Isidore Bakanja

On February 6, 1909, according to the date given in a Carmelite article, a young man came out of the forest near Ikili, in the heart of Congo. He could barely walk. Two local men, Iyongo and Moya Mputsu, had kept him hidden and brought him to a European inspector of the rubber company. That inspector’s name was Dorpinghaus. He later wrote down what he saw. In free translation: “I saw a man come out of the forest, his back torn open.” The wounds were deep and infected. According to the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, in some places the bones were exposed.

The scapular he always wore, two small pieces of brown cloth on cords, had been torn from his neck by his boss shortly before. It was for that bit of cloth that he had been beaten.

His name was Isidore Bakanja. He was about twenty-four years old, a houseboy, an ordinary laborer. He was not a priest and not an official catechist. He had been baptized less than three years. Six months later he was dead. In 1994 Pope John Paul II, in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, called him “a man of heroic faith” (freely translated). In 2019 Pope Francis placed him in a line of young saints whom he held up to young people all over the world.

To understand why a scrap of cloth could arouse so much rage, we have to go back to the country where he was born.

A KING WHO OWNED A COUNTRY

Isidore Bakanja was born in Bokendela, a village in the rainforest north of the present-day city of Mbandaka, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His parents were called Iyonzwa and Inyuka. They belonged to the Boangi people and were not Christians. His year of birth is not certain. The sources give years between 1880 and 1890. The Dictionary of African Christian Biography settles on 1885, the Vatican on about 1887.

The country he grew up in had a strange status. At the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885 the European powers recognized the claims of the Belgian king Leopold II to the vast basin of the Congo River. It became the Congo Free State. The name sounds free, but the country was the private property of one man. Leopold governed it from Brussels and never went there himself.

Most of the land was declared state land. Villages had to deliver fixed quantities of rubber and ivory. An army, the Force Publique, enforced this. Anyone who brought too little could be flogged with the chicotte, a whip of dried hippopotamus hide. Women were held hostage until their husbands had collected enough rubber. Soldiers cut off hands as proof. The Irish diplomat Roger Casement traveled through the region in 1903 and in February 1904 published a report on what he had seen. It caused a great stir in Europe.

Under outside pressure the Belgian state took the country over from the king on November 15, 1908. From then on it was called the Belgian Congo. That date matters for Isidore Bakanja. What happened to him in 1909 took place under Belgian rule. The system of rubber companies with their own agents and their own plantations continued after the takeover.

One of those companies was the Société anonyme belge pour le commerce du Haut-Congo, SAB for short. It had been founded in Brussels in 1888. From 1893 it laid out rubber plantations along the Busira River, not far from Bakanja’s home village.

MONKS FROM WESTMALLE

Around 1904 the young Bakanja went downriver to Mbandaka. The Belgians then called the town Coquilhatville. He was looking for work and found it in construction, as a mason’s helper.

Trappist missionaries were working in Mbandaka. Trappists are monks of the Cistercian order, known for their strict life of prayer and manual labor. These Trappists came from the abbey of Westmalle, near Antwerp in Belgium.

We do not know for certain who first told Bakanja about Jesus. An article by the Carmelite Patrick Mullins names a certain Linganga. He received his instruction in the faith from the fathers, according to Mullins Gregory Van Dun and Robert Brepols. On May 6, 1906, he was baptized. He received the baptismal name Isidore. The sources differ about the parish, and also about the date of his confirmation. That he was baptized in 1906 is certain. His baptismal record is the oldest document about his life that we know of.

THE ROSARY AND THE SCAPULAR

The Trappists taught the new Christians to pray the rosary and gave them a scapular. For a Protestant reader that word may be unfamiliar. Originally a scapular is a long strip of cloth that monks wear over their habit. There is also a small form: two pieces of cloth joined by cords, worn under your clothes over the shoulders, one piece on the chest and one on the back. It is a sign that you belong to a religious order or a confraternity.

Bakanja wore the brown scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the devotion of the Carmelites. According to Mullins he had himself enrolled in the scapular confraternity. For him it was a visible sign that he belonged to Christ and to the church. A Roman Catholic would call it a sacramental, something that helps you think of God. A Protestant does not have to share that form of piety to understand what happened. A young man did not want to hide that he was a Christian.

And he talked about it. He held no official role in the church, but he helped other catechumens and spoke with anyone who wanted to listen. That is how the Carmelite sources describe him. Pope John Paul II put it this way in 1994: he was “truly a catechist,” even without that title (freely translated).

How would you show your faith if you worked in a place where no one shared it?

A JOB IN RUBBER

In 1907 Bakanja decided to go back to his own region. According to the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, friends warned him. He took work with the rubber company in Busira all the same, as houseboy to a European agent named Reynders.

In 1908 Reynders was transferred to Ikili, and Bakanja went with him. The plantation at Ikili was run by another Belgian, André Van Cauter. Van Cauter hated Christianity and the missionaries. Reynders saw trouble coming and advised his servant to keep his faith to himself. Bakanja did not.

Let me say something here about those Belgians. I do not want to turn this story into a reckoning with a whole nation. It was Belgian monks who taught Bakanja to pray. It was a Belgian plantation boss who had him beaten for it. And it was a European inspector who later brought him out of the forest. Van Cauter, writes the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, was fiercely opposed to Christianity and to the missionaries themselves.

“SOON THE WHOLE VILLAGE WILL BE PRAYING”

Van Cauter forbade Bakanja to tell other workers about the faith. According to a witness in the later inquiry, he is said to have claimed that Bakanja was teaching the workers all sorts of nonsense. An Irish Carmelite page passes on another sentence of his, in free translation: “Soon the whole village will be praying and nobody will work anymore.” Those words come from the tradition surrounding the beatification. They are not preserved in any report from 1909. They do fit what is certain: Van Cauter wanted no Christian influence on his plantation, and he demanded that Bakanja take off his scapular.

Bakanja refused. Van Cauter then had him flogged a first time. According to the sources he endured it without resisting.

Shortly afterward Van Cauter saw him praying during a rest break. He flew into a rage, tore the scapular from his neck and had his overseer beat him on the spot. The sources differ about the whip. The Dictionary of African Christian Biography speaks of hippopotamus hide, the Carmelites of elephant hide. All of them say there were nails at the end. They also differ on the number of blows. Most Carmelite sources say the onlookers stopped counting after a hundred. The Dictionary gives more than two hundred and fifty. There is no firm count.

When exactly this happened is not entirely certain either. The Carmelites and the documents of the beatification process give February 2, 1909. Other sources give April 22. The February date fits best with what follows, because all sources say he lived for about six more months.

According to Carmelite tradition he murmured under the blows: “My God, I am dying.” A fragment from the process file, published in 1995, says he screamed it, so loudly that people sleeping some distance away woke up. He was no hero out of a legend who felt nothing. He was a man in pain who cried out.

CHAINED IN THE RUBBER SHED

After the second flogging Van Cauter had him put in chains. According to Mullins he was locked in a room of the rubber factory, out of sight. An inspection was coming. Van Cauter sent his wounded servant away to Isoko, so that the inspector would not see him.

Bakanja did not get far. He could barely walk and hid in the forest. There Iyongo and Moya Mputsu found him. After a few days they brought him to the inspector, Dorpinghaus. According to Mullins that was on February 6, 1909. So we come back to the beginning of this chapter, to the man who came out of the forest.

Dorpinghaus had him taken by boat to have his wounds treated. He also wrote a report on what he had found. According to Mullins he later brought Van Cauter to court. The archives of the Centre Aequatoria in Mbandaka hold a report from the public prosecutor’s office in Coquilhatville, dated July 31, 1909, and a file on the trial. The Dictionary of African Christian Biography writes that Van Cauter was prosecuted by his employers and received a prison sentence. I have not been able to consult the exact verdict myself.

“I AM DYING BECAUSE I AM A CHRISTIAN”

The boat stopped at Ngomb’Isongo. There it proved impossible to stop the infection. Bakanja was taken on to Busira, where a Congolese catechist cared for him. A fragment from the process file says his wounds turned into gangrenous sores. The medicines at Isongo and Busira did not help.

He asked visitors to pass something on, to his mother, to the judge or to a priest. In free translation: “Tell them that I am dying because I am a Christian.” To the missionaries he explained why he had been beaten. The white man did not like Christians, he said. He had shouted at him when he prayed, and he did not want him to wear the scapular.

Those sentences come from the statements witnesses made years later, when the church investigated his life. They have been passed on in a great many places, but they remain words that reach us through others.

TWO MONKS WITH A DYING SERVANT

On July 24 and 25, 1909, two Trappists came to see him. They gave him the last sacraments: confession and the anointing of the sick, the prayer with oil for those who are seriously ill. Mullins names one of them as Father Grégoire.

The missionaries urged him to pray for Van Cauter. The answer that has been preserved runs, in free translation: “Certainly I will pray for him. When I am in heaven, I will pray for him very much.” Another sentence the Carmelites pass on sounds more sober, almost dry: “The white man beat me, that is his business.” The judgment he left to God.

I read those two sentences side by side and both sound true to me. He does not pretend nothing happened. He calls it what it was. And he refuses to give the rest of his life to it. Do you know someone from whom you will never get an apology? Bakanja never got one either.

He died on August 15, 1909, in Busira. Some sources leave August 8 open, but most give the fifteenth, the day on which the Roman Catholic Church celebrates the Assumption of Mary. He had the rosary in his hand and the scapular around his neck. He had been baptized a little over three years.

A GRAVE IN BOKOTE

After his death his name kept circulating. In August 1913 a church inquiry began, as the Aequatoria archive shows. On June 7, 1917, his remains were exhumed and reburied at the parish of the Immaculate Conception in Bokote, a mission station in the same region.

After that things went quiet for a long time. According to Mullins, Pope John Paul II already spoke of him with praise in 1980, during a journey through Africa. The country was then called Zaire. The same pope would beatify him fourteen years later.

WHAT A BEATIFICATION IS

For readers from a Protestant tradition, first a word of explanation. In the Roman Catholic Church a person can, after death, officially be declared blessed and then a saint. In a beatification the church establishes, after a long inquiry, that someone led an exemplary Christian life, and that person may then be publicly venerated and remembered in a particular region or order. Canonization is the next step, for the worldwide church. In the case of a martyr the church also investigates whether the person was truly killed for the faith. Protestant churches do not have this. They prefer to speak of witnesses of faith, like the long line in Hebrews 11.

The inquiry into Bakanja was not without questions. In January 1995 The New York Times published a fragment from the file used by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Some consultors doubted whether he had really died of the wounds, since he had lived another half year. Perhaps he had also had an illness, they wrote. One consultor wondered whether the case would stir up the old hatred in Zaire against the Belgians. In the end nine theological consultors voted unanimously in favor. In their view the witness statements showed that he had been beaten because he was a Christian.

A SUNDAY IN APRIL

On Sunday, April 24, 1994, Pope John Paul II beatified him in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. The bishops of Africa were meeting in Rome at the time in a special synod. On the same day two Italian women were beatified, Gianna Beretta Molla and Elisabetta Canori Mora.

In his homily the pope addressed Bakanja directly. He called him a young layman from Zaire. He said that Bakanja had been scourged like his Master and that he had forgiven his persecutors as his Master did on the cross. He spoke of his love for everyone, without distinction of race or social position. Many of his fellow workers were not Christians and yet respected him.

The day before, the pope had received pilgrims from Zaire. He asked them, following Bakanja’s example, to be people of dialogue and peace. In his homily he called Bakanja’s example an invitation to unity and reconciliation among children of the same heavenly Father.

His feast day is August 15. The Carmelites and the church in Africa celebrate him on August 12. In 2019 Pope Francis wrote a letter to young people, Christus vivit. In it he names Bakanja as a layman from Congo who bore witness to his faith. The process for his canonization is still under way.

TWO PIECES OF CLOTH

Isidore Bakanja wrote no book and founded no church. There is no photograph of him. What we know of him comes from a baptismal record, a few reports by the colonial authorities, and the memories of people who saw him in his last months.

It is little. But it is enough to see who he was. A young Congolese laborer in a system that treated people like work animals. He had to do only one thing to escape the beatings: take a piece of cloth off his neck. He did not do it. And when he had been beaten almost to death for it, he said he would pray for the man who had ordered it.

He died in Busira, by the river along which the rubber plantations lay. He died with a rosary in his hand. And around his neck hung the scapular again, two small pieces of brown cloth.