The Magical Miracle Tour

Travel Stories: When a German evangelist arrived to save Africa from Satan and his evil witch doctors, Frank Bures went along for the ride

I closed my eyes, raised my hands and felt nothing but the hot sun. All around me, though, thousands of converts began babbling with eyes closed and arms stretched to the sky, exactly as Bonnke had said they would.

That’s not to say everyone was overtaken. Several children near me, whose parents stood enrapt, looked bored and confused. Various counselors roamed through the crowd and a few teen-agers stood nearby with their arms crossed, apparently too cool for the rapture. The peanut sellers, too, managed to retain their senses.

But the most notable exception was Bonnke himself, who strolled back and forth across the stage, aloof from the babbling masses.

Mzee Muro, however, lost all power over himself, except enough to keep the microphone by his mouth. His holy gibberish thundered over the crowd.

Gradually people composed themselves—last of all Mzee Muro—and started speaking in earthly tongues. Finally order was restored and the meeting began to wind down.

But not before the healings.

This was what I’d been waiting for. Lately I’d been having stomach problems and had an old knee injury that had flared up. But up front, Bonnke informed us there were prerequisites. First, you had to be washed in the blood of Jesus Christ. Second, you had to come to the healing in faith. As far as I knew I didn’t qualify for either.

The Lord’s health plan was as bad as any.

The healing was anticlimactic anyway. There were no mass bonfires of wheelchairs and crutches, like there’d been in Kenya. Hardly anyone even fell down. No one was raised from the dead. Bonnke simply told us to check ourselves wherever we’d had a cancer, and that it would be gone. He said some blanket prayers for AIDS, sterility, goiters, malaria, rheumatism, arthritis and other ailments.

Already people had started to trickle out of the field and back into the streets of the city. I decided to join them rather than get caught in the flood of converts and non-converts.

In the days after Reinhard Bonnke left, the town rocked in his wake. Especially in the days afterward the buzz was everywhere and opinion ran the full spectrum: Some were convinced they’d seen the Messiah, or the next best thing. Others wondered why their rickets hadn’t healed or where all those new jobs were. A few saw a good business plan somewhere in there.

And still others just shook their heads at the crazy white man who came to Africa to give away books and money and to teach everyone a new language no one could understand.


Tags: Spiritual Travel, Africa, Tanzania


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