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