The Diary Of A Religious Seeker In The African Heart Of Darkness - The Epiphany Of Unimaginable Savagery

Angela Langford had grown up Catholic, but had fallen off the wagon in her adolescent years.  The whole story - virgin birth, resurrection, walking on water, loaves and fishes, 'I can see!' miracles seemed like one big charade, a joke, a charlatan's shell game, one great Ponzi scheme begun in the Vatican and shelved down until it became a parade of frilly hats, bonnets, and crinoline dresses. 

She had sat through one Sunday sermon after another, harangued, badgered, and warned against sin until she felt used, abused, and tinkered with by unctuous priests who retired to the sacristy and buggered each other until bleeding and sore - their only reflection of the suffering they invoked at every mass. 

'Once a Catholic, always a Catholic', goes the old adage.  The Church was so efficient in its making of Catholics out of little children that as adults they never lost the fear of a vengeful God, the heavy burden of sin, and the desperate need for salvation.  And so it was that although Angela swore off the faith, doubts kept returning, and she spent hours with the university chaplain hoping to resolve them once and for all. Fish or cut bait - believe or begone. 

She traipsed across the Old Campus three times a week to meet young Father Soto, himself a graduate of the university, schooled in the classics, history, and the strands of molecular biology.  He had never lost his faith, and in fact it had only increased over the years.  He knew about doubt and appreciated those niggling questions about the implausible myths of his religion; but was so profoundly impressed by the scholarship of Aquinas, Augustine, Athanasius, and the Alexandrian church fathers, that he based his faith on their teachings and the core beliefs of the Church - the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, and Redemption. 

 

It all went for naught, and as the semester drew to a close, Father Soto concluded the sessions, telling the young women that it all boiled down to a matter of faith. 

Given her doubts and criticism of Catholicism, she set out on a course to explore other religions which perhaps hewed closer to the essential meaning of spirituality; but she was put off by the holy-rolling, ecstatic nonsense of evangelical Protestantism.  Their claims that Jesus could be one's personal savior, come down from his heavenly throne to become a celestial friend were absurd; and where on earth did the notion that the Quran was delivered by an angel in Arabic to a poor, illiterate Arab goat herder come from?  

The Aryans on their way down to the Gangetic Plain from Mohenjo-Daro saw the universe filled with elephant gods and monkey gods, and Buddhists, rejecting all of it prayed to The One - one what, exactly, wondered Angela who had been attracted to the religion's simplicity and unpretentious devotion but got lost in its idolatry?

 

And that was just for starters.  She tested the Shakers and the Quakers,  She explored the new age religions - Scientology and its comic book electronics, The Church Universal and Triumphant and its Armageddon millennialism.  She left no stone unturned.

Joseph Conrad writing The Heart of Darkness understood the primal power of animism, a belief in the immanence of God in the natural world.  While Catholics in the sacrifice of the mass only metaphorically drank the blood and ate the body of Christ, the cannibalistic tribes of the African forest, barely evolved from the Paleolithic, understood the redemptive, salvational potency of eating real flesh and blood.

 

This was her last hope.  If she could prostrate herself before the universe, before the gods of thunder and lighting, and before a human sacrificial altar, she might find her way. 

Before she travelled to the inner reaches of the Congo, cutting herself off from the civilized world, she went to Haiti where a primitive animist, pagan religion - Voodoo - was still practiced.  Participating or at least observing these rituals would be a tutorial, a first step into the heart of darkness.

She was not disappointed, for in the hills far above Kenscoff she witnessed a bloody primitivism she had only imagined.  It was a wild, ecstatic affair with animal slaughter, the drinking of blood, demonic possession, and an experience completely removed from anything familiar or ordinary.  

'I am ready', she said; and so it was that she travelled to Africa, to the Congo, and booked her passage as far up the Congo River as she could past Kisangani, the last trading post on the river, onto a series of ever smaller tributaries which eventually led into the last virtually unexplored regions of the rainforest.  

Her guide, Emmanuel Ngoma left her at Kisangani.  'Do not go there, Madam', he said before disappearing into the dark lanes of the town.  'Do not go there'; but Angela had not come all this way to turn back.  She was not only unafraid but expectant.  This, she thought, might be the epiphany she had always sought. 

The trip was long and difficult, often impassable, choked with water hyacinths, shallow and narrow twists and turns, until finally she could go no farther.  Her boatman who had reluctantly taken her this far, fearful for his life but tempted by her generous payment, saw her off among the mangrove roots, and quickly turned back. 

Mungo Park, English explorer of the late 18th century wrote of his trips up the Niger River and how he was repeatedly captured, enslaved, sold and bartered from one tribe to another, finally able to escape captivity and somehow return to England.  His memoirs tell of the savage primitivism of the jungle, its Neolithic culture, and the fearful cannibalism of the tribes of the most interior regions of the forest. 

 

Angela had read Park, du Chaillu, Burton, and Conrad but driven by idealism, hope, adventure and a faith-or-death motivation, she pushed on into the jungle.  Along the way she kept a diary as had all these earlier explorers, and in it wrote of her expectation and spiritual coming of age.

Her remains - her macabre shrunken head and her diary, hung from it on a leather tong as a talisman - were found a year later by a Belgian missionary.  Attempts to find the young woman by Congolese, Belgian, and American authorities had failed.   Once she turned off the Ubangi and headed down the many unnamed minor tributaries and streams deeper into the jungle, she was lost to modern communications. 

The journal is hard to read, for it describes her ordeal in graphic detail. 'I am finished', she wrote, 'I have lost hope'.  The rapes, torture, disfigurement, and humiliation were unimaginable. They were done with glee, she wrote, in a kind of feral paganism that was beyond imagining.  The natives danced, sang, and howled as they encircled her, jabbing her with spears, licking her blood off the blades and driving them again into her flesh.  When she was nearly spent, bloodied, and bleeding they threw her into a hut with a joint of monkey meat, and left her to recover or die. 

Near the end managing only a barely legible scrawl, she wrote of the animist rituals outside the hut.  The entire tribe gathered in a glade open to the sky and began to chant.  The voices in unison grew louder and louder until it became a roar, and as she saw through the chinks in the mud and wattle,  a young woman was tied down on a primitive altar, raped, decapitated, sliced and served up to the priests around the altar. 

'God help me', was Angela's last entry in her journal. 

The Belgian authorities were reluctant to send the journal to Angela's parents.  It was simply too horrific, too descriptive of the inhumanity and barbarism she suffered to be read by anyone of her family. The Belgian High Commissioner in Kisangani gave the journal to the Franciscan priest who had found it and her remains.  He said he would be her caretaker, her advocate, her missionary; and alongside his Bible, he kept the journal and read its lines as if verses in a prayerbook.

Seen One Slum, Seen Them All - An Operatic Libretto, Or Annals Of African Development

Bradford Perrine was an economic development consultant with a resume filled with assignments in some of the most difficult and challenging places in the world.  These were places that no one but the international banker, oil prospector, or non-profit volunteer would go - pestilential places from arrival hall to departure lounge and everywhere in between.

Perrine had a sinecure with the World Bank - first class air travel, two-day stopovers in Europe, five star hotels at his destination and a no-limit expense account.  These were compensations for having to work in desperate, malarial, crime-ridden, corrupt places. 

The Hotel Independence was his favorite, built by Joshua N'dogo, President of a central African country with vast mineral deposits and newly discovered rare earths.  N'dogo spared no expense to make the Europeans and Americans who came courting happy, and the Independence was as fine a hotel as one would find in Paris, Rome, or London.  

Pierre Gramont, formerly of Le Lion Farouche, a Paris  restaurant which had, thanks to him earned its third Michelin star, was the chef.  N'dogo's offer was too generous to refuse - far more money in hard currency than he had ever dreamed of, a penthouse apartment at the Independence, a new Mercedes, and his choice of Fulani women.  

The luxury of the hotel was a necessity after long days of visiting Bonneville, the festering slum on the river which was the home to 100,000 residents.  It was among the nastiest of Africa, long left to rot by the President whose interests lay in beryllium not the souls of the slum. His wealth was legendary, the Presidential palace magnificent, and his harem of beautiful women from the four corners of the continent was admired by Big Men everywhere. 

The World Bank, the executing agency for a United Nations project to improve environmental sanitation, had provided a multi-million dollar soft loan to N'dogo to invest in providing waste disposal in Bonneville - low cost sanitary latrines in particular.  Bank engineers assured beneficiaries that the latrines were the latest in structural design and would revolutionize slum development. 

Of course the President had no use for toilets or slums, siphoned off most of the Bank money, dug a few desultory pits and sent bulldozers on a one-time visit to move the trash from choked gutters to large, rat-infested mounds, took photos and videos of the operation and signed on for an extension to the loan. 

Perrine had found every reason to avoid visiting Bonneville, for as callous and unfeeling as it might sound, 'seen one slum, seen them all' was the meme. The factors producing abject poverty and miserable living conditions were universal; and in the case of Africa, they influenced countries as a whole. 

Rural populations tempted by the promise of big city opportunities but still tribal in outlook had neither the will, the education, nor the cultural ethos to make anything of the city except one vast, pestilential slum. 

Every city was more slum than residence. Tribal mentality, government indifference, the venal opportunism of post-colonial regimes, and some kind of animist loyalty turned one urban area after another into a stinking pit. 

N'dogo of course knew which side of his bread was buttered, and he made sure that at least one part of every major city looked modern, enclaves of faux prosperity more theatrical staging than anything, and development bankers chose to see these areas as signs of hopefulness not the charade they were. 

Bonneville was disgusting, but no more than any slum Perrine had visited in Kinshasa, Lagos, Luanda, or Maputo. Open air defecation, rutted, potholed roads, wooden huts on stilts perched over stinking, human waste-carrying, trash-clogged canals, naked children, cheap whores, indolence, and grime. 

Which was why Perrine had deferred his visit. What was the point?  He could write his report without having to set foot in the place.  He knew where the Bank money went - to offshore accounts and not to Bonneville - and N'dogo knew that he knew but the rare earth contract was all that mattered. 

A drive-through perhaps with a Bank photographer in tow - Perrine With Native Children...Perrine Observing Excavation...Perrine Beside Local Authorities - was the least he could do, so in the Presidential limousine, dark tinted windows rolled up, chilling air-conditioning on full blast, and single-malt whisky in the teak cabinet before him, Perrine did an 'on-site' visit. 

Finally back at the Independence, sitting by the pool with Emriye al-Maghrebi, Fulani princess and his Presidentially approved consort, sipping a sundowner, he lay back watched the evening swallows do their aerobatics, and smiled.  Life in Africa wasn't all that bad. 

The next morning he was invited to the Presidential palace for an audience with the President.  The entrance hall was magnificent - Carrera marble floors, Venetian sconces, Baccarat chandeliers, and caparisoned Republican Guards - and the long walk through equally well-appointed corridors only confirmed the majesty of presidential power. 

'How was the trip over?', asked the President.  Were Perrine's accommodations comfortable?  Had he tried Pierre Gramont’s pheasant-under-glass? 

The meeting was a formality of course.  The President had not an iota of interest in the project in Bonneville and was only interested in the Bank's upcoming geological mission - an evaluation of the rare earth deposits in Bolo Province, the first step to opening the area to private investment. 'Soon, Mr. President, soon'; and with that, Perrine was ushered to his waiting limousine to complete his mission. 

The First Class cabin of Emirates was offering a tasting of the best California and Bordeaux wines - a friendly competition for those Americana and European patrons of the airline.  The wine flowed, the mood was jovial, and time passed quickly. 

 

Perrine's department chief, a Dutch engineer with a commitment to low cost sanitation and a lifelong dedication to alleviating African suffering, wanted details.  Perrine, used to his boss's ardency was well- prepared, and shared with him the engineering report prepared by N'dogo's Minister of Public Works, a man known to Rietveld thanks to his many trips to Washington.  

The report was fiction, of course, but prepared in the most meticulous engineering language complete with dimensions, static head calculations, temperatures, and plumb lines. 

'Good', said Rietveld, 'very good indeed', and with that Perrine returned to his office to begin the paperwork on the new, extended loan. 

Perrine saw no irony in all this, no moral crossroads, no ethical dilemmas.  This was the way the world worked - a mutual back-scratching, quid pro quo arrangement that had taken place ever since African independence when Cold War powers did everything to win the allegiance of the new continental governments.  

Money had poured down the sluice without a second thought in those days.  Nothing had changed. It was no longer a matter of political rivalry but economic competition.  Chinese and American interests were anxious to secure African natural resources, and would look the other way when it came to accountability.

Given this larger geopolitical context, issues of moral probity or ethical posture were irrelevant. Generous loans would be given, eyes turned the other way when money showed up in Aruba or Bimini, fictious reports of 'development' taken as gospel and used as the basis for more soft loans, and the dance of consultants like Perrine perfectly choreographed in time with the music. 

So Perrine slept well and looked forward to his next trip to Africa. By now even the pro forma trips to the beneficiary slums were unnecessary, so unerringly similar they all were, and so predictable were the projects designed for them.  A sojourn at the Independence or the Internationale or the Majestic, good food and wine, a friendly camaraderie with the President's men, and lovely, languorous nights with dark-eyed lovers was all one needed to know about Africa. 

A Love Affair In The Heart Of Darkness - Without Savagery, Passion Is Pedestrian

Barton Ames, World Bank loan officer, old Africa hand, and world traveler, had had his share of affairs on the Dark Continent, some incidental, some circumstantial, and others temporary but telling. There was nothing like loosing the tethers that bind, heading off for the deepest, most remote and unexplored regions of Africa and, like Kurtz in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, coming to grips with human savagery and engaging it. 

Of course Ames had a romantic streak, and his job as an international civil servant working at the behest of bank investors and canny loan beneficiaries offered little in the way of Mungo Park, Conrad, Rene du Chaillu, or Richard Burton; but he at least understood the nature of adventure and how it provided the context for more simple engagements.

He first experienced the strange complementarity between danger and sexual energy the last time he was in Haiti - a country disturbed, politically uncertain and calm before he arrived, but chaotic and violent a few days afterwards.  He and his lover, a Palestinian woman in Port-au-Prince for the United Nations Refugee Relief Agency, were on the balcony of their room at the Splendid, a Victorian gingerbread hotel, all mahogany, teak, and polished brass, when the shooting started.  They could hear the mortar fire by the port, and hear the rumble of tanks making their way in convoy from their barracks in Petionville to Duvalierville. 

Soon the hotel was surrounded by army troops, the first of which broke into the bar and carried out cases of Johnnie Walker, passing bottles around to their comrades in the half-tracks and armored personnel carriers stopped in the parking lot in front of the hotel.  

When  they received orders to proceed ahead and engage the rebel forces coming up from Avenue Toussaint de l'Ouverture, they were drunk and fired their old, Soviet-era single shot, bolt action rifles into the air, hollered and bellowed patriotic songs, and made their way south. 

Tires were burning everywhere, 'necklaces of fire' they were called.  Traitors were handcuffed and blindfolded while tires were put over their heads and set ablaze while irregulars hooted and hollered at the charring bodies. 

The night spent by Barton Ames and Emriye al-Mehmet was all the more uninhibited because of the intimidating, encircling violence.  Far from frightening it gave emotional cover and shared protection.  In bed, under the covers, holding each other for comfort and fear, their intimacy turned to sexual interest and then to irresolute passion. 

The coup was aborted, the President was still alive and well in the palace, and the rebels were executed by firing squad in the public square.  Barton left the next morning for Washington, and Emriye for Istanbul on the first flights available. 

One might think that such an adventure would bring them indivisibly together, but foreign affairs have a way of dissimulating. Lovers can never recreate the heady atmosphere of a dangerous tropical sexual rendezvous in their own, calm, quiet, and sedately peaceful home countries. Trysts in godawful places are things of fancy.  

At the same time Barton couldn't help but wanting to revisit the uncommon passion of that night at the Splendid.  It was unique, something out of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller; but undaunted and a sexual partisan, he knew that if the circumstances were right, it would happen again. 

Africa is a penitential miasma on every point on the compass - venality, autocracy, civil violence and unrest, corruption, and chaos.  Somalia is but the most current example of Africa's descent into tribal, religious, and ethnic hell.  It is a country defined by international boundaries only, an unruly and unrulable place unfit for human habitation; and the Congo is no different,  Kinshasa is a sinkhole of poverty, incivility, and misrule.  

Nigeria is perhaps the worst. International development consultants have No Nigeria clauses in their contracts, Americans have lost millions to Nigerian online fraud, and the fertile delta, area of vast oil resources is a gangland shooting gallery.  South Africa, once the bright light of the continent, destined to build on Afrikaner enterprise and wealth, now is only a desperate shithole of tribal rivalry and government corruption. 

Barton was drawn to Africa not because of Conrad but not despite him either.  The continent held a special place in the adventurer's heart -  a place still so primitive, uncivilized, intemperate, violent, and untamed that it had to be experienced.  He signed up for a sojourn in a Sahelian country recently in the news for its successful fight against ISIS and the rebellious Tuaregs in the North.  It would provide just the right blend of colonial French culture, Islamic Sufism, and African tribal warfare to be the right place at the right time. 

The trip started off well.  He chose a small hotel run by ex-colonial women from la France profonde, somewhere in the Dordogne, women who still recorded guests' accounts by hand, and where old Africa hands came in from the desert for their Pernod and canapes at the bar. 

As occasion would have it, he met a young German woman ready to embark on a solo journey far to the north, beyond Mopti and Timbuktu, toward al-Alamein and the Algerian oases serving the salt trade caravans. She, like many expatriates and European travelers were drawn by Africa's mystery.  

It was indeed a mystery why after over sixty years of independence the continent was far worse off than under its colonial rulers.  In the same space of time that South Korea went from a rural peasant society to a world economic power, Africa regressed.  While China went from Maoism to America's rival if not superior in a few short decades, Africa became basket case.  

It was this desire to explore a seemingly defiant primitivism that drew both Heidi and Barton Ames to the Sahel. Like attracts like, and after pastis and capitaine, they became lovers.  Anyone but expatriate drifters might question the ease and quickness of their affair, but those who have been about and around such Sahelian places would not question it. Temporary, fortunate sexual elisions are common and expected in otherwise uninhabitable, uncivilized places. 

The night was hot, long, and stifling. The hotel lost power by 6pm and never recovered, but with the windows to the street wide open, and secure under a canopied mosquito net, the two lovers were at ease. Both would never do with cooling, insulation, and  the security of Europe a l'étranger. It had to be this way, and the disturbing gunfire from the nearby desert rebel redoubts only added to the sexual tension.  

Baron and the German girl said their goodbyes the next morning.  He back to Washington and she to the interior.  His trip was subject to delays, hers was liable to Tuareg or ISIS raids, which is why both hoped that they would meet again under similar circumstances but knew that they would not.  Such love affairs do not survive light and air, 

Infidelity, fantasy, adventurism?  All the above and more.  Barton was near retirement.  Although he looked forward to a new, less complicated, and simpler life, he wondered how he would adjust to his new celibacy, his confinement, and his ordinary ways. Thomas Wolfe:

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

 

Back home - Barton wouldn't want to go there if he could.  He was more than satisfied with an untethering of the ties that bind, a sojourn in a nasty place, love in the palms.