swamps, and plains lying south of the Sahara (north of which Allah has an almost exclusive franchise). Each tribe, and there are thousands—Xhosa, Zulu, Masai, Kikuyu, Tutsi, Hutu, Loli, Bembe, Yoruba, Fulani, Dinka, Nuer, Chagga—possesses its own pantheon of spirits that dwell in numinous trees and on sacred rocks: ancestral spirits, benevolent spirits, evil spirits, and capricious spirits whose goodwill can be bribed with certain sacrifices or charms, though such gratuities are paid without guarantees, for those supernatural beings reserve the right to turn malevolent on a whim, rather like African politicians.

Is Fitzhugh referring to them? she wonders. Or does he mean that the God of Abraham and the Prince of Darkness have joined forces to reign united over the continent?

He doesn’t answer directly but tells her, in the metaphorical language he favors, that the word of Africa’s Supreme Being is to be found not in the writings of prophets but in its great rivers. The slow, brown, resistless currents of the Congo, the white wrath of Nile cataracts—those are His scriptures. The Congo and the Nile create and destroy and create anew out of what they destroy, declaring the rule of God in Devil and Devil in God, a majestic duality who offers neither judgment nor mercy, neither reward for virtue nor penalty for sin. He nourishes the robber’s fields while flooding the honest man’s, bears the bloody-minded safely to their destinations while sinking the vessels of the guiltless, for He doesn’t demand good behavior from humankind, only recognition of His dyadic sovereignty, and submission to it—

She interrupts: “Fitz,
what
are you talking about?”

“I’ll admit the idea isn’t completely my own,” he replies, as if its originality were the issue. “It was inspired by something I read. In Isak Dinesen. In
Out of Africa.
”

The journalist has never seen a photo of the real woman: a picture of Meryl Streep comes to mind; it doesn’t help her understand Fitzhugh’s meaning. She asks him to explain.

“Simple,” he says, clutching a fifth Tusker. “If we were in front of one of those Nile cataracts right now, and I said, ‘Well, that’s bad, let’s get rid of it and put it someplace else but keep the nice smooth stretches below,’ you’d think I was crazy. That’s how the African thinks of good and evil. It’s foolish to try and separate the two. Foolish
and
dangerous. You have to give in to it, the oneness, I mean, but not entirely. No! You submit without surrendering. That’s the difficult trick. That’s how the African survives, physically and otherwise.”

Fitzhugh is an African, albeit of mixed race, so she accepts his sweeping generalizations without argument, but she’s grown impatient with his figurative lingo. He senses this and raises his hand to hold her in her chair, facing the Bob Marley poster taped to the wall behind him.

“Let me tell you about a friend of mine, an American missionary priest, Father Rigney. Jim Rigney. Maybe then you’ll see what I’m getting at.”

A political missionary as much as one who ministered to the soul, says Fitzhugh. An apostle of human rights who became known in Kenya for his intemperate public denunciations of official greed and nepotism and brutality. Bandits in Savile Row suits, Father Jim called cabinet members and members of parliament, fattening themselves while people in the villages he served went without clean water or electricity or proper medical care. He raised money back in Chicago, where he was from, built churches, schools, and clinics, had wells dug. He lived ascetically, in a small mud-brick house out in the Masai-Mara, and his veranda was neutral territory where disputes between Masai and Luo were settled, Father Jim presiding. He had exposed a land-grab scheme by a couple of cabinet ministers and sheltered the farmers who’d been driven off their
shambas
in a tribal clash orchestrated by the politicians. He was beloved by his congregations and seen as a champion of the oppressed, even as a kind of charmed figure because he got away with things that would have landed a Kenyan in jail or in the morgue.

“I loved the guy,” Fitzhugh declares. “He did things that needed doing and said things that needed saying, but”—he pauses, contemplating the elephant on the label of his beer can—“he did them the way white guys do things over here, head-on, and he said them so loudly, so directly, even after he got a couple of death threats, even after the head of his own order sent him a letter, asking him to back off just a little. They were worried that he was going too far.”

One afternoon about two years ago some of Father Jim’s parishioners told him that two girls, fifteen and sixteen, had dropped out of school after they’d had sex with a powerful member of parliament, Daniel Mwebi. The sixteen-year-old was Mwebi’s niece. The priest counseled the girls and hired lawyers for them. A lawsuit was filed against the MP, alleging statutory rape. The case made all the newspapers. Also TV and radio.

A couple of weeks later both girls were visited by certain gentlemen and strongly advised to withdraw the charges. They refused, their defiance encouraged by their lawyers, who belonged to an organization that defended women’s rights in Kenya and had somehow deluded itself, as well as its clients, into thinking it could. The girls were summarily thrown in jail. Kenyan jails are extremely unpleasant places, and a week in one was enough to persuade the fifteen-year-old to do as she’d been told. Mwebi’s niece, however, wouldn’t quit. Her lawyer managed to get her out, and they went ahead with the case. The member was arraigned. More headlines, more stories on TV and radio.

In the meantime Father Jim had heard that several other underage girls in the parish had slept with Mwebi, and he mustered more lawyers to gather depositions from them.

At this point Mwebi, accompanied by two bodyguards, paid the priest a call.

“Now I know you’ll wonder how I found out what happened at this get-together,” Fitzhugh says. “But trust me, I’m sure it’s true. The lesson is, African politicians, even the worst of them, can be subtle when they need to be.”

Daniel Mwebi, himself a Roman Catholic, asked Father Jim to hear his confession.

“Clever, wasn’t it? Anything said in confessional is absolutely secret. Can I swear that the MP confessed to having sex with all those young girls? No. But I’m pretty sure he did. Can I swear that Father Jim checked this move by telling Mwebi that he could not grant absolution without assurance that his repentance was sincere? And that the best way to assure him was for Mwebi to admit his guilt in court? No, but I’m pretty sure he did. But Mwebi had another move on the board.

“Yes, he would be willing to face the music to save his immortal soul, but he informed Father Jim of certain events that had recently taken place in Nairobi. First, the judge had decided to postpone setting a trial date for two months. Perhaps Father Jim had read that in the newspapers? Second, Mwebi’s niece had privately agreed not to go ahead with the case. She’d had, oh, call it second thoughts, and did not want to disgrace her uncle’s name any further—after all, he was going to stand for reelection in a few months. Soon she and her lawyer would inform the judge of the decision. In exchange for the favor, Mwebi would pay for the rest of the girl’s schooling. So you see, said the member of parliament to the priest, he could not answer the charges in court because there would be no trial. Ah, but Mwebi truly wished to be cleansed of sin. So for his penance, he would pay for the schooling of all the girls involved—if Father Jim and the lawyers agreed to stop gathering evidence against him. Can you imagine? Old-fashioned African marketplace bargaining, right there in the confessional box.

“Now I can’t fault Father Jim for being outraged, but here was his chance. Do you see what Mwebi was saying? ‘We are in the confessional, Father. Nothing we say to each other can leave this little box. No one will ever know we made an agreement. My reputation will be saved, and your honor will be preserved, and the girls will all benefit.’ Father Jim could have made sure that Mwebi did indeed pay for the school fees. He could have convinced Mwebi that if he so much as touched one of those girls again, the scandal would be revived. He could have submitted to the evil without surrendering to it. But he didn’t. He kicked the man out. Mwebi walked straight outside to his car, but he made some sign to his companions, who remained in the office and suggested to Father Jim that he take his annual three-month home leave now. They were still giving him an out! He turned them down.

“The niece did drop the charges, no trial took place, and the other girls, for all their devotion to Father Jim, realized that they’d better keep their mouths shut. A few more months passed, and then one morning Father Jim was found beside his Land Rover on a road out in the bush. Head blown apart by a shotgun. Weapon at his fingertips. The spent round was never discovered, but a live one was found in his pocket. The assassins wanted to make it look like a suicide, yes? And the crudeness of the attempt didn’t show they had no skill in planting false evidence. No! It showed their arrogance. They expected people to believe that a Catholic priest would commit the gravest sin, and would do it with the most astonishing flexibility and recuperative powers, shooting himself in the
back
of the head with a shotgun, then come up from the dead and get rid of the fatal cartridge. And I’m afraid they were right. Not that people really believed it. They simply knew the consequences of stating that they did not.”

Fitzhugh falls silent, to again study the elephant on the black and gold can.

“And?” the journalist asks.

“And nothing. No one dared to investigate if the MP ordered Father Jim’s murder. I’m sure someone could prove he did, and I’m sure no one ever will. But you know, I am sometimes inclined to acquit Mwebi in my own mind. Maybe Father Jim
did
commit suicide. He must have known he was in mortal danger from the moment Mwebi was arraigned, but he didn’t take even the most elementary precautions. Didn’t bother to change his routine. Said mass in the same places at the same time and went to them by the same routes, every week, and he was ambushed on one of those routes. His body wasn’t discovered until Monday, with the vultures already going to work on him. His mass kit was found in the back of his Land Rover. Chalice. Paten. Hosts. Flasks of holy water and communion wine. He must have believed he was traveling under the protection of those sacred vessels, but their magic doesn’t work over here, as it would in America or Europe. He had set off alone that Sunday morning.
Alone.
Did he do that because he was brave, proud, stubborn, and dedicated, or because he never understood the testament written in our waters?”