The Death of Comrade President

by Alain Mabanckou

  But I don’t. If Papa Roger knows the answers to these questions, he’ll tell me. That’s what he always does if there’s something serious on the news, in our country or in the world in general. In any case, we weren’t likely to hear, as Brazzaville is over five hundred kilometres from Pointe-Noire, where we are; even if you took the Micheline it would take three whole days. So, for me this story about the firing of shots that hasn’t even been reported by our radio station yet could just be some piece of provocation by white and black imperialists, trying to upset our country and the Congolese Socialist Revolution. I want to tell Papa Roger he’s wrong to take this news item so seriously, he’s heard worse things than that before without getting all upset, and managed to carry on eating his pangolin meat and drinking his red wine and stuffing his nostrils with the tobacco that always makes him sneeze.

  I’m not worried; I know our best soldiers are all in Brazzaville. Their job is to train morning, noon and night to intimidate Zaire, i.e. the former Belgian Congo, who long to wage war on us, create chaos in our country and then steal our oil by night, while we’re asleep. Also, when you’re a really small country like the Congo, if you make loads of noise by firing shots, countries like Zaire piss in their pants and think there are lots of us, that we’re hiding in the River Congo and we’ll leap out at the crucial moment and attack them, like in the war films they show in our cinemas in Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville.

  The Zairian military never train at all, and they still think they’re the biggest shots in the whole of Africa. They just sit around in their barracks watching The Longest Day and think they’ll be able to fight in the water like the Americans. I’ve already seen The Longest Day four or five times at the Rex, it’s the only film that’s shown right through from Monday to Sunday. As soon as the idiots from the Rex or the Trois-Cents rip down the poster for the film and put it up at home, the cinema owner puts another one up and writes underneath in red pen: It is forbidden to steal the poster for The Longest Day. Fines will be imposed. They do the same thing on the walls in the rich neighbourhoods, they write, No litter tipping. Fines will be imposed, but it doesn’t stop people from leaving their manioc leaves or their rotten food in the street, around midnight, when there’s no one there to see.

  So, these Zairians who want to attack us have got it wrong: the Congo River is different, the Americans can’t come to their aid with all their heavy artillery, because there’s no beach here, it would be even harder for the Americans because of the dangerous beasts in the water, not to mention Mokélé-Mbembé, the monster that terrifies the Pygmies in the north, even if no one’s ever actually seen it …

  Papa Roger and I are listening carefully to what they’re saying on Voice of America. The names of the American president, Jimmy and Carter, are like names anyone might have, they’ve got a good ring to them. Jimmy Carter isn’t talking about the war that may break out between us and Zaire, he’s got something more serious to discuss: he’s really angry with that other lot of troublemakers, the Israelis and Palestinians. Instead of getting along nicely they just squabble the whole time, as if they had nothing more important to do. Jessica Cooper, the American journalist, is in a really bad mood too, even worse than Jimmy Carter. She says it just can’t go on, we need to give the poor Palestinians a plot of land, or how are they going to feel proud and go round shouting that they exist, if they don’t have a country like all the rest of the world?

  They’ve stopped talking about the shooting in Brazzaville now, it was just a flash, and Jessica Cooper says they’ll give more information once the journalists they’ve sent from Kinshasa to Brazzaville know more.

  They’ve stopped talking about arguments between Israelis and Palestinians, they’re talking about the St Etienne football team, which Papa Roger supports, and who are top of the French league table. They’ve lost to Liverpool, who are top of the English league table, and my father is not happy to hear this:

  ‘Anyway, who cares about the English? The Swiss will win in the end; they’ve got more than enough money to bribe the referees, even the honest ones.’

  He takes a couple of swigs of his red wine, and turns the dial on the radio to the Voice of the Congolese Revolution.

  ‘Good God, when are these good-for-nothing Congolese journalists going to tell us what’s happening? You’d think they’d have had enough of this Soviet music they’ve been bombarding us with since yesterday!

  The talking tree

  That’s the third time Maman Pauline’s asked us to switch off the radio because it’s time to sit down to eat. She says it’s not good to eat while you’re listening to Soviet music, you won’t appreciate the flavour of the food. Also, if you’re at table it’s better not to know what’s going on in the world, that way if you hear bad news it will be too late, you’ll already have eaten and belched.

  My father and I don’t budge, even though Maman Pauline’s calling, we stay put under the old mango tree, which is one of our three fruit trees, along with the papaya and the orange tree outside the kitchen. Maman Pauline planted this tree when she bought the land; she likes to tell you how she brought the seed directly from her native village, because the best mango trees in the whole country grow there, and not in Pointe-Noire, where the mangoes look beautiful on the outside but are rotten on the inside. Besides, the mangoes from here are not as sweet as the ones from Louboulou, even the flies know that, they leave them alone.

  This tree is a kind of second school for me, and sometimes my father jokingly calls it the ‘talking tree’. This is where he always comes to listen to the radio when he gets home from the Victory Palace Hotel. His work is very tiring, so at the weekends he rests here, from morning till sundown, just sitting in his cane chair, with the radio right up close. He could go and lie in his bed and take it easy, but the trouble is, the aerial doesn’t really work inside the house, it’s like you can hear the sound of popcorn bursting in boiling oil coming from inside the Grundig. Also, it’s often just when the news is really important that the voices get all jumbled up and in the end the transistor tells stories that are just not true. A radio should never lie, especially if it was really expensive, and the batteries are still new, because my father sends me to buy them at Nanga Def’s, the West African seller with a shop two minutes on foot from Ma Moubobi’s.

  I’m serious about this thing with a school under the mango tree. For example, this is where my father told me lots of secrets about the war in Biafra, because the Voice of the Congolese Revolution was always talking about it. Our radio informed us that Olusegun Obasanjo, the President of Nigeria, where the war took place, had been congratulated that year by Pope Paul VI for organising a huge meeting of blacks from all over the world. Our journalists, who wanted to be in the good books of the government and Comrade President Marien Ngouabi, started off saying it was a scandal, shouldn’t they be congratulating our leader of the Revolution, who’d been working 24/7 to develop our country? They criticised President Olusegen Obasanjo, saying he never wore a collar and tie, he never smiled, he was a disgrace to our continent, and anyway, their war in Biafra was just a war between prostitutes about who was in charge of the streets in Lagos.

  ‘Michel,’ my father said, ‘don’t listen to them! Over two million people have died in two and a half years in this war!’

  Papa Roger added that the Nigerians were all killing each other in a real civil war, because some people had decided they were going to create their own separate country, the Biafran Republic, alongside the normal country, even though this one had been clearly drawn up by the whites in geography books. Again according to Papa Roger, the government of Nigeria was opposed to splitting up the territory because otherwise people would wake up the next day with two enemy countries at war all day long. The government had closed the borders. But if you close the borders with a great big padlock, if people can’t come and go as they please any more, how do you get food in? Which is how famine came to Nigeria, with not a single bunch of bananas left to feed people’s
hunger. Papa Roger had told me quietly – because it was an important secret that he’d heard from the whites at the Victory Palace Hotel – that the French had joined in the war, even though they didn’t even colonise Nigeria like they did us. Their president back then, General de Gaulle, had sent a man they called the ‘white sorcerer’. This man, whose real name I’ve now forgotten, was someone who never said very much, and who knows so many secrets about our continent that you wonder who the traitors were who gave him the information and how much he paid them for it. Most black presidents have to talk with the ‘white sorcerer’ to keep France happy. This is the man who decides who will be the president of the Republic of such and such a country that the French have colonised. And if one of these presidents that the French have put in power criticises the French too loudly at the UN, where they sort out rows between countries that are cross with each other, ‘the white sorcerer’ gets annoyed and the next day the jumped-up African is no longer president of the Republic, he’ll be put in jail, if they haven’t already killed him in a coup d’état secretly cooked up in France with other Africans who don’t understand they’re providing a rod for their own backs and continue to have their riches stolen at midnight when people are in bed dreaming about more important things than oil, which is the cause of so many of our problems.

  ‘So what I’m saying, Michel, is that France has poured a lot of money into this civil war. Both sides in the conflict, the official government and those in favour of dividing the country, asked France for help. And the French chose to support the divisionists and their Biafran Republic. Does that seem right to you?’

  Since he’d told me that the French were happy for Nigeria to be split in two, I said to Papa Roger that it was wrong for one country to get involved in another country’s fights – if people get into fights and I don’t know why they’re beating each other up I just walk straight on by and don’t look back; I’m only going to fight if I’m provoked or if there’s no escape because there’s no short cut or the people after me have already caught up with me.

  Papa Roger smiled and replied that since the French supported the creation of the Republic of Biafra-next-door, they’d employed mercenaries, who are bandits that get paid to cause turmoil in a country they don’t even know. One of these mercenaries – this is a name I do remember – was Bob Denard. He’s a real specialist in turmoil; before he popped up in the mess in Nigeria he’d been stirring up trouble for the people in Algeria, who were fighting to get their country back from the French. So this Bob Denard’s name in French is actually Robert, but Bob sounds scarier for a mercenary. Anyway, Papa Roger didn’t like this guy having the name ‘Robert’ because, he said, the little brother of some American president was also called Robert, although the American Robert had not been making trouble for the people bravely fighting in Algeria to get their country back from the French. When Papa Roger showed me a photo of the American Robert in the newspaper I was shocked: he was young and handsome. But even though he was young and handsome, the Americans assassinated him when he too could have become president of the United States like his big brother, who’d been shot in a car next to his wife, like in a film.

  ‘Michel, you’re dreaming again!’

  Papa Roger gives me a shove with his elbow and interrupts me just as I’m sitting happily there under the mango tree with him, thinking my thoughts. He gives a nod and I turn round: Maman Pauline’s heading towards us, like an enraged bull.

  ‘Do I have to tell you twenty times to come and eat, instead of sitting around listening to lousy music? Well, you can just eat the radio today! Bon appétit!’

  I don’t want to eat the Grundig or the Soviet music inside it. I want to eat what she’s prepared, especially as she announced yesterday that she was going to cook something special for me because she was proud of the good marks I’d got in my second term at middle school.

  Papa Roger tries to calm her down.

  ‘We’re coming, Pauline, just give us a few more seconds …’

  She zooms back into the house. First we hear the sound of her opening the old cupboard, then of plates smashing on the floor.

  ‘What on earth is your mother doing?’ Papa Roger says.

  ‘I think she’s punishing the plates instead of punishing us …’

  Mboua Mabé

  Maman Pauline comes back towards us. She’s carrying a large cooking pot, and her face is even more furious than before, as if we were her enemies in the war in Biafra.

  She chucks the whole dish of pork and plantains on the ground, then runs to the front of the plot and shouts:

  ‘Mboua Mabé! Mboua Mabé! Mboua Mabé!’

  Mboua Mabé is our dog. He’s so thin, you can easily count all his ribs and wonder if he’s got another scrap of flesh hiding anywhere else. We bought him three years ago, he was one of those abandoned dogs that people catch in the neighbourhoods and sell at the Grand Marché. Mboua Mabé just kept fixing me with his huge black eyes like he was trying to tell me he was unhappy, and I said to Papa Roger:

  ‘Let’s buy that dog, he looks so unhappy …’

  Papa Roger disagreed.

  ‘No, he’s a problem dog! He’ll do nothing but eat, and he won’t even guard the house! Look at him, he’s a hypocrite, an enemy of the Congolese Socialist Revolution!’

  ‘He’ll guard the house, he won’t eat a lot and—’

  ‘Really? How do you make that out?’

  ‘I just feel it, when he looks at me …’

  He burst out laughing; maybe that was when he decided to listen to me.

  ‘I hope you won’t regret it!’

  I told my father straight away I was going to call him ‘Mboua Mabé’, which is Lingala for ‘bad dog’.

  ‘Honestly! Does a dog need to be told he’s a bad dog?’

  I thought Mboua Mabé would put on a bit of weight, but in fact he stayed exactly the same, Téké dogs never gain weight.

  Mboua Mabé is very polite, he never goes for the bitches that make eyes at him, lying down with their legs spread wide, to get him to do things that I won’t go into here or people will say Michel always exaggerates and sometimes he says rude things without meaning to. Whenever I come across a dog in our neighbourhood doing the thing with a female dog, I always feel sorry for them both, two animals stuck together like that, while people throw stones at them, to force them apart, when actually it’s just nature taking its course. Mboua Mabé, who is very intelligent, has worked out that if he does the thing with a female dog, he’ll find himself stuck to her, while passers-by abuse him with sticks and stones. So the minute he sees a female dog making eyes at him, even if she’s very beautiful, Mboua Mabé shakes his head three times to say no, and actually turns his back on her …

  So today, Mboua Mabé is the happiest dog in Pointe-Noire, he’s got the whole dish of pork and plantains to himself, while I’ve got nothing, even though I rescued him from the Grand Marché. He’s coming forward slowly now. He’s pretty suspicious, he’s hardly ever had anything but bones, he’s not a human, so he doesn’t deserve meat.

  From a distance he eyes up the meat spilled on the ground, then looks over at my father and me. We signal for him to stay, Papa Roger wags his finger to say no, and I wave my fist to say no as well. Mboua Mabé doesn’t know who to obey, he doesn’t know if he should be scared of the finger and the fist. So he turns to Maman Pauline, who smiles at him and nods kindly.

  ‘Eat that up for me, Mboua Mabé! Eat it!’

  Mboua Mabé drops his ears, wags his tail and heads towards the meal, which Papa Roger and I are eating with our eyes, imagining the pleasure we’d have had.

  First he gobbles down the plantains round the edge, saving the big bits of meat for the end. He’s excited; his tail’s wagging really fast, like a windscreen-wiper. It’s a good job Maman Pauline didn’t put any chillies in or anything could have happened.

  Just as he’s tucking into the juicy bit of meat, a violent gust of wind suddenly shakes our mango tree. The bir
ds hidden in its leaves fly off with loud squawks, as though a hunter had taken a shot at them.

  I look up: a great big cloud has appeared from nowhere and is blocking out the sun.

  The Soviet music has stopped! Yes, it’s finally stopped! Papa Roger quickly readjusts the Grundig aerial and we both draw close to the device, which has suddenly gone quiet, though the batteries are still new.

  Our heads almost knock, bending over the radio at just the same moment.

  I tell myself maybe there is no more Soviet music left for them to play on the Voice of the Congolese Revolution, the radio’s used up their entire stock.

  The Grundig crackles once, twice, three times. No, it’s someone coughing, they’re starting to read:

  People of the Congo,

  A few days ago, during a meeting to mark the celebrations of the twelfth year of the Revolutionary Union of Congolese Women, held in the Hôtel de Ville in Brazzaville, the leader of the Revolution, Comrade Marien Ngouabi, announced that sessions of the 3rd extraordinary Congress of our young and dynamic party, the Congolese Party of Labour, would take place shortly. Every Congolese man and woman knows that the 3rd extraordinary Party Congress was about to endow our country with stable revolutionary institutions, to give a fresh boost to our people’s struggle for liberation.

  Now, with its back to the wall and in its death throes, imperialism has used a suicide unit to launch a cowardly attack on the life of our dynamic leader of the Congolese Revolution, Comrade Marien Ngouabi, who died in combat with his weapon in his hand, this Friday, 18 March 1977 at 14:30 hours.

  In the light of the current situation, the Central Committee of the Congolese Party of Labour decided during a meeting today to delegate full powers to a Military Committee of the Party, composed of eleven members whose task will be to prepare a state funeral, to manage state affairs and to assure the protection and security of the people and of the Revolution, until further notice.