Kaveena

by Boubacar Boris Diop

  N’Zo Nikiema saw the crowd gathered along July 21 Boulevard. Some people led the procession shouting, “Ni-kie-ma, murderer! Ni-kie-ma, murderer!” Others shouted, “Casta-ne-da president! Casta-ne-da president!” But overall, tens of thousands of people from unions and political parties marched peacefully. When they arrived in front of the gates of the palace, one of the leaders, with a white bandanna around his head, walked up to the balcony with a megaphone: “N’Zo Nikiema, come out of your palace if you’re a man! Murderer, get out!” He shouted these words mockingly and—at least in the leader’s memory—without any wickedness, and they were met with laughter and cheers of joy.

  The serenity and smiling congeniality of these family men contrasted with the tension in the country. In spite of these appearances, we headed straight for civil war. When it came to my services, there was no longer any doubt: my work was merely to inform President Nikiema, and I did. As far as I could judge, the opposing camp, that of Castaneda, was better prepared. Castaneda felt he was ready for the clash, and with all sorts of instigations he laid the groundwork for lighting the house on fire.

  On the eve of the march, someone on the radio promised to plant Nikiema’s skull on “the pointed and flamboyant bayonets of freedom.” Nikiema immediately recognized the voice of one of his most zealous admirers, a young poet now eager to dedicate his verses to the service of Castaneda. Although he was far from believing that he had been defeated, Nikiema could not banish the images from his mind, the images he had often seen on television during the last three years. Classic scenario: After more or less spontaneous riots, protesters force open the palace gates. The bloody tyrant flees by helicopter and his giant bronze statue in the center of the city is toppled amid the pandemonium. The actual historical sequence only lasts a few seconds. It begins the moment the statue wavers under the hammer and ends when the dictator’s bronze nose touches the very ground that has been bloodied by his unspeakable crimes. If the cameras unfortunately miss this sequence, then everything has to start up again: strikes, marches, popular uprising, the poet’s hymns to the rebellion, flowers thrown at intimidated and radiant soldiers, and the demolition of the statue—on horseback or not, marble or bronze—of the dictator. This is the only moment of interest—a counterpoint to lavish swearing-in ceremonies—and no TV in the world wants to miss that. Nor do parents. They go to the show with their children and later they declare proudly, “I was there too—I was six years old when N’Zo Nikiema the Tyrant was overthrown, and that day, sitting on my dad’s shoulders, I truly understood the meaning of the word ‘freedom.’” And in some tarnished town in Kisito, a fanatic will beat his breast and boast at one time or another, “Yes, young man, you have before you one of the real heroes who defeated N’Zo Nikiema! I was the one who took that first shot at Freedom Square that morning!”

  “History repeats itself, every time,” Nikiema declared in a low voice, almost in a bad mood. He remembered the end of Almamy Samory Touré. Shortly before being deported to the Missanga Forest in Gabon, Samory was led by the poor Whites of the colony at the end of a rope through the streets of Saint-Louis in Senegal. The crowd on the sidewalks laughed as he passed them and flung banana peels at him. They treated him like a monkey and a warrior Negro, and the women of the city came out in large numbers to jeer at him and mock him to his face. “Well, here he is, the savage who wanted to shake our empire, don’t you doubt it,” they spat in French, and also, it won’t surprise anyone, in Wolof too, because the Negroes there, those from Senegal, were already “children of the Fatherland” and company. What struck Nikiema the most, and what he found difficult to cope with, was the joy of the populace. Almamy Samory Touré was not even worth their hatred—no one cursed him angrily. They just found his many battles against foreign forces amusing. His victories in Bouna against Monteil, and in Bouré against Combes, and with Henderson and the English in Dokita, weren’t worth anything. All that remained of this great epic was a Negro tied to a rope in an old French city in Africa. Nikiema tried to get inside Almamy’s head: what wouldn’t he have given, Fama, to hear at that moment at least one cry of hatred before going into exile in Missanga the next day? N’Zo Nikiema also wondered if Almamy had gone to Gabon aboard the Bou El Mogdad or some other boat. For some peculiar reason, this suddenly seemed of great importance to him and he promised to consult the history books in the basement.

  He had already circled the room several times, ruminating on these dark thoughts. Throughout the house, there were portraits of little Kaveena drawn by Mumbi. He stopped at a sketch but hardly saw the smiling face of the girl. His mind was elsewhere. And what if his hiding place was unfortunately discovered? He would never agree to get out alive from the small house. He would never fall into the hands of his enemies. He would not walk, tied to the end of a rope, through the streets of Maren. He had shaken up that bastard. He had killed; he should not be afraid of dying.

  As for Kaveena, it wasn’t me. I did not kill your daughter. You reprimanded me one day for not letting the investigators do their work. How furious you were that night! For a few moments, I toyed with the idea that you were going to stab me in the heart with a kitchen knife. Yes, I covered up the Kaveena case. It doesn’t cost me anything to admit it to you now. What I’ve learned in politics is that, in the end, only your worst enemies can really understand you. Anyway, they are often the only ones with whom there are common memories and shared emotions, being men of the same world, far from the clamor of militants. Ordinary people like you, you imagine naively that there are good people and bad people. You go to bed at night and you wake up in the morning with the idea that such-and-such regime kills and tortures and that seeing this, others want to put an end to those horrors. Well, know this: the others who see it, they want to put an end to the regime, yes, but not to the fact that one kills people and all that. They stand by their noble positions, and they themselves end up believing that they are troubled by I don’t know which grave human rights violations, and if you ever get hung up on it, you’re ruined. We are all villains and we know it.

  Their Independent Investigation Commission, for example, was a bad farce. If I had left those experts to do their work properly, they would have no doubt discovered the truth. There is so much damning proof. That imbecile Pierre Castaneda behaved like an amateur. I have the video. In it, he talks about the place where the little girl’s skull must be buried and about the other place, under a kapok tree to be exact, where the left leg had to be put, etc. “And the heart, where’d you put it, man? The heart of a little girl is the symbol of eternal innocence. My enemies will have to come face to face with my purity. Their blows will never reach me again.” Pierre Castaneda had gone mad. All those stories about having to bury the victim at the four cardinal points make me vomit. The guy admits to Castaneda that he raped the little girl before killing her and he laughs as he says, “Well, yes, in any case, she was going to die, so why get upset, eh, my good man?” And you know what? He adds, “I hope you liked it, at least!” Bawdy jokes between the guys, you know.

  You are shocked, Mumbi, you think that I shouldn’t tell you that? Well, yes, I should: I don’t have any other choice than to tell you all that. And if we see each other again, I will show you this cassette. And you will see this: after a moment of reflection when you believe he’s going to succumb to remorse, Castaneda pulls himself together, shakes his head, and declares, “Yeah, it’s not pretty, but what’s done is done and anyway you’ve got to consider that she didn’t even have time to realize what was happening, the poor thing.” It’s a totally vile document. It’s right here, the film! I have it with me here! Pierre Castaneda, son of the Age of Reason, champion of the democratic freedoms in its great works . . . Pierre Castaneda knows that I ran off with the cassette. That’s why he did everything he could to rally Colonel Kroma’s support. As long as I live, that man will not be left in peace. But at the time, did you see me bringing Pierre Castaneda to justice? This country would have been ransacked and pillaged.
Is that what we wanted? It’s true the country did not escape ransacking and pillaging. That was no reason, though, to have to put up with the chaos sooner than was expected.

  I try to imagine N’Zo Nikiema’s first days in the small house. It’s not hard: the fugitive left clues, and all it takes is a little patience to transmute them into words. And besides, when you really think about it, that’s all I’ve ever done my whole life. True, I’m missing a good part of my usual material: the tips from our informants and the confessions yelled out by the tortured victims in the Satellite basement. But I’m managing very well with what I’ve got on hand.

  Here’s, roughly, what must have happened. N’Zo Nikiema had just escaped from the palace. His partisans were hunted down. I had drawn up the list of them myself. Castaneda added some names and crossed off others. Then he told me, “OK, Asante, you can go right ahead.” At this terrible hour when Nikiema’s regime was crumbling to pieces, Castaneda addressed me in a familiar tone and was on a first-name basis with me. These signs were not misleading. I knew that I had to act quickly: soon it was going to be peacetime and it would be more difficult to finish off all those men under Nikiema.

  As for the latter, we were looking for him everywhere. His head had a price on it. In addition to being furious about having been taken in like a real greenhorn, Pierre Castaneda feared seeing his good white name sullied forever. I could read the anguish in his eyes. It was true; the video of Kaveena’s murder was a bomb that N’Zo Nikiema held in his hands. Pierre Castaneda was behaving like a real jackal.

  During this time, the war didn’t manage to end completely. Some soldiers pretended that they were still fighting. There weren’t very many and the pockets of resistance were cleaned up one after the other. In spite of everything, it was a mess. What’s more, Castaneda was beginning to wonder whether it wouldn’t be safer to give these killjoys a little piece of the national cake.

  All of that seemed to be happening in a time and a world that did not concern the fugitive.

  As was the case every morning at dawn, he was content to stand at the window, contemplating the deserted boulevard. His mind was empty, and a minute earlier, passing in front of one of the small house’s windows, he saw an absent look on his reflected face. The sky above Jinkoré slowly cleared. Kids set out on their old mopeds putt-putting through the streets of Maren; they sped straight ahead, crouching down over their handlebars at the turns, as they’d seen in the movies, and let shots ring out through the air. What did these young soldiers do with their nights? He thought, Castaneda likes to boast about their bravery and he proudly calls them “my Lil Boys.” They are said to be disciplined enough in combat. They’re also very cruel.

  Across from him, three-quarters of the houses were nothing but a mass of stones and rubble. Some rats fled from a truck transporting troops. The truck was part of the convoy stopped dead several days ago by shooters lying in ambush in the ruins. The soldiers of its army—the “loyalists,” as they were called—hadn’t had the time to counterattack. Cleared out by Castaneda’s Lil Boys’ bursts of machine gun fire. N’Zo Nikiema had seen his soldiers peel themselves off the ground, whirl between the trees like dead leaves, then come back and crash to the ground, and he’d had the impression that this was a game and that he was sitting in the front row at the Theatre Doura Mané, Maren’s largest hall. The gunfire ceased abruptly and after several minutes N’Zo Nikiema saw an officer come out of his hiding place, looking worried and waving a white flag. He was looking all around him, terrorized. He wanted to give himself up and seemed to be wondering if it was really a good idea. The Lil Boys quickly put an end to his doubts. It was as if the kids had sprung out from everywhere, and Nikiema’s heart began pounding very hard. At such moments, we all want—without daring to admit it—for something to happen, and sometimes the more bloody it is, the happier we are. The Lil Boys could see very well how afraid the guy was. And all they had done was to circle around him grimacing and crying out like Cherokees on the battlefield. One of them had stuck a dagger in the guy’s abdomen and he had fallen forward, saying things that N’Zo Nikiema couldn’t hear. Anyway, it had to have been very funny, because the kids were laughing nonstop. They laughed, stamping the ground with their feet and holding their stomachs.

  Once the guy’s body had stopped wriggling, the Lil Boys started rifling through his pockets. One of them, young but hefty, had put on his uniform. One of his comrades gave him a manly thumbs-up, meaning, it’s a little broad in the shoulders but fine, it’ll do, my man.

  Seeing this officer, N’Zo Nikiema had shaken his head resentfully. The uncommissioned officer had waited for all his men to be killed before coming out of hiding. There was nothing surprising about his army’s retreat. N’Zo Nikiema felt a deafening rage rise up in him.

  He was potbellied like a character in a comic book, grotesque, with frightful eyes. A coward. He was definitely one of those guys they made me name an officer. They all wanted to be generals or colonels, well decorated with yellow or red epaulettes, long shiny ribbons, and black mustaches, and well built, as if all of this were distributed to them in their army stores. “Colonel.” “General.” Two magical words which, when there was a dearth of enemies, served the purpose of breaking the hearts of little bitches and middle-aged broads burned by their last affair. I resisted as long as I could. But you know, Mumbi, in the end, you’ve had enough. Everyone joins in, the Mother of the Nation as they call her, your childhood friends, everyone, they don’t give you a minute of respite and you say to yourself, OK, the days are short and I need a little rest too. If I don’t make this guy a superior officer, the sky’s going to fall on our heads. I’ll never be able to live in peace, and plus, it doesn’t cost me anything. Mistake. Because when the war arrives, like now, those guys who wanted to be generals are no longer there anymore. Since the Sereti barracks were attacked, which marked the beginning of the civil war, all those tin-soldier officers understood that it was going to be hard, that Castaneda’s Lil Boys were going to cut open their prisoners’ flesh, and they all got rid of their beautiful uniforms.

  Today I’m almost happy to no longer have to determine my fellow citizens’ lives for them. I have no more explanations to offer to anyone, and in this semiprison, I feel lighter, freer.

  He thought about those palace meetings with the general staff once again, always angrily. Surrounded by generals all talking to him with deference, deliberately using words he didn’t understand. The typical gobbledygook of military officers in the field. “Strategic depth.” “Controlled fire.” “Thermal signature.” “Pyrophoric decoy.” “Our forces are going to evacuate the ten-degree and four-degree north latitude and the ten-degree and zero-degree west longitude.”

  Nikiema often thought, if your profession isn’t to kill your kind en masse, how can you know what all that means? For several months, he contented himself with listening to them and nodding knowingly. After all, he was the supreme leader of the armies. He couldn’t, in all decency, send young people to their deaths without knowing what it was he was doing.

  Their little game continued this way for weeks or maybe even months. One day, he had enough of them mocking him. During a general meeting, he turned to the deputy chief of the general staff of armies and said to him in an icy tone, “Hey, stop acting like an imbecile. Try saying things simply.” Then, addressing the others, he added, “I am no fool, you know.”

  A deadly silence descended upon the room. Which indicated, for those used to the mysterious place often ironically referred to as the “high level,” that it was one of those moments when everyone knows that a major event has just occurred.

  In front of those expressionless faces, N’Zo Nikiema was more than a little proud of himself. He felt like the real boss, with all the cards in his hand. None of them dared to speak. In a way, their spinelessness didn’t surprise him at all. They had important responsibilities even though they weren’t the best at their jobs. Quite the opposite. All that was being asked of them was
to serve and be quiet. It was simple: N’Zo Nikiema never claimed to be original in exercising his power. He didn’t put up with any rebels around him. Pierre Castaneda taught him what it meant to be a puppet.

  After staring each of them down with a glare, he said in a firm tone, “I let the common people call me the Omniscient or the Sun Giant of Mount Nimba. It’s good for the work we want to do. All of us around this table want this country to move forward, right? It’s good when the people think that the leader has magical powers, that he has dozens of degrees, and that he can conquer the most valiant enemy armies with a single little movement of his chin. But all of you and I know what the situation is, OK?” Then he added, with a brief deafening roar, intoxicated by his own rage, “Is that clear?”

  I remember that after this meeting, I was responsible for the surveillance of all our superior officers. None of them seemed to want to mess around. I reported to N’Zo Nikiema. He just gave me a certain look: I understood that I had to bump off the deputy chief of the general staff. It was done. To come up with proof of a scheme isn’t difficult. I would even say it’s child’s play.

  I wonder why I’m talking to you about these people. They don’t interest you, and you are right. Bastards, from fathers to sons. When I executed that guy under whatever pretext, his wife wanted to play the inconsolable widow. I told her to dry her crocodile tears. She raked in an unbelievable amount from the army uniforms, the detached helicopter pieces, and hey, why not, the officers’ black well-trimmed and lustrous mustaches, everything. Billions. With all that, they calm down. And believe me, she calmed down very quickly, the little comrade.

  Kaveena’s maternal grandfather was, as I’ve already said, a modest taxi driver. Despite the tumult stirred up by the case and even though he was one of the people primarily involved, he had remained admirably reserved. And if nothing else, N’Zo Nikiema was happy not to be implicated in the murder of the man’s granddaughter.