The Death of Comrade President

by Alain Mabanckou

  THE DEATH OF

  COMRADE PRESIDENT

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

  Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  29 Cloth Fair

  London

  EC1A 7JQ

  www.serpentstail.com

  Originally published in French as Les cigognes sont immortelles

  © Editions du Seuil, 2018

  Translation © Helen Stevenson, 2020

  Copyright © Alain Mabanckou, 2020

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Cover design: gray318

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781788162326

  eISBN 9781782835400

  Contents

  Saturday 19 March 1977

  Our plot

  The Malongas and the Mindondos

  Case by Case

  Bad mood

  The talking tree

  Mboua Mabé

  Chilli in your eyes

  The cranes fly over

  The runner

  The Salamanders

  The red Renault 5

  Two strange men

  The polygamous priest

  The list

  Sand in my eyes

  Sunday 20 March 1977

  The Voice of the Congolese Revolution

  Voice of America

  Marien Ngouabi Junior

  The photo of the comrade president

  Troublemakers

  Black cloth

  The Mouyondzi neighbourhood

  The dirty note

  The answer’s no

  Ma Moubobi’s rage

  The cardinal’s cousin

  Sweet dreams

  Monday 21 March 1977

  La Chine en colère

  The Bandas

  In the taxi

  At the Grand Marché

  Chez Gaspard

  113 Avenue Linguissi-Tchicaya

  White cranes never die

  Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo and lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. His six previous novels Black Moses, African Psycho, Memoirs of a Porcupine, Broken Glass, Black Bazaar and Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty are all published by Serpent’s Tail. Among his many honours are the Académie Française’s Grand Prix de littérature, the 2016 French Voices Award for The Lights of Pointe-Noire and the 2018 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Black Moses. Mabanckou is a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, was a finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize and has featured on Vanity Fair’s list of France’s fifty most influential people.

  Author photograph: © Caroline Blake

  ALSO BY ALAIN MABANCKOU

  African Psycho

  Broken Glass

  Memoirs of a Porcupine

  Black Bazaar

  Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty

  The Lights of Pointe-Noire

  Black Moses

  In memory of my mother Pauline Kengué,

  my father Roger Kimangou

  and my uncle René Mabanckou

  for the Captain

  and for the Immortal

  and all the cranes that fly overhead

  THE DEATH OF

  COMRADE PRESIDENT

  ALAIN MABANCKOU

  Translated by Helen Stevenson

  Saturday 19 March 1977

  Our plot

  Maman Pauline says you should always wear clean clothes when you go out. She says the main thing people criticise is what you’re wearing; you can hide the rest, dirty underwear, for example, or socks with holes in.

  So I’ve just changed my shirt and shorts.

  Papa Roger is sitting under the mango tree, at the far end of our plot, busy listening to our national radio station, the Voice of the Congolese Revolution, which since yesterday afternoon has broadcast nothing but Soviet music.

  Without turning round to look at me, he gives me my orders:

  ‘Michel, don’t dawdle on the way! Don’t forget your mother’s errands, my red wine, my tobacco, and don’t lose my change!’

  He reminds me not to dawdle because I have a habit of stopping to drool over the cars of the black capitalists near the Avenue of Independence, as though I’ll never get another chance. I just stand there gazing at them, imagining one day I’ll buy one myself, I’ll hide it at night in a lock-up, guarded by bulldogs I’ve dosed with Johnnie Walker Red Label mixed with corn spirit to make them ten times more vicious than even the dogs that belong to the whites in the town centre. I get caught up in my thoughts, and forget all about Maman Pauline’s errands; I forget Papa Roger asked me for red wine and the tobacco powder he stuffs up his nostrils, making his eyes water.

  My father’s concerned about his change, too, because ever since primary school I’ve had a bit of a problem: often the pockets of my shorts have holes in, from hiding bits of wire in them for fixing the holes in my plastic shoes, in case they fall apart right there in the street. So, instead of pocketing the change I clutch it tightly in my right hand. Unfortunately, whenever I wave hello to the local mums and dads (which you have to do, or they’ll go and say crazy things to my parents), the money just falls on to the ground. I have to pick it up pretty smart, or the young guys smoking pot on street corners will snatch it to buy presents for those skinny girls, the runaways, that hang around with them. It’s their own fault we call them the runaways: they’ve left their parents’ homes, they dress like they’re not wearing any clothes, you can see everything, they don’t care, and they’ll do things with any boy that I won’t go into here, or they’ll go round saying Michel always exaggerates, and sometimes he says rude things without meaning to …

  Before I leave our plot, I take a good look back at it. There’s barbed wire all round it. The entrance is just four planks knocked together, with gaps so we can see who wants to come in. Just to confuse Maman Pauline and Papa Roger, I used to slip between the barbed wire, first one leg, then the other, and slip out without hurting myself, to go down to the River Tchinouka with my friends to hunt swallows and weaver birds. But that was all back when I was at primary school, and now I’m at Three-Glorious-Days middle school I’m allowed out through the door.

  It was Maman Pauline who bought this plot, and she gave her little brother, Uncle Mompéro, the task of building us a house. It cost too much to build a permanent house, so ours is just made of wood. Pontenegrins call this type of house ‘houses in waiting’. I don’t like that expression. There are loads of families round here who wanted to show they had money, so started out building proper houses, but never put in the famous windows that keep the noise out, because they cost too much. Surely they’re the families with ‘houses in waiting’. At least ours is actually finished, there’s nothing more to add, it’s made out of okumé boards, with a roof of corrugated iron and plywood windows. We have two bedrooms: one for me, one for Maman Pauline and Papa Roger. In my parents’ room there’s a smell of mothballs, 24/7. The smell gets rid of roaches and other kinds of insect that mess up the wax-print fabrics my mother’s pagne wrappers are made from. The bed is very tidily made, thanks to Papa Roger, who copies the technique of the chambermaids in the Victory Palace Hotel where he works. Papa Roger’s well in with his boss at the hotel, Madame Ginette: it’s unusual for someone to stay i
n a hotel job for twenty years without stealing the nice tablecloths or the sheets that come from Europe.

  In the bedrooms at the Victory Palace Hotel, the sheets are all white. Maman Pauline doesn’t want that at home, she thinks white is for the corpses in the morgue at the Adolphe-Cissé hospital, so she uses her own brightly coloured prints instead. The thing I like about their bed is the big pillows and the designs my mother’s knitted for them: two birds kissing with their beaks, the big one’s Papa Roger, the smaller one’s Maman Pauline herself. You’re bound to sleep well with pillows like that. I know other people who have lions or panthers on theirs, the idea being they eat up pests like snakes and scorpions but really it’s the people sleeping in them who get eaten up in their dreams instead.

  Since we only have two rooms, things get pretty complicated when members of the family from our village pitch up in Pointe-Noire with nowhere to stay. You can’t shut the door on them, you can’t just say you don’t know them, so we put them up in the living room on mats, because if they sleep in proper beds they’ll only get uppity and start saying it’s their house now, and they’ll stay till their dying day. Also, if Maman Pauline and Papa Roger die before they do, they’ll kick me out and inherit everything.

  In the living room we have a really wobbly table. My mother says it’s a bit disabled, it’s got a poorly leg. My job is to stabilise the leg, with two little stones, when important people come to eat at our house. I keep the stones hidden in a cupboard by the window; it’s the only piece of furniture we inherited two years ago when my Uncle Albert Moukila who worked for the National Electricity Board died. Our relatives who had come from the village for the funeral all made a dash for Maman Pauline’s older brother’s property; they told my cousins to leave the new house their father had built for them in the Comapon neighbourhood and find somewhere else with their mother’s family. He was a very nice uncle; he arranged free electricity for anyone from our ethnic group who lived near his house, near the quartier Rex. We lived too far away; Uncle Albert, now deceased, couldn’t get a cable from there to our place in Voungou to give us free lighting. That’s OK; the main reason we don’t have electricity is because Voungou is still a new neighbourhood. The Vili’s cemeteries used to be here, the tribe that live by the Côte Sauvage and eat sharks, though there are plenty of other smaller fish in the sea. The traditional chiefs of the Vili knocked down their pretty cemeteries and sold off the plots without even consulting the dead, but it was good news for anyone who couldn’t afford to buy land in the other neighbourhoods of Pointe-Noire, the ones where the members of the Congolese Party of Labour live, with their big bellies and shiny bald heads.

  Our kitchen is outside, but attached to the house, like a child on its mother’s back. The toilets are opposite, well away from the kitchen, in case bad smells get into whatever’s cooking and spoil our appetite. Besides, they don’t really deserve to be called toilets. It’s just four sheets of metal Uncle Mompéro put up to stop passers-by from watching us from the street. If I want a pee, or something more substantial – which I won’t go into detail about here, or people will say Michel always goes over the top and that sometimes he says rude things without meaning to – I have to take a bucketful of water and pour it down so that the next person won’t know what’s gone on before. But I have to be pretty careful, if I make a mess pouring the water it splashes on my feet and the flies will be after me for the whole of the rest of the day.

  The Malongas and the Mindondos

  I go past the Malongas’ place. Monsieur Malonga’s three wives always cook outside, in the middle of their plot. If anyone criticises them, Monsieur Malonga just says that back in the day their Lari ancestors’ food was always prepared outside on three stones placed in a triangle, and it was all fine, the dishes even tasted better.

  The Malonga children, all eleven of them, have the job of making sure the fire doesn’t go out. If they fail, their mothers won’t fill their plates up when it’s time to eat. Kékélé, the oldest brother, is twelve, he’ll be taking his Primary School Certificate this year, he has a different teacher to the one I had when I was in that class last year, he’s got Monsieur Ngakala Bitekoutekou, who’s not very nice, he whips the pupils because he wanted to go and teach in the north of our country but the State refused his request and sent him to us in the south to show there was no tribalism in the Congo these days, it’s all just the imperialist Europeans trying to divide us.

  The Malongas aren’t black capitalists; their father sometimes comes round for a chat with Papa Roger under the mango tree. They don’t speak the same language, in our family we’re Bembés and speak the Bembé language, but either the Malongas speak the language of Pointe-Noire, Munukutuba, or they speak in French, but Monsieur Malonga’s French is nothing like as good as my father’s. For instance, one day my father used the word symposium. Monsieur Malonga was open-mouthed, the word was completely new to his ears, he’d never even heard it before.

  ‘Symposium, what’s that? Really, Roger, sometimes you come out with words even the whites don’t have in their dictionaries!’

  Monsieur Malonga works in the depot of the Printania store in the town centre, next to the Victory Palace Hotel. Because of his work he has things that come direct from France, that smell of France and are sold at Printania for loads of money. But Monsieur Malonga also has another job at weekends and it’s this second job he’s famous for in our neighbourhood. Families bring their boys to him and he makes personalised fetishes for them, so they’ll be good fighters. The most powerful fetish is called the kamon. Monsieur Malonga makes little cuts on the boy’s wrists with a Gillette razor blade, then rubs some powder into the wounds (a mixture of lots of ground-up things, like viper’s tooth, gorilla hairs, lantana leaves and bee’s sting). After that Monsieur Malonga makes this great show with an empty bottle, which he whacks against the child’s head. The child feels nothing, but the bottle breaks into a thousand pieces against his skull. Which means that when the boy headbutts someone, the other guy will see a thousand stars and pass out.

  Monsieur Malonga learned these secrets in his village, Mplangala, where he goes once a month. That’s where he gets his viper’s teeth and gorilla hairs. You can get hold of lantana leaves or bee sting in the new neighbourhoods of Pointe-Noire, or behind Mont-Kamba cemetery, where there’s still a bit of bush left here and there, with domestic animals who’ve decided they’ve had enough of being human slaves and want to go wild again.

  Girls can’t have the kamon, no boy will ever marry them if they do, they’d be too scared of getting beaten up, and losing face in the neighbourhood. I really wanted Monsieur Malonga to do the kamon on me, but to my great regret Maman Pauline and Papa Roger refused, because of the bad behaviour of one boy called Claver Ngoutou-Nziété. Monsieur Malonga had made him really strong, everyone avoided him, and he had no one to try out his kamon on. So he turned on his own parents, one head-butt for his mother, another for his father, both of them ended up in the emergency room at Adolphe-Cissé hospital. When my mother heard about this terrible business on the radio, she went and told Monsieur Malonga that it was unacceptable, that her boy Michel was never going to have the kamon, no way, and that if he gave it to me in secret when I went to see his children she would report it to the Voungou police, and he shouldn’t forget, the chief of police was from the same ethnic group as us …

  Just beyond the Malongas’ house is the Mindondos’. They built a proper, solid house, and their plot has concrete walls round it. They have swings and bicycles and new toys and a big blue tub for their children, who go round boasting that they’ve got a swimming pool, but I’ve seen the pool at the Victory Palace Hotel so I know a real swimming pool is way bigger and you can swim up and down in it, or jump into it off a board and go splash! in the water. When you’ve finished you take a white towel and wipe yourself with it a bit and then wrap it round your waist, then go and lie down on a plastic lounger and read books with nice, simple stories in them. The Mindondos can’t s
wim up and down and they can’t jump off a board and go splash! in the water. They just sit around their tub and throw plastic ducks into it while pretending they’re real live ducks.

  The door to the Mindondos’ lot is very fine, made of ebony wood, with a little hole you can open and shut so you can get a look at someone before opening up. They know some people are just greedy so-and-sos who’ll claim they simply happened to be passing and wanted to say hi to the children. They’re just opportunists, who don’t realise that black capitalists carefully count the number of mouths to be fed. If you turn up at their house they get all anxious about how long you’re going to stay, in case there are too many mouths at the meal table. This is why Monsieur Mindondo leaves magazines in the living room for visitors to read and look at the nice photos, while he and his family are eating.

  Monsieur Mindondo is a member of the Congolese Party of Labour. He studied in the USSR for five years. He wanted to bring back a wife from there, but his parents threatened him:

  ‘If you get yourself a white wife we’ll put a curse on you; you’ll never have children with her, or you’ll have children with snouts and boars’ feet! We’ll choose for you, from the Kamba people, a nice round, short woman, not one of those tall thin white women who look like they eat nothing but macaroni!’

  The wife they found for him is round and short, that’s Madame Léopoldine Mindondo. She never says hi to the local mamas, and avoids them by doing her shopping at Printania with the whites and other black capitalists.

  I know all the Mindondo children by name; they’re the only family in Pointe-Noire with such grand names. The big brother is called Thomas Aquinas Mindondo, then there are three other boys: Dionysus Mindondo, Olympus Mindondo and Poseidon Mindondo. They only have one daughter, Artemis Mindondo, but she’s still crawling around on all fours.

  The big brother, Thomas Aquinas Mindondo, is fourteen, but he doesn’t go to our school, the Three-Glorious-Days, he goes to the French school, Charlemagne, with the children of the whites and the black capitalists who come to our neighbourhood whenever Monsieur Mindondo celebrates one of his children’s birthdays.