The plane from Dakar into Guinea-Bissau was ninety minutes late and, as luck would have it, half a dozen other Americans had flopped themselves around the waiting room. They were kids in their late teens, part of a high-end adventure travel group, the sort that specializes in appealing to enlightened cultural elites. They were on their way to a three-week “cultural plunge” into the achievements of African socialism. A former Portuguese colony on Africa’s western hump, Guinea-Bissau had won its independence just a few years before. Now – in the summer of 1981 – it was a magnet for a new congregation of political pilgrims.
“They’re really doing something new and different in [Guinea-Bissau],” one of the teens said earnestly. “I only hope we can learn something to bring back home. I don’t want these people thinking that all Americans are bad.” Then he wandered off to buy scotch at the duty-free shop.
Not everyone shared their youthful enthusiasm. I struck up a conversation with a pasty white couple guarding a pile of groceries and suitcases stuffed, they said, with canned goods. He was an aid officer with the U.S. embassy in Bissau. She was his wife. They liked Bissau, they said unconvincingly, but it was “hard on families because there’s nothing to do. No food either, so we always load up when we go to Dakar.”
I mentioned the unpleasant 1980 coup in Bissau that had happened just eight months before. “Oh, that wasn’t very serious,” he shrugged. “Couple of people got shot; the rest were just reshuffled.”
We climbed aboard a seedy Air Senegal DC-6, jammed with restless bodies and cardboard baggage held together by rope. A lone, lackadaisical stewardess reminded us to check the safety instructions in the seat pocket in front of us, but of course the card had been missing for years.
The plane crossed a river into Guinea-Bissau. I stared at the landscape below: deserted swamps, isolated dry patches veined by tangled rivers with silver-smooth surfaces, submerged forests and wet mudflats. It looked familiar. It looked like Vietnam.
Bissau, the capital, was just as engaging. The city (and the country) had one bookstore lined with Marxist-Leninist texts gathering dust; one bank with fantasy interest on deposits; half a dozen gas pumps; and a theater showing kung fu movies. The Soviet Union had donated the national monument memorializing Guinea-Bissau’s independence: a huge black marble fist surrounded by eternal flames, overlooking the docks where a strike had first ignited the revolution. But the nation lacked propane, so the flames had gone out.
Weeds had begun to take over. Across the street, a small international-class hotel had been abandoned in mid-construction. So had an aluminum factory. So had a modern highway into the capital. An automobile manufacturing plant had closed down when the market was quickly saturated. The local “People’s Store” lacked rice, meat, and bananas, but had an entire wall of Chinese Communist dolls, an obscure form of foreign aid. The only factory that couldn’t keep up with demand was the brewery.
I was there to write about the local Church. And so, a few days after arriving, I joined Bissau’s Italian-born bishop for a drive into the countryside. After twenty minutes, we stopped, walked half a mile into the bush, and came to a series of parallel gashes in the earth. In each of these gashes were hundreds of bleached human bones – skulls and clavicles, ribs and femurs. There were other such sites all over the country.
The political murders had started just after independence in 1974. In a nation of less than 760,000, as many as 50,000 men, women, and children were butchered before the 1980 coup. And while the new regime, expressing shock, had opened up the mass graves to discredit the government it had overthrown, “everyone in the new regime had known about the [murders] all along,” according to one missionary priest. “They were all implicated.”
On the scale of modern horrors, what happened in Guinea-Bissau was a small atrocity in a forgotten corner of the world. But that never matters to the victims. Climbing down into a trench, I picked up the skull of a creature who had been filled with life just a few years before. While he or she was being shot to death in the dirt, some professor or political tourist somewhere was delivering a lecture on the exciting dynamism of Guinea-Bissau’s pristine socialist experiment. We see what we want to see. Reality gets buried in a trench.
So what’s the lesson here?
Today, forty-five years later, Guinea-Bissau is as broken as ever: impoverished; politically unstable; and now a hub for global drug trafficking. The one public agent that has always functioned faithfully in service to the country’s hungry, the poor, and the suffering is the Catholic Church.
In effect, despite her minority status – Catholics comprise only twenty percent of the population – the Church is Guinea-Bissau’s social conscience. Her institutions manage key social services, including clinics, schools, and a range of programs that serve the needy regardless of faith. More importantly, she anchors these efforts in preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, proving her words by her actions.
After a few trips to Africa, one inevitably arrives at a crossroads. Either you choose to trust in the future, or you become a cynic, seeing no farther than Africa’s problems and contradictions. We in the “developed” world rarely suffer, much less risk our lives, for what we claim to believe. We too easily imagine ourselves reaching down to lift up the Church in Africa. But the truth, so often, is exactly the reverse.
The courage, endurance, and enormous fertility of the Church in Africa, despite the violence of her enemies and the poverty of her means, invite us to become something better than ourselves; to love Someone greater than ourselves. The Church is in the business of sanctifying the world, one soul at a time. In that light, we might profitably examine our own.
