Closer to God. John Moehl

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      Those who most probably had the right to call themselves the indigenous people were now a small, small minority; the population was numerically dominated by agrarian stocks who had come from the West, while the traditional society in recent memory had been politically dominated by a second exogenous stock of pastoralists coming from the North. The northern ethnicity was a warrior group that quickly assumed power, often in a most heavy-handed and dictatorial fashion.

      By the time of the arrival of the White Fathers in the mid-nineteenth century, the Great Lakes area included a number of kingdoms, the Mwami (or King) being of the northern ethnic group. These feudal states saw the pastoralists as the nobles and the farmers as the serfs. While the lines were blurred, this bipolar structure, with a minority dominating a majority (in general, the people from the West outnumbering the people from the North by 4 to 1, and the indigenous folk by more than 20 to 1), was prone to strife. This instability led to considerable demographic fluidity, as those feeling as though they were the mistreated and marginalized majority attempted to move to other neighboring areas where they would be free of the domineering pastoralists.

      This unrest had led to various experiments at Independence. Some newly formed countries were majority rule and others were still controlled by the minority. These population dynamics and their time-honed frictions also led to various periods of out-and-out confrontation, with these contests often bloody, even atrocious.

      The net result of this history was that ethnicity was very important. While ethnic groups did intermarry, there were still very clear feelings and stereotypes of each group that were often magnified by frequent (but not always true) observations that the physiognomies of the two major groups epitomized their standing: the patrician Nilotic pastoralist and the servile Bantu peasant.

      The interethnic antagonism was a simmering pot that boiled over at recurrent intervals. However, the green hills of Africa were often far from the global political spotlight. Similar pots boiling over in Vietnam or Czechoslovakia took the front page and the evening news. News from Central Africa, regardless of how brutal, simply took a long time to filter out to the wider world. Under the shadow of what could be seen as international apathy, people strove either to keep the old ways or to implant the new.

      Brother Mike knew the situation well. He understood the sensitivities and tried to see all sides of the issues. The monastic life was often seen as divorced from the politics of the everyday, but Brother Mike knew one could not live in these green hills without understanding the context. The past was the future. The history of these hills impregnated every thought and deed. To navigate the maze, you needed to understand the lay of the land.

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      The tale of this land, romanticized in a popular film of the 1950s and forgotten during the terrors of the 1970s, was the tale of its people and the story within which Brother Mike hoped to achieve his life’s aims and his personal aspirations. Without understanding the story, one was faced with a lock without a key.

      Brother Mike was digging into all these thoughts as he tried to imagine how he could use his unaccustomed free time. By the time he and Jean-Baptiste had returned to the city center, the sun had set and they decided to go to the veranda of the Palace Hotel, an old colonial relic, for a drink as they decided how to use their time until they got their load of fish.

      This castle-like hotel dated to pre-Independence. Albeit once a jewel in the city’s center, it was now tarnished and drab in comparison to the shiny new metal and glass hotels that had been built by international conglomerates. These gleaming hotels catered to large international meetings organized by large international promoters with big budgets, as well as to staff from large international organizations with big wallets. They offered all the pleasures, if indeed this could be an apt term, of being in a hotel in Brussels—every room, bed, breakfast, and dinner the same blasé content that was intended to encourage in clients a feeling of detachment from really being in the heart of Africa.

      The Palace had been and was different. Under its faded exterior, it still was a fixture with charm, with personality. It was perhaps for this reason that most of the clientele were long-term guests; reportedly, most expatriates engaged in trafficking any of a multitude of items. The city’s modern international airport gave entrepreneurs access to the world’s markets while the porous borders offered access to the riches of the Congo and beyond. It was rumored that whatever one sought, it could be found at the Palace.