Africa

Africa is presented in the conclave as a substantial but politically complex part of the global Church: a region whose cardinals may be courted as a voting bloc, yet whose local ministries and individual allegiances resist reduction to electoral arithmetic. The contrast between Joshua Adeyemi’s visible influence and Vincent Benítez’s work among people affected by war gives the region two sharply different kinds of prominence, while allegations about Joseph Tremblay’s payments make African votes part of the election’s dispute over power and accountability.

The African electorate

Lomeli counts thirteen African archbishops among the arrivals at the conclave, representing sees including Maputo, Kampala, Dar-es-Salaam, Khartoum, and Addis Ababa. He initially assumes they will vote as a solid bloc for Adeyemi. That expectation gains force when Adeyemi returns from the direction of the Palace of the Holy Office with a group of African cardinals, walking among them as he points out the buildings and brings them to Lomeli for their official welcome. Even the older Zucula of Mozambique and Mwangale of Kenya defer to him.

The scene also shows the limits of Adeyemi’s regional strength. Lomeli judges that he must win support beyond Africa and the developing world, and that his attacks on global capitalism and homosexuality may cost him votes in America and Europe. The African cardinals’ presence therefore matters not simply as a number, but as a constituency whose perceived unity cannot by itself secure the papacy.

Benítez’s African ministry

Africa also shapes the history that makes Benítez an unexpected figure in the conclave. When he arrives, eight African cardinals recognize and welcome him, led by Beaufret Muamba, the elderly Archbishop Emeritus of Kinshasa. They stand in turn to greet him, although Lomeli realizes none of them has met him before. Their respect comes from what they have heard of his work, carried out in remote places and often beyond the Church’s traditional structures.

Lomeli learns that Benítez’s African ministry involved establishing clinics and shelters for women and girls who had been raped in the continent’s civil wars. He understands why the late Pope might have valued a priest whose service took him to places of profound need rather than through the usual layers of Church appointments. The cardinals’ welcome makes Benítez’s reputation visible, even as the circumstances of his work explain why he could remain personally unfamiliar to them.

Votes, money, and accountability

Africa’s place in the election becomes more contentious when Lomeli examines documents hidden in the late Pope’s bed. The papers include financial records and a list of names that Lomeli identifies as cardinals who received money from Tremblay, mostly in Africa and South America. He alleges that the payments helped Tremblay obtain votes in the first ballot, were made in cash to hinder tracing, and occurred during the final year of the late Pope’s pontificate. The material makes the African electorate a focus not only of campaign strategy but of an alleged attempt to purchase influence.

The accusation is presented as an allegation supported, in Lomeli’s account, by bank statements; the evidence does not establish that every African cardinal was involved or that the region voted uniformly. Africa’s narrative significance lies in this tension: its cardinals are treated as a potentially decisive bloc, its pastoral realities appear through Benítez’s work, and its electoral influence becomes entangled with the question of whether Church office has been corrupted by money.