originally published in the Guardian, United Kingdom Not a lot of planes land at Rwanda’s central airport. Perched on the top of a hill, Kigali International is a tiny architectural throwback from the 1970s, incongruent with the country’s forward-looking and ambitious plans. Most of the traffic is from nearby outposts such as Bujumbura, Burundi or Uganda; propeller planes and commuter jets. A couple times a week, the late-night gets in from Brussels, Rwanda’s commercial link to Europe.
Walking across the runway one bright morning on a recent arrival in Kigali, something was blocking the sun, something out of place; a massive 747 Jumbo Jet. It towered as large as the terminal, with specially painted livery. I watched it all the way through the glass-plated doors at customs.
Ernest Angley is 88-years old. On stage his voice can be shaky and scarce. He wears makeup and a dark toupee. A younger man in sunglasses stands on the steps of the stage at the ready in case anything happens. When he is not reading from the bible or dousing prayers over the injured or disabled, Mr. Angley sits on the corner of the stage in a white plastic chair. He’s been doing it for 70 years.
Reverend Angley is the biggest show in town. Thousands attends his sermons each day; donations given, books sold. Dozens of Angley’s assistants, clad in neon-green t-shirts, have been handing out fliers throughout Kigali’s downtown for the last week. Hymns, prayers, and supposed miracle healings. Grandmothers and young boys pour onto the soccer fields in their weekend best. On stage, a Rwandan R&B singer croons an evangelical song about Jesus. For a country often quiet and sober and traumatized, it is a rare and loud public gathering.
Mr. Angley’s 747, Star Triple Seven, is a testament to the televangelist’s success over the last three decades, traveling to more than 30 countries, and growth of evangelicalism in Africa into a big business.
Packed into the jumbo-jet are stadium speakers, flood lights, scaffolding and television cameras, and then everyone to operate it. On this trip to Rwanda the Star Triple Seven has brought 80 followers from America, including doctors, teachers, and sheriffs, booking out much of Rwanda’s most expensive hotel.
With him have also come wild claims of healing people from deafness, disability, and AIDS. The claims have brought rounds of criticism and even got Reverend Angley into trouble with the South African government in 2007. Now on stage in Kigali he waves his fist in the air and calls into the microphone, “We have documentation! We have proof!”
For centuries missionaries have found fertile ground in a continent pulled apart by war, famine, and kleptocracy. More recently, evangelicals have used the 3rd world as a test-tube for social experiments impossible back home. Conservative American senators have been linked to draconian anti-gay legislation in Uganda. Missionaries visiting Haiti illegally plucked children out of the country. Mr. Angley himself has come under fire for his views on HIV/Aids, which he has said can be cured by prayer.
All have contributed to a nasty image of missionaries as ignorant and dangerous, and in some ways as a hoax. But in times of crisis, passion has also proven to hold a powerful currency. During humanitarian disaster, missionaries have at times outperformed larger aid organizations in delivering food and other necessities to desperate people.
When an ethnic warlord threatened the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2008, hundreds of thousands were displaced in the country’s east. The World Food Program and United Nations struggled with the logistics and law of handing out food, water and blankets. To Bruce McDonald, who flew in from Talahasse, Florida with two others from his ministry, it was as simple as going down to the local market.
“We were waking up at 5, 6 in the morning, at the camps by seven, giving out food, saving people,” says Mr. McDonald, who directs the ministry Regions Beyond International. While missionaries like Mr. McDonald cannot serve huge masses of refugees, their seamless work illuminates the crippling effect red-tape and bureaucracy has on large organisations to deliver immediate aid.
This wasn’t McDonald’s first time in a war zone. His ministry has held crusades during emergencies in Burundi, Sudan, and the Soviet Union, to name just a few. When torrential rains blanketed Ethiopia in 2006, Mr. McDonald was able to deliver two tonnes of food nearly a week before larger organizations. In 2002 he was back in Goma when nearby Mount Nyiragongo erupted, flooding the city in lava and ash. He rushed to hand out food, and then bibles.
“It was just absolutely incredible,” McDonald says, and then adds. “It’s easy to lead people to the lord when things like that happen.”
In Kigali that precedent is already set, and Reverend Angley’s assistance has a long-term importance. Despite Christianity’s dark history during the genocide, evangelicalism has a popular grasp on society, and Reverend Angley sermons of casting aside Lucifer have penetrating meanings here.
This isn’t Reverend Angley’s first time in Rwanda either, and as he calls for the sick and deaf to line up alongside the stage to be healed, he lists some of his work here. He has visited hospitals, prisons, schools and orphanages, he says, and has handed out thousands of bibles. He looks out into the crowd of several thousand.
“Don’t I act like I’m 29?” cries Mr. Angley, chanting to the crowd. A few young boys are pulled reluctantly to the side of the stage by their grandparents. “Don’t I act like I’m 29?” he says again, posing stage left. The crowd laughs and cheers. “Don’t I act like I’m 29? I just keep on going.”
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