I, Asante Kroma, am in a position to talk about it. They had completely infiltrated my secret service ranks. Our spies—and even some of my shady agents—were working off the books for them. And among themselves, those foreigners were intoxicated with outdoing each other. A real mess.
And as I write these lines, it continues.
They show off their warrior tattoos and talk about their exploits in Maren’s nightclubs. Angola. South Africa. Liberia. Sierra Leone. They knock back an unbelievable amount of whiskey and muse on the day when they’ll be able to call Castaneda. It will go something like this:
“Yeah, I believe your nasty nigger is in my area.”
“Really? He . . . ?”
“You want to know if he’s alive? He’s a little odd! More or less, yes. I unhinged his jaw a little, but the rest is OK.”
“Don’t move an inch, man, I’ll be right there!”
“That would be surprising. You don’t even know where I am, big guy.”
“But you’re going to tell me. I have a written order from President Mwanke—the state demands that this prisoner be delivered.”
“Have you gone crazy, my little Pierre? I’m in contact with the Red Cross. I’m going to turn over my package to them.”
At that exact moment, Pierre Castaneda will stifle his mad laughter. “Oh, really?”
“This bastard’s got to explain himself to the international courts. Human rights, that’s what it’s really about nowadays.”
After a few minutes, Pierre Castaneda will say to the guy, “OK, we’ve had enough fun. How much?”
There will be a long negotiation. The video of Kaveena’s murder alone would bring in hundreds of millions for the war hound. But Pierre Castaneda, who reigned over Cogemin’s gold and marble mines, has the means to pay.
What happens next will definitely seem less funny to Nikiema. He is handed over to Castaneda. The man, cruel and vindictive, had been dreaming of this tête-à-tête for a long time. For days, he subjects him to the most unusual forms of torture. As long as he still breathes, a part of his body is cut off. An ear. His tongue. His chin. Whatever.
It’s not easy to slice this chin, it’s really too hard, boss.
You bums! It’s certainly long enough—try with the metal saw, over there, on the little table, there it is, his fucking headstrong chin that juts forward, go on, put your hearts into it, go faster, sever it off for me I’m telling you and get a move on!
And all this time, Pierre Castaneda, sentimental as ever, doesn’t stop reminding himself of the time when, as inseparable friends, they would go have their beer almost every day at the Blue Lizard, and you were mad about Heineken and I’d be gone on the Premium Club—I even called it my little brunette, do you remember? We were the best friends in the world. I’d have never thought that you could stab me in the back like that. We were making the future of your native country together. I helped you climb higher up the ladder, and as soon as you got to the top, you started pissing on my head. Maybe I should have let you climb up on the throne, over there in your lost hole? King of Nimba, my foot! You’d have become like your father, an old spoiled fellow, alcoholic and morose. A little port, a few small bags of popcorn, and he would sign anything we wanted, your royal pops! I pulled you out of nothingness and that’s how you thank me, eh? You stick the murder of that little girl that you killed on my back! Is that it? Little bastard! Cut off his left leg!
Here, sir?
No, a little higher, let’s see, moron, toward the knee! Higher, a little ambition, what the hell!
And while Nikiema howls with pain, Pierre Castaneda mops his brow with his handkerchief.
I hope that things don’t happen like that. I don’t want to suffer. That would be useless. My destiny as a glorious martyr is a failed case. That said, maybe I’m going to surprise you: I can’t manage to say Pierre Castaneda was completely in the wrong. Of course, I am surprised to see him mixing his emotions with everything. But actually, we had been like milk brothers. We simply cannot hate each other. The paths of our lives are intertwined forever. I’m sure that Pierre Castaneda also thinks about me night and day. No doubt with more rage and hatred, since he’s the emotional one. For me, our break isn’t the end of the world. Of course, it so happens that I can be outside myself when my memory opens old wounds. Solitude weighs on me more than usual in those moments and I dream of a bloody revenge. But I am not deluding myself: I played and I lost.
On the other hand, I admit that Castaneda understands Abel Murigande’s attitude better than mine. Commander Nestor, armed, crossed his path. It was clearly a fair fight between enemies. I was happy to betray Castaneda. I also made a laughingstock of him. For years, all of his compatriots at Cogemin mocked him, but he had stood firm. He made a point of being seen everywhere with his Negro. He made a radiant political future for himself. People would say to him, those baboons are all the same, lazy and lackadaisical—be careful, Pierre, they are not like us. And as we savored Ta’Mim’s grilled fish or saka-saka, we would both mock those little racist Whites from the colony. Then Pierre Castaneda would play the dangerous revolutionary, especially when he had drunk a little too much Premium Club. Yeah, it was too bad that a guy with such advanced ideas was stuck in such a place. He treated his own people like fools.
I see you smile—in a manner of speaking, Mumbi, because you don’t smile very often. You are right: Pierre Castaneda’s bravado is comical. I’ve seen him at it, our great liberal. The murder of your daughter, Kaveena, was nothing compared to his other crimes. Don’t forget that I met the guy during the colonial period. A Negro had to stay in his place. We were forbidden to walk on the same sidewalk as Whites, to talk to them from far, to address them familiarly. Pierre and I were quite young then, but he already loved inventing the most refined torture methods. I saw him hang someone by his feet and ask some villagers to set his head on fire. I also remember the day when he ordered people to sweep all the paths leading to Cogemin. We went to inspect the grounds at the end of the afternoon. A single bit from the broom around there was enough for him to call all those in charge of the surrounding areas. He waved the twig around, high toward the sky, and said in a theatrical voice, “A child is going to be shot in the village closest to the spot where I found this. If I ask you to live on the property, it’s for you, not for me. The execution of this child will be a good lesson for all of you.”
And after that was the most difficult task: to know which village was closest to this famous twig. I saw Pierre Castaneda behave like a madman on such occasions. For several days, taking pride in his extreme precision, he did nothing but make stupid calculations, his map, notepad, and pen in hand. The residents of the concerned villages, under house arrest, waited anxiously. But incapable of admitting a fraction of uncertainty, he made everyone constantly retake the measurements. On about the sixth night, the chief of Mballa turned over a teenager to him, the son of an old woman who was said to be a bit of a witch. The child was shot in the village public square. The firing squad was under the command of an uncommissioned Senegalese officer. A little side note about this, Mumbi: In my opinion, we don’t talk enough about these auxiliaries from all the colonial armies. The empire’s bleak bulldogs! The dirty work was always theirs. When I see their country puff up its chest today and pass itself off as an example to the entire world, it makes me laugh! They’re funny anyway, my Senegalese brothers. And what if they start by apologizing to the Vietnamese, to the Madagascans, to the Algerians, and to so many others? That wouldn’t be a bad thing, I think.
Let’s come back to our friend, Pierre Castaneda. You talk about an enlightened mind! I know all the little secrets of Maren’s strongman. When he got here, he did what all the other Whites did, he slept with all the young women, blindfolding their eyes. And do you know why? They were not to see him naked. They all did it, too. The master’s race. Isn’t that true, my little Pierre? And that other time when a canton chief had slapped his wife, Hortense Dupaquier. Pierre was on a trip t
o France. The man was tortured to death. Upon his return, Castaneda was still so angry that he had the body dug up in order to have it whipped in front of the natives. I’m not telling you anything new, of course, when I say that this Hortense Dupaquier did not deserve so much infamy. But that is another story. . . . Not for a single day did that man think that our freedom was more important than Cogemin’s gold and marble. You know, Mumbi, those big words: self-determination, national destiny, independence—independence, my love, oh boy!—they made Pierre Castaneda chuckle. He never thought that we could take charge of our affairs by ourselves, like other people on earth. And that’s why, up to the moment when his troops and mine started shooting each other, he refused to admit that I had truly envisioned nationalizing Cogemin. In his mind, all I wanted to do was blackmail him.
I’ve been to Cogemin more than once. As everyone knows, it’s the largest industrial company in our country. It extends across tens of thousands of hectares if you take into account its gold and marble mines. And since Pierre Castaneda has been its boss for several decades, Cogemin is central to national political life. Its emblem, a black eagle taking flight, is known throughout the entire world. When foreigners hear about it, they imagine lavish buildings standing in the middle of a thick African forest. The reality is quite different. The mining company’s offices are actually made out of modest, rather unattractive barns. More than once, businessmen who had come from far away were struck by the contrast between these makeshift premises and those of the company in their own country. Wild grass was growing around the buildings and you had to jump over mud puddles in order to access the main entrance. In the first years—during the colonial period—small businesses had spontaneously popped up around Cogemin. Shopkeepers settled into makeshift shelters made of cardboard and sold to the company workers cigarettes, cola, ginger juice, and even packets of ice water that were likely tainted; then came the cheap restaurants, and when the bars opened their doors, prostitutes arrived. People would often see them on the arms of young workers in orange overalls and gleaming helmets.
It continued like that for years. But a little before independence, the director of the company was replaced by Pierre Castaneda, who had been his trusted representative up to that point. For reasons known only to him, Castaneda had all those establishments I just described torn down. In his eyes, they were illegal. Undoubtedly, too, with this dramatic action, he wanted to show that he was a strong man. In a few hours, all the stalls were torn down, as were the surrounding villages. Some of those villages, several centuries old, were proud of their past. All of them were razed. Cogemin’s perimeter expanded from one day to the next. That was one of the goals of the operation. Castaneda then had high barbed-wire fences put up around the mine. The residents of Nimba started to protest. But their king was Pierre Castaneda’s friend. He was also, one must not forget, N’Zo Nikiema’s father. The matter was quickly decided. Castaneda was a prudent man: he recruited young villagers from the western tribes to ensure security at Cogemin, which was located in the north of the country. Proud to wear uniforms for the first time in their lives, the stern faces of those who patrolled the mine were ready for anything. Very quickly, they got firearms. They liked to use them on the slightest pretext and they often had to be called to order. They later formed the shock troops against Commander Nestor’s guerrilla force.
In a short time, Cogemin became equipped with better roads, clinics, and schools than any city in the country. Its white employees could go to the Belvedere Complex’s two supermarkets to stock up on provisions shipped directly from France. They knew almost nothing about the indigenous town outside its walls. Not to mention, it didn’t interest them at all.
In the early days of independence, people believed that Cogemin was going to be nationalized. Nikiema had made the promise several times in his meetings, but in very ambiguous terms. Pierre Castaneda didn’t leave him any time to think about it. The new state signed a document with Cogemin called Nimba Protocol 212. It’s a period in our history that I don’t know well. I was preparing for my baccalaureate exams in high school and so I was far away from all that. In any case, only a few initiates knew from the start what was hidden behind that curious name. President Nikiema had just ceded, in the most legal manner in the world, the country’s entire mine zone to Cogemin. The latter was obtaining the rights to police the area and to import or export whatever it pleased in the tens of thousands of square kilometers. Pierre Castaneda even had a small airport built. It quickly became impossible to conceal this fact: Cogemin had become a state within a state. There had been protests here and there. To no avail.
But as soon as he went underground, Abel Murigande reserved his most virulent attacks for Cogemin. According to him, Nimba Protocol 212 made it clear that the country was not independent. After Murigande’s execution and the rallying of his senior lieutenants by the regime, no one ever took interest in the affair again.
On his end, Nikiema had hoped—as many African political leaders of his generation did—that independence, which was rigged to begin with, would slowly become a reality. Even if he didn’t dare bring up Cogemin’s nationalization, he secretly pursued the idea. He had to find the right opportunity. And, in his mind, it didn’t have to be some sort of revolutionary rebellion. He just had to do it. But, far from declining, Castaneda’s hold on political life only became stronger. And N’Zo Nikiema himself learned, much to his chagrin, that being a puppet is never an easy task. You constantly wait for your moment, each morning you’re convinced it’s finally here, and at the end of the day, it never comes.
During that period, I often got the chance to meet Nikiema. Every day, my police work allows me, as one can easily imagine, to observe people without their knowledge. And I must say that as the years went by, I detected a growing discomfort in the president. He became less and less tolerant of being Castaneda’s puppet. The anecdote that I’m going to narrate is revealing of that mindset. A playwright had put up a play on this well-known topic—N’Zo Nikiema, a lackey of the Whites, etc. It was called The Little Stone Dog. Nobody was fooled by the play on words, “stone” being pierre in French. The text was loaded with mean allusions that triggered hilarity in the audience every minute. Sometimes, a few of them even chanted the name Commander Nestor or Prieto da Souza. Nikiema couldn’t hear anything about the author of this play without getting mad as hell. I rarely saw him hate someone so much. He used to say to me, “Listen, Asante, I knew this guy’s father. His father was certifiably insane! He defecated in the street, he lived under a baobab surrounded by a dozen scrawny cats, he would talk to them all the time, he was a madman! And one day at dawn, people heard all the cats meowing. They went to see, and the cats were all sitting around the man’s corpse and they meowed in a strange way, all together. He had died at night. And that, Asante, is who the father of our great writer was!”
I pretended to be scandalized, which is what he seemed to be encouraging. In fact, I don’t think I played the charade well. I just did not agree with Nikiema. When a young man wants to become a playwright, he perhaps asks himself a bunch of questions—he may have doubts about his abilities or even the usefulness of literature. But the fact that the death of his father had long ago been announced by a concert of meowing cats early one morning is certainly not going to keep him from writing plays. In this case, I was above all a witness to N’Zo Nikiema’s powerless rage. With The Little Stone Dog, this playwright was striking violently where it hurt and Nikiema couldn’t even react. It was also a time when, according to what I understood, he was obsessed with the memory of Commander Nestor, who knew how to stand up to foreign powers and had the guts to do so.
At this point, the horrifying death of Commander Nestor gives us pause.
Despite his latest taste for confession—and, I will even say, his desire to remain sincere in all circumstances—we can’t take everything Nikiema wrote at face value. When he told Mumbi, for example, about the end of Abel Murigande, we can suspect he exaggerated.
And it’s distressing anyway when a head of state writes, “I was furious when they killed my childhood friend, so I went on a little strike just to spite my French advisors.” It’s infantile, but also what a horrible confession! However, I am still convinced of one thing: N’Zo Nikiema was envious of Abel Murigande’s fate. Commander Nestor did endure some hardship, but his suffering in some way sanctified him. For all of us, his image is that of the golden eagle shot down in midflight. And Pierre Castaneda didn’t realize what he was doing throwing him out of a helicopter into the Atlantic. He forever made him into a quasi-unreal being, a sort of archangel making a pact until his last breath with the thunder and lightning. In one of his letters to Mumbi Awele, Nikiema did not indicate otherwise.
However, without Kaveena’s murder, he would never have dared to attack the all-powerful Cogemin. He thought he finally got Pierre Castaneda with this heinous murder. His father, the king of Nimba, had sold an immense plot of land to the foreigners for a few cases of whiskey and port. He himself had been subjected to the worst racist humiliation by Cogemin. He wanted, at all costs, to take his revenge on destiny, and he thought, for the first time in his life, that he had the chance.
Don’t listen to those who tell you with a whistle of admiration, “What a brilliant strategist Pierre Castaneda is!” In reality, his logic was quite simple. The boss of Cogemin knew very well what the exploitation of the gold mines in Ndunga and the marble mines in Masella meant. The sons of the country were working in there like slaves. They were forced to extract the subsoil wealth at the cost of great suffering. It was then loaded into boats and no longer concerned them. When you think about it, it’s mind-blowing and even a little funny, this way of coming to the other end of the world in order to appropriate the wealth of others. Pierre understood that one day or another, the system would have to be made more flexible. That meant preparing the takeover. That was with me. There’s nothing extraordinary about it. I almost want to say that for us politicians, our only truth is in our survival.
Kaveena Page 10
