Comrade President Marien Ngouabi had met our sisters and brothers in North Korea and the president of North Korea, one Comrade Kim Il-Sung, gave him a fine medal because the leader of our revolution agreed with him that they should stop having two countries in Korea, one in the north and one in the south, like when people wanted to divide Nigeria with the Biafra business.
Since our leader of the Congolese Socialist Revolution was already on his travels, he thought he might as well go and say hi to Comrade Leonid Ilich Brezhnev in the USSR, the country where the white cranes flying above people’s heads aren’t actually real birds, but Soviet soldiers who’ve died on blood-soaked battlefields. Comrade President Marien Ngouabi felt really at home with the Soviets. A lot of Congolese study over there, and join the Congolese Party of Labour when they come home. Another thing is, it’s apparently quite easy to get a Russian woman to marry you, they don’t mind if you ask them to marry you, even if you warn them that they’re not going to be trafficked, that they’ll have to go and fetch water from the river like Congolese women, and eat manioc, foufou or peanut butter with smoked fish with their fingers. They come without a second thought; they can live in our villages and they’ll always be happy, as though they didn’t really love their own country because of the snow which means you can’t see how beautiful they are because their big coats hide the lovely things they’ve got at the front and at the back, which I won’t describe in detail here or people will only say oh that Michel, he always exaggerates, and sometimes he says rude things without meaning to. The Congolese who’ve been to the USSR say that when Soviet women take off their coats you can immediately see that they’re the most beautiful women in Europe, even if, sadly, they don’t speak French …
Comrade President Marien Ngouabi went to see Comrade President Fidel Castro in Cuba, and together they criticised the Americans, who don’t want Cuba to develop. Now, the Cubans are our brothers, so they can come to our country whenever they like, including to train our military and help out comrades elsewhere on our continent who are fighting against the accomplices of imperialism. Here in Congo we know the Cubans well, they’re in Angola, where their mission is to wage war to protect Comrade President Agostinho Neto against the bad rebel, Jonas Savimbi, who goes round stirring up civil wars everywhere with his accomplices from Portugal, America and South Africa, as if this was still the civil war in Biafra, when anyone who looks at the photo of the two Angolans could tell you straight away that Comrade President Agostinho’s the better looking one, and also writes poems we’ve studied, whereas Jonas Savimbi has never written a poem you’d study in one of our schools. So the Cubans can be expected to give Comrade President Agostinho a bit of a hand. Besides, the Cubans that turn up in Pointe-Noire are really nice to us, drinking beer in our bars, eyeing up the girls’ behinds, then dashing off to protect the Angolan president, who is very fond of Comrade President Marien Ngouabi and must be really sad right now …
The leader of our revolution also visited African presidents. He went to have talks with Comrade President Muammar Gaddafi, hoping they’d get on well together and be able to stop our enemies getting in the way of our development because when we stand firm together imperialism can’t find a way in. So he did the same with almost all the African presidents who aim to bring development to our continent and who look after their people properly, as if they were their own children: Siad Barre of Somalia, Gaafar Nimeiry of Sudan, Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Houari Boumédiène of Algeria, Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea, Félix Malloum of Chad, Ahmadou Ahidjo of Cameroon, Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga of Zaire, Samora Machel of Mozambique, Omar Bongo of Gabon and even the president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, who had been congratulated at the start of the year by Pope Paul VI because he’d had the bright idea of organising a huge festival in his country to discuss black culture all over the world.
All this goes to show that Comrade President Marien Ngouabi was not a man to bear grudges; he loved all of Africa just as he loved our country, just as if the people in other countries were Congolese too …
The runner
Even remembering all the citizenship lessons and the names of the presidents all over the world that Comrade President Marien Ngouabi met with, I still somehow can’t get as upset as I should.
I notice a weird guy opposite our house. He’s telling off his three boys, I wouldn’t like to have a dad who acts like that. I go a bit nearer; I want to hear what he’s upset about, why he’s yelling at his poor children. He says they mustn’t play outside, they must go straight back indoors, tell their mother to close the doors and windows till the funeral for Comrade President Marien Ngouabi is over. He’s very small and is wearing wide flared trousers and three-decker Salamander shoes so people will think he’s tall, when in fact he’s not, it’s easy to see he’s no giant, when you’re a giant you’re giant all over: arms, fingers, legs, etc. Comrade President Marien Ngouabi was also very short, and wore those Salamander shoes, maybe that way he thought he wouldn’t look small next to the other presidents, like a glass placed next to a bottle of red.
The man’s still standing outside our house watching his children move off when he yells:
‘Run! Run! Run, for heaven’s sake!’
I can see them running towards Voungou Bridge Avenue, as if they were racing, and their dad was timing them all. They don’t look back, they just keep on and on running, and the smallest of the three is fastest, like a gazelle.
The three boys keep on running, harder, faster. The little man glances over at our plot and notices me, Michel, standing there by the entrance watching everything like a spy. Our eyes meet. First he’s embarrassed, then frightened, and suddenly he starts running too. But he’s making for the Tié-Tié neighbourhood, in the complete opposite direction to his boys. That seems really weird, and I think to myself: Could he be going to a different house – to his second or third or fourth wife? I turn round and see my dad wiggling the radio aerial to get a better signal. I can’t ask him if the little guy has gone to find his second or third or fourth wife or he’ll think I’m just trying to find out if he, Papa Roger, will go off to see Madame Martine, his second wife, who I really like. Madame Martine’s children are my brothers and sisters, even though I didn’t come out of her belly and I was adopted by Papa Roger before I was even a year old, and Maman Pauline had just arrived in Pointe-Noire after the man who would have been my father, the policeman who made me hate every single policeman in the whole wide world, abandoned us and ran off to Mouyondzi, in the Bouenza region. Papa Roger’s always telling me and Maman Pauline that the children he had with Maman Martine are my mother’s children too, and my brothers and sisters; that for him there is and never will be any difference between them and me, and when I go and visit Maman Martine in the Joli-Soir neighbourhood she treats me like I’ve come straight out her own belly and that she knows I love little Maximilien, it’s so sweet to see little Félicienne doing her wee-wee on me, and the way Marius chats away to me, and Mbombie respects me and sister Ginette looks out for me, and Georgette, the big sister, is a really good big sister and my big brother Yaya Gaston, who’s the big brother to everyone, always wanted Michel – that’s me – to live with him in his studio. But I’m lying here now and I always will be. I’m still here, even if I go and see my brothers and sisters sometimes …
So when I see this little guy running off in the opposite direction to his children, I can’t ask my dad:
‘Papa, do you have to go to Joli-Soir tonight and tell Maman Martine to shut up the yard and close the doors and windows tight till the funeral of Comrade President Marien Ngouabi is over?’
The Salamanders
They come, they go, arguing, gathering, no one agreeing about how Comrade Presiden
t Marien Ngouabi came to be dead. And they speak so loud it’s as though I was in there with them. There’s one who’s bald on the sides with a tuft of hair on top who’s shouting:
‘It’s a military plot, everyone knows that! It’s not rocket science, the assassins of Comrade Marien Ngouabi are from the Military Committee of the Party!’
A second man, with biceps like Hercules, replies:
‘A military plot? It’s not a military plot! Don’t you know anything about politics? Comrade President Marien Ngouabi did it himself, he was trying to work out how to use his new gun, the one the Soviets gave him last new year for his thirty-eighth birthday!’
‘Really? So why did he wait nearly three months to try it? Do people try their guns out at half two in the afternoon? Anyway, Comrade President Marien Ngouabi was at Saint-Cyr, he must have tried out every kind of gun under the sun while he was training there!’
The Herculean guy quickly slaps his hand over his mouth, realising he’s said too much in front of the half-bald guy.
‘Here we are talking like we know each other. Where are you from, then?’
‘Where am I from? You’re asking me where I come from? Any reason?’
‘No reason, just wondered who I was talking to, and …’
‘I’ll tell you where I’m from, I’m from the north, Bangaloulou, to be exact. But watch out, I’ve got friends in the south: Laris, Babemes, Vilis, Dondos, Kambas, and more besides; when my father died my own mother married a southerner who was raised by a kindly northerner who—’
‘There you go then, you’re a northerner! Don’t go trying to confuse me; I can see what you’re up to! Anyway, why am I talking with a northerner? Now I know why you don’t want to hear that the northerners killed Comrade President Marien Ngouabi, even though he was from your region and you’re trying to blame us southerners for it! We didn’t kill him, you did! It’s your corpse, you sort it out, leave us southerners alone, or there’ll be another civil war and the country will split in two, and you can carry on murdering your own brothers to get power, and we’ll just look after our oil here in Pointe-Noire all by ourselves, and sell it to the Americans and the Italians and the Spanish, but not to the French – no way!’
‘So where are you from?’
‘I’m Lari. Is that a problem?’
Our neighbourhood’s crawling with military vehicles now.
How come they’ve got themselves organised so fast? Have the military actually known the news since yesterday? Either way, they move slowly and people first look at them fearfully, then run off like chickens down little side streets or go into the nearest plot, as though the people who lived there were their own family. As soon as the trucks have gone, the chickens all come back out and start peering about them, to see which way the military went. The trucks in question are black, just the hoods are bright red like the Revolutionary flag, and you can’t even see the driver and the soldier sitting beside him, because the glass is smoked. You just imagine they can see everything, and if anyone gets up to any mischief they would straight away gun them down.
Papa Roger’s really sad, sitting there beside his radio, with his right hand clamped to his cheek, elbows on his knees. Anyone who sees him sitting like that will think Comrade President Marien Ngouabi was a member of our immediate family, maybe even his brother. So, to show him that Michel – that’s me – is feeling just as sad as him, wants to be just as sad as him, I go towards him and ask:
‘Papa, who do you think will wear Comrade President Marien Ngouabi’s Salamander shoes now he’s gone?’
The red Renault 5
I thought of nothing else all afternoon. In the end I told Papa Roger I needed to go and look for Mboua Mabé, he’d been gone over four hours.
‘Are you serious?’
‘I need to find him and—’
‘He’s only an animal, Michel!’
‘But he’s my dog, Papa, and besides—’
‘The death of the president is more important than the wayward behaviour of a duplicitous and cowardly hound! Were those great bits of pork not enough for him, then? Does he have to go eating from bins all over town into the bargain, so people think we don’t feed him properly at home?’
I don’t agree.
‘It’s the radio’s fault.’
‘How come?’
‘If we’d switched it off when Maman Pauline wanted we’d have had a proper meal. Mboua Mabé never eats from the bins in Pointe-Noire, I told him not to …’
I continue to defend the dog; I tell my dad that just because Mboua Mabé wasn’t lucky enough to be born human doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about him. I want to know why he was trembling, why he ran off as if the devil was coming straight out of the Germans’ Grundig just to scare him, because he knows who the assassins of Comrade President Marien Ngouabi are. I had promised to protect Mboua Mabé, and he had promised to protect our lot, and us with it. Now if he’s gone, the bad men who killed Comrade President Marien Ngouabi will come into our lot and steal first our Grundig then our table, then our chairs, then our stools, then our beds, not to mention the big five thousand franc notes the whites give my father at the Victory Palace Hotel, that are never crumpled, they look like they’ve been washed and ironed to get them so clean and flat.
Papa Roger listens to me, thinking all the while, with a little smile, while I can’t see myself what’s so funny about what I’ve said, it’s very serious.
I quickly check my shirt’s not on back to front. I do up all the buttons, because it’s just begun to feel a bit cooler, with the sun moving over towards the Côte Sauvage, to go and light up lands afar.
I take a step towards the exit of the lot.
I take a second step, then a third, and it’s at that moment that Papa Roger grabs me by my shirt:
‘No, Michel, you’re not going anywhere. It will soon be seven o’clock; the patrols of the National Popular Army are everywhere, making sure people respect the curfew. And the curfew also applies to teenagers like you …
It’s not the first time I’ve heard this weird word ‘curfew’. Usually when they talk on the radio about war in Africa, or elsewhere, it crops up at least ten times, along with others like ‘ceasefire’, ‘open fire’, ‘bloody havoc’, ‘pools of blood’, etc. And it’s because of the curfew that we’re not allowed to stay out at night till the early hours of the morning. The enemies of the Socialist Revolution hide out among the regular population, then after dark they make all these plans to cause trouble in a country that’s never done them the slightest harm. He even tells me the wicked plotters may well come causing trouble here in Pointe-Noire because whenever there’s some kind of problem over in Brazzaville, where they talk politics from dawn till dusk, it’s always to do with oil.
‘And where is our oil to be found, Michel?’
‘Here in Pointe-Noire …’
‘There you go. Now you get the picture!’
On the other hand I think to myself: Why would they come and stir things up here when it will only be a waste of oil if they start falling over themselves to fight each other like the Nigerians with their war in Biafra, which actually wasn’t just a little bust-up with some prostitutes?
‘You don’t leave this spot, Michel. Mboua Mabé is acting like a local lackey of Imperialism. I never liked that dog! If a mutt refuses real food because someone killed the president you can be sure he’s got something on his conscience …’
No, I can’t just abandon Mboua Mabé to his fate, all alone in this town of leaderless madmen, because he’ll get run over by a car and his body will be left in the street and get eaten by flies, wasps, snakes and other beasts placed on this earth to be a nuisance to us, when they could just go and create their own country.
No, Mboua Mabé is not a mutt. I don’t like that word; it makes my dog sound worthless, just like all the other dogs with no master.
No, Mboua Mabé is no hypocrite, whatever Papa Roger thinks. Hypocrites are weird people who hide their intentions a
nd then try to harm you when you’re least expecting it. This is Michel telling you, I know exactly what’s in that dog’s mind, he tells me everything. He always asks me if he can do this, or do that, if he wants to scratch or go and take a rest under the mango tree and he knows if he hasn’t got my permission I’ll be cross with him.
No, Mboua Mabé does not have rabies. True, he’s so thin that even the fleas can’t find anywhere to get their teeth into him. But I’m thin too. Does that mean I’ve got rabies?
Just because Mboua Mabé can’t talk back in French or in one of our ethnic languages, we shouldn’t go blaming him for everything like he was the scapegoat mentioned by Father Weyler at Saint-Jean-Bosco’s, not far from the house of the parents of my friends Paul and Placide Moubembé, who I play football with at the Tata-Louboko stadium. Anyway, Mboua Mabé has proved his intelligence to me by being the only animal in the entire town to be sad, even before I was, when they announced the news of the death of Comrade President Marien Ngouabi on the Voice of the Congolese Revolution. Would any other dog in the world turn their back on a dish of pork with plantains because of something bad they heard on the radio that took place over five hundred kilometres from where he’s eating?
Also, I feel less alone with him; he’s my brother and my sister too. The reason I’m feeling sad right now, it’s not because of Comrade President Marien Ngouabi, it’s because of Mboua Mabé. I’m not going to listen to Papa Roger, I’m going to wait till he’s thinking of something else then I’ll run off and find my dog. For now I just act like I agree with him.
My father still hasn’t budged from the mango tree. Now and then he glances over at me – he knows I’m stubborn.
Maman Pauline’s making some more food for us, but before she went back into the kitchen she muttered:
The Death of Comrade President Page 5
