Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (21 page)

The remaining group of children and women was taken to Kamanyola, on the border with Rwanda, where they joined up with hundreds of other Banyamulenge. The military escort brought five to six hundred “refugees” in trucks to the border. They were joined by thirty haggard Banyamulenge leaders, who had spent the past month in prison in Uvira. At dusk, once again the women and children were separated from the men and taken to a thirty-meter-long cement bridge that separated the two countries. The Rwandan Patriotic Army (the armed wing of the RPF) had deployed its troops to the iron gate that blocked the road, and the women and children ran toward the silhouettes of soldiers and tanks.

Alex was less fortunate this time; after a brief debate over his age, a soldier tousled his unkempt hair and kept him on the Zairian side of the border with the other men. They were pushed into a makeshift prison close to the border, where they were strip searched and beaten again. Around forty men pressed together in a small room, some beaten so badly that they couldn’t walk. A youth who looked feverish and faint asked a soldier for some water to drink. The soldier shook his head in disgust, telling him he was being disrespectful. He yanked him outside, leveled his AK-47, and, as Alex watched in horror, blew his brains out.

The heat in the small room became unbearable. The air was getting heavy; in the distance they could hear a thunderstorm moving down the floodplain from Rwanda. The storms from the east were the worst; Congolese used to quip that “all bad things come from Rwanda.”

The soldiers had left a light guard, including a young intelligence officer from Mobutu’s home region in Equateur Province who had become friends with many Banyamulenge in Uvira. As the storm approached, he whispered to the prisoners that they would be shot at dawn; this was their only chance. Alex remembered the thunder cracking over them, unleashing a torrential downpour. “It was a miracle,” he said. “We had never seen anything like it.” The guards outside the houses sought shelter, and the Equateurian youth popped the bolt on the door, ushering them out and telling them to hurry and get to the border. “The rain was so heavy you couldn’t even see the road in front of you,” Alex remembered. Seeing their prisoners flee, the Zairian soldiers ran out in pursuit.

At the border, the Rwandan guards saw the commotion and advanced toward the bridge, over the border, guns at ready. Through the rain, the Zairian soldiers saw a phalanx of hostile troops blocking the road and retreated. Back at the prison, they found the prisoners who had been too weak to flee, including the president of the Banyamulenge community, and killed them.
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After the sweaty car meeting with Alex, Remy and I continued on to Baraka, a humid port town on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. I wanted to hear the other side of the story. Remy had told me that the massacre that Alex had lived through had been triggered when Banyamulenge infiltrators had killed a large group of people in a nearby village. Could we find some witnesses of that massacre?

Remy hit himself on his forehead. “Ah! Of course,” he sucked his teeth loudly. “How could I forget? We have to go and see Malkia wa Ubembe.” When I told him I had never heard of that name, a smile twitched across his lips, “No? Well, you should have. He’s the physical reincarnation of Jesus Christ.”

Religion is alive and well in the Congo. Colonialism and Mobutism eroded traditional authority and created uncertainty in everyday life. Various churches vigorously proselytized in the Congo throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; white missionaries still abound in remote corners of the country, puttering about in battered Land Rovers, fluently bantering in the local language or dialect.

Malkia wa Ubembe is a different kind of church, a small utopian movement that shies away from politics. Its head and spiritual center is Prophet Wahi Seleelwa, a bouncy fifty-year-old man who founded the church in 1983. The name of the church means “the queen of the Bembe,” the ethnic group that the prophet belongs to. Years before, a prophecy had gone out from members of the Catholic Church that a virgin saint would arise among the Bembe. Instead of a virgin girl, they got Wahi Seleelwa.

We drove into his compound late on a Friday afternoon, as the sun was going down through the palm trees that sprout everywhere in Baraka’s sandy soil. The community’s villages are identical to each other, each built after a common blueprint. Matching houses, made out of mud bricks and then whitewashed, line a long avenue that leads up to the prophet’s house, which forms the center of the community. Behind the houses, communal vegetable plots stretch out into the surrounding palms.

The Prophet, as Wahi Seleelwa likes to be called, greeted us on the steps of his house wearing a white T-shirt with an imprint of his own picture and a black felt Stetson hat. Three large glass doors took up the front of the house, set into whitewashed walls and underneath a corrugated iron roof. The house seemed very open; in contrast with most buildings in the region, there were no bars on the windows or doors.

The prophet formed the physical and spiritual center of the community. Their founding belief is that Wahi Seleelwa is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, a distinction he inherited from his predecessor. As Seleelwa explained, after the death of their previous leader, whose picture hung on the wall behind him as he spoke to us, he was possessed by the spirit of Christ. Over the following years, he received the revelations of Christ, which his followers wrote down in their drably named “Communication Notebook,” which contains the main teachings of the church. Some of the passages would raise eyebrows among mainstream Christians: They allow polygamy (the prophet has three wives), have their own calendar with twelve-day months, and are governed by a conclave of elders dubbed the Four Living Beings.

Seleelwa was eager to speak with us about the beginning of the war. “Nobody has ever come to hear our story,” he lamented. “Not the United Nations, not our own government, nobody.” He pulled out sheaths of handwritten letters he had sent to various presidents and UN secretaries-general. “Nobody ever answers,” he said, shaking the papers.

On the wall behind him hung a black-and-white picture of a group of people posing together in front of a white church with thatched roofing. In the middle of the group of around sixty people is a smiling Seleelwa, his Stetson hat tipped backwards, looking like a halo; many other men are also wearing the hats, a sign of “the coming kingdom,” Seleelwa said. Children make up around half the congregation, kneeling and peering sullenly into the camera from the bottom of the picture.

“Of all the members of that church there,” he said, pointing at the picture, “only a dozen survived. I’ll show you the survivors.” Seleelwa called for an assistant and gave him the names of several people.

There was no doubt that Seleelwa commanded respect from his congregation. Minutes later, we heard the voices of a dozen people milling around on the steps outside. Three males and eight females, some of them still children, had gathered to talk to us. The prophet grinned: “Here they are!”

The leader of the group was a forty-eight-year-old man called Neno Lundila. He was wearing an oversized green blazer and felt hat that was considerably shabbier than Seleelwa’s.

Neno’s church had been located in Abala, a town in the foothills of the Itombwe Mountains, a two-day walk away. It was a corn- and cassava-farming village inhabited mostly by Bembe who had moved down to the main road that linked the lakeshore with the high plateau. Before the war, Banyamulenge had sent their children to primary school in Abala, and the lively trade had brought the two communities together in markets, churches, weddings, and funerals.

By the end of October 1996, the war that had begun two months before had reached Abala. Ragtag local militias skirmished with Banyamulenge troops, who advanced steadily down the road toward Baraka, prompting a mass exodus of the local population. In Abala, the entire village fled, except for the Malkia wa Ubembe congregation. “We weren’t involved in politics,” Neno said. “We were preaching the good word, nothing else. Why leave?”

On October 28, the congregation gathered in their church for morning prayers. As usual, they brought their whole families with them. The aisles were more crammed than usual that morning. “The troubled situation had given us good reason to pray,” Neno recalled. After an hour, just before dawn, as they were singing the last song—“We will not run, we will not be afraid, we are with Prophet”—they saw soldiers surround the church. Their preacher told them to stop singing and went outside to talk to the soldiers. Through the windows, in the half-light, Neno could see the features of a Munyamulenge who had grown up just two hours away from Abala and was well-known to the community as a courteous, polite man. That day, however, he was aggressive.

“Why didn’t you leave, like everybody else?” he barked at the preacher.

“We are people of God,” Neno remembered the preacher saying. “We didn’t have anywhere to go.”

“Then you have to come away with us!”

The preacher refused, saying they didn’t know anybody where the Banyamulenge lived and didn’t have a church there.

The commander lost patience. Words were exchanged, and a scuffle ensued. Through the narrow window, Neno saw another soldier pull out his rifle, shove it into the preacher’s nostril, and pull the trigger. In the church, people started screaming as the soldiers advanced on the doors and windows and opened fire. A grenade hit the ground not far from where Neno was, ripping into several people’s bodies. Women took babies off their backs and huddled over them, praying. They tried to hide between the benches and under the altar, and Neno felt bodies falling on top of him. “They saved my life: I felt bullets going into their bodies; they shielded me.” After several minutes, the soldiers stopped shooting. Neno could hear them debating outside. Then, the sound of tinder crackling broke the silence. “It was still dark outside, but all of a sudden there was a bright light I could see between the bodies.”

The soldiers had set fire to the thatched roof, in order to kill survivors and get rid of evidence. When Neno heard the soldiers say, “Let’s go,” he climbed out from underneath the bodies. The whole roof was on fire, and clumps of burning thatch and crossbeams were falling down. Neno managed to drag himself and seventeen other survivors out of the burning church. A hundred and three others died, including Neno’s two wives and six children.

We went back outside to the front steps, where the other survivors were still sitting. The women were sullen but hitched up their worn
kikwembe
to show me their wounds. One of the girls, now around seventeen, had grabbed her baby brother and put him on her back to try to flee when a bullet went through both of them. Twelve years later, she has a shiny welt on her lower back, matching his scar across his stomach. “They are tied together by their injury,” Seleelwa told me. Blushing, the girl pulled up her T-shirt to show me. Another girl had had her leg amputated.

“The other bodies are still there, buried under the collapsed church,” Neno told me as we got ready to leave. “Nobody has even so much as put a memorial plaque there. You can still see the charred remains.” He shook his head. “We have nowhere to mourn our dead.”

I asked him if he had ever heard of Banyamulenge who had been massacred. He looked surprised. “Banyamulenge? No. Never.”
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