Running with the devil

The simple naïve world of Pastor Chintu Mukonka is turned upside down on the holiday that marks the National Day of Prayer, Fasting, Repentance and Reconciliation. While taking stock of the morning’s proceedings with the rest of the members of the Pastors’ Fellowship, after the march to the Kalulushi Stadium with the local Boys’ Brigade Band and the school cadets, he receives a call from a man calling himself Vincent Kunda.
Vincent is a former intelligence officer who is still being haunted by events that took place more than forty years ago, not just the horrors of the Rhodesian war but also those of Shaba Province when a group of rebels had twice tried to take the Province away from the rest of the then Zaire, with total disregard of the cost in human lives. The call to the Pastor is a desperate effort to get rid of nightmares that never seem to go away. His hope is that prayers will work where sleeping pills and the like have failed. But then, after Vincent had narrated the full extent of the horror he had witnessed, even the Pastor is not sure if the nightmares can indeed be gotten rid of with a prayer, at a snap of the finger.