by Ondjaki
“Tell Bruno . . .” Teacher María said through her thick tears, “that even though he lacks discipline, he’s a good boy. . . .”
We left, and they came to the window to wave farewell. Bruno waved goodbye from down below; so did Romina, even though she was wiping her cheeks.
“Very good, Cláudio,” Petra said. “I was very impressed by your gesture. . . . Congratulations!”
“Hmmm. You’re gonna be really impressed by the new watch my dad’s gonna give me on Friday!”
Bruno was walking in silence. I thought he was sad. He was the worst troublemaker in Comrade Teacher María’s classes but, in spite of that, I always figured they liked each other.
“Are you sad, Bruno?” Romina seemed to enjoy asking the question.
“No. . . . Why?”
“You didn’t even say goodbye to Teacher María.” I approached him.
“Oh, didn’t you guys notice?!” He started laughing.
“Notice what?”
“How was I supposed to kiss her on the cheek when she had tons of snot pouring out of her nose?”
The sky remained dark, ashen, as though night wished to come before its time.
Again we said goodbye.
Again that vision of each of us going our own way.
Up above, in the window, Teacher Ángel had his hand on Teacher María’s shoulder, and was kissing her on the cheek to stop her from crying so much.
A solitary drop of rain fell on my head during that last time that we saw those comrade Cuban teachers.
it was the water that brought that smell that rose from the earth after the rain, the water that made new things grow on earth.
The quality of light that I could see through the window of my room told me right away that it was going to be a grey morning. The studio art test was today and our classroom would be dark because the lamps were all broken. I just hoped that, if it started to rain, it didn’t pour down onto my sketch pad.
We ate breakfast slowly. The exam started later that day because there was just the one, and it was the last one. The avocado tree stood almost motionless. I was afraid my father would say: “So? It isn’t stretching itself today?” What could I say? Maybe the tree was still asleep, or maybe it felt cold, or perhaps the ashen sky had said something to the avocado tree that we didn’t know how to hear, and that was why it was sad.
“Hell . . .” My father looked at his watch. “Comrade António’s really on the hook today.” This, in fishermen’s jargon, meant that he’d slept in.
“Hmm. . . . I don’t think so, Dad. He must be out there sitting in the garden. . . .”
The test went very well for me. The classroom was a bit dark and, in spite of the cloud-laden sky, the rain didn’t fall. The studio art test was perfect for the final day because it allowed us to take advantage of all the leftover material – compasses, gouache, India ink, markers, felt-tipped pens, even plasticine – to make the last inscriptions of the year on the desks, the wall and the classroom door.
In the test we’d been asked to make a drawing of our choice, using certain prescribed techniques. We took advantage of the opportunity. It was striking; I’d noticed in all the studio art tests since grade four that everybody drew things that were connected to the war: three people had drawn AK-47s, two had drawn Soviet tanks, others Makarovs, and the girls drew things like women washing clothes in the river, or an aerial view of the Roque Santeiro Market, the Marginal at night or the hill where the fortress stood.
It was normal to draw weapons. Everybody had pistols at home, or even AK-47s, or if they didn’t, they had an uncle who had one, or who was a soldier and showed them how the weapon worked. Cláudio even said one day that he knew how to assemble and dismantle a Makarov; his uncle had shown him how. But everybody thought this was a fib. Filomeno’s drawing was very pretty. He’d even worked in the gleam that lingers after you’ve cleaned the AK-47’s barrel, and at the side he’d drawn one of those magazines that looks like a double magazine and which the FAPLAs stand up back-to-back so that when they want to change magazines they just have to turn them around.
The subject of war, of weapons, arose, too, because everybody had already seen, and some had already fired, pistols. We talked heatedly at recess about this. There were people who’d heard bush-rumours about the battles in Kuando Kubango province, stories about how tough the South Africans were, but how they were scared shitless of the Cubans, che. When they heard that the Cubans were moving into an area, it was as if they’d seen a ghost. Everybody, elders or not, said that the Cubans were very good soldiers, brave, well organized, disciplined, good friends. The only problem was that they couldn’t say Kifangondo8, they always said: “Kifangondo-ete!”
War always appeared, too, in our compositions. Any student who was assigned a free composition would talk about the war; he would exaggerate; he would tell a story about his uncle, or he would say that his cousin was a commando, che, a tough guy, a ballbreaker, don’t mess around with him. War appeared in our drawings (the AK-47s, the cannons we called “Monacaxito”), it came up in conversation (“It’s true, I’m tellin’ you! . . .”), it appeared on the murals (drawings in the army hospital), it was part of our put-downs (“Your uncle went to fight for UNITA, but he came back because he complained that his hair was full of lice . . .”), it appeared in public service announcements on TV (“Hey, Reagan – hands off Angola!”), and it even appeared in our dreams (“Shoot Murtala, fuck it, shoot!”). War even got into the mouths of crazy homeless people, like that nutcase who called himself Sonangol, after the oil company, because he always lathered himself with oil. You only had to look at his red mouth and his white eyes. He always said: “War’s a sickness . . . Now I wanna know where yous are gonna get a pill for it . . . I’m warnin’ yous, if yous catch war, every day you’re gonna die a little bit, maybe it goes slow at first, but yous are gonna drop. . . . War’s what makes a country itchy . . . Yous scratch and scratch and then the blood starts comin’ out . . . War’s when yous stop scratchin’ but the blood keeps pourin’. . . .”
And he laughed, like that, with the oil running down his body. Petra said that maybe that oil running down him was his soul. What do I know.
I left the classroom, looked up at the sky. It was such an enormous place. The sky wasn’t blue-een; it was more darkish, the colour of cement that’s already a bit old.
“Don’t you want to write your name?” Romina had come up to me.
“Eh?” I said, distracted.
“Aren’t you going to write your name on the door?”
“Yeah, in a minute.”
“You’re already thinking about the farewells, eh?”
“No, actually I’m not.”
“Hmm . . .” She looked at me.
“But it’s the last time we’re going to write on that door, that’s true . . .”
We went over to where the others were. Some people were painting symbols on the classroom door; others were trying to draw their own faces. Filomeno was carefully drawing the Empty Crate car, the comrade principal at the entrance of the school and the students all shouting: “Welcome, Comrade Surprise-Inspector!”
From there we went to the area behind the classrooms, where it really stank of piss. We pulled all our books and notebooks out of our backpacks. I’d brought all my notes except the ones for Portuguese Language, which contained compositions that I liked. Cláudio took out his books; Helder and Bruno as well. We put them all together and lighted the fire.
Petra was terrified. There could be a maka if they caught us. But we made a point of lighting the fire right in the schoolyard. Bruno even joked: “The children around the fire. . . .”
The fire got bigger, the flames grew bolder, and we edged away.
“Hey,” Murtala said. “Let the fire breathe!”
And the fire breathed, yes, free, yellow, absolutely enormous. That rush of heat felt really good; there was an unpleasant wind. On the other side of the flame, images looked like they were melting:
I saw Bruno’s face, his unkempt hair; I saw Romina’s face, her curly hair; I saw Murtala’s face, his eyes wide open.
“Well . . .” I looked at them. “I’m off.”
“You’re going already?” Cláudio said.
“Yeah, I’m splitting.”
“I’m taking off, too,” Bruno said.
Before we had time to say a word, Bruno picked up his backpack and put it on. He started away with his quick walk, restless. When Ró and I went to take a good look at him, he was already far away, next to the front gate.
“Brunoooo . . . ,” I called. I waited to see if he was going to look.
“He’s not going to look,” Ró whispered to me.
He’s going to look, I thought to myself.
Far away, next to the gate, Bruno lifted his hand and waved farewell. I never did see whether by moving his head just a little he was looking back or not. “Brunoooo. . . .”
“Till next year, Ró,” I said.
“Till next year,” she said.
“Ró. . . .”
“Yes.”
“If you don’t come back next year. . . . write to me and tell me where you are,” I said.
“Fine.” She looked at me, nodding her head with her eyes and with the curls in her hair. “Fine.”
I went through Heroines’ Square. I passed the National Radio station and stopped there, on the spot where, on the day of Empty Crate, Romina and I had stopped running. I remembered the comrade English teacher, her leaps, her speed, her technique for jumping over a wall without touching it. I passed Kalí’s house and continued down the hill.
When I reached my house, the interior door of the front gate was open.
On the balcony, I saw my mother speaking to a woman with a black scarf on her head. I dragged my feet from the gate to the stairs: I opened the mailbox, where there was never any mail; I stood up two gas containers that were lying on their sides; I lifted a snail off the path and set it down in the grass; I cleaned my feet carefully on the mat before treading on the first step; all this just to catch a tiny little bit of their conversation. It was no use! They were speaking too quietly.
I greeted them with a, “Good afternoon,” and then I saw the woman’s face: it was Comrade António’s wife. My mother waved me inside so I only had time to see that the woman’s left hand was wrapped in a white cloth, and that my mother’s eyes were very red.
The hall leading to the kitchen was full of silence: I didn’t hear the pressure cooker, I didn’t hear the comrade announcer speaking on Comrade António’s radio, I didn’t hear the noise of cups or cutlery, the table wasn’t set, I didn’t hear footsteps and, when I reached the kitchen, I saw no one. No one.
I realized immediately that Comrade António hadn’t come. When he was absent someone from his house always came to let us know, but it was never his wife. It was always a son or daughter, and sometimes they came wearing a hat or a head scarf, but that scarf was never black. And when somebody came to warn that Comrade António couldn’t come, in spite of having to whip up food for us on short notice, my mother didn’t have bloodshot eyes.
I opened the kitchen door and sat down on the step.
I couldn’t see the avocado tree from there, but I could hear the sound of the leaves shaking in the wind. The sky was very dark and if that wind was coming from the north, we were going to have a storm. My grandfather always used to say: “The worst wind comes from the north!”
“Let’s eat. . . .”
My sisters had arrived.
The girls had moved quickly. They’d already set the table, and my older sister had even put together a tuna salad with canned peas and yesterday’s Angolan black beans.
“Comrade António died this morning . . .”
But after that my mother couldn’t say anything more.
It was very silent around the table, but out in the streets we heard shouting and gunshots fired in celebration. When we turned on the radio I finally understood: they were saying that the war was over, that the comrade president was going to have a meeting with Savimbi, that we weren’t going to be a single-party state. They were even talking about elections.
I tried to ask: “But how can there be elections if in Angola there’s only one party and one president – ”
But they told me to be quiet and listen to the rest of the news. Then they told me to go to the kitchen to look for the oil, the vinegar and the red jindungo peppers. I tried hard not to cry. I pretended that Comrade António was there next to the stove.
“Comrade António, pass me the jindungo peppers, please. . . .” As he didn’t reply, I said: “You see, António, now we’re going to have elections here in Angola! I bet there weren’t any elections when the Portuguese were here!”
But he didn’t say a thing.
After lunch I went to lie down in the long green chair in the garden. It was a little windy, which was good because it meant I could doze off quickly to the sound of the rustling of the avocado tree’s leaves.
On days when the sky wasn’t so dark I liked to imitate the slugs in the garden and lie out in the sun. Over in the kitchen Comrade António made a lot of noise with the plates and glasses; it always took him forever to do the washing up. This was the sound to which I was used to dozing off. “Wake up, son. . . . It’s bad for you to lie with your head in the sun. . . . Your mother’s going to give you a talking-to,” he liked to say.
“But has it really been so long, António? . . . I only slept a little bit,” I’d reply.
“Hey, son! It’s been more than twenty minutes. . . .”
I woke with the raindrops smacking my legs and cheeks. Suddenly a powerful downpour began to fall. I slipped under the roof of the shed and stayed there watching the rain. I thought immediately of Murtala: in his house only seven people could sleep at a time when it was raining; the other five had to stand up against the wall where there was a little jut of roofing that protected them. Later it was the others’ turn to sleep. I swear that’s how they did it; no more than seven each time. Each time it rained overnight, Murtala slept through the first three classes the next morning.
Looking at all that water, I remembered the compositions we wrote about the rain, the soil, the importance of water. A comrade teacher who was sure she was a poet used to say that it was the water that brought that smell that rose from the earth after the rain, the water that made new things grow in the earth. However, it also nourished the earth’s roots; it made “a new cycle burst into life.” In the end, what she meant was that, thanks to the water, new leaves sprang from the soil. Then I thought: “Hey. . . . What if it’s raining all over Angola?” Then I smiled. I just smiled.
AFTERWORD
In May 2000, an African writer in his early twenties, who had published one book of poems, had a conversation with Jacques dos Santos, editorial director of the Angolan publishing house Chá de Caxinde. Dos Santos was seeking manuscripts for a potential series of books that would evoke themes related to Angola’s tardy and troubled arrival at independence. He asked the young writer, Ondjaki, whether he had a manuscript that might fill the bill. “I didn’t have anything,” Ondjaki recalls. “But I lied and said yes. . . . He asked me when I could submit the manuscript to him and I told him in two months’ time.” At the time, Ondjaki was studying for a university degree in sociology in Lisbon, Portugal. In spite of his academic commitments, he completed his first novel in two months of concentrated activity. Bom dia camaradas was published in the original Portuguese in Angola in 2001, in Portugal in 2003 and in Brazil in 2006; it has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and now, as Good Morning Comrades, into English. Few novels offer such a sensitive, original and human account of the end of the Cold War as seen from an underdeveloped country.
For Ondjaki, Good Morning Comrades proved to be the first milestone in a prolific creative career. He continues to live in Luanda, writes fiction and poetry, and maintains his interest in theatre, filmmaking and visual art. Ondjaki’s second novel, the magi
cal realist fable O Assobiador (2002), has been published in English by Aflame Books in the United Kingdom as The Whistler (2008). His most innovative novel, Quantas madrugadas tem a noite (literally, “How Many Dawns Has the Night”), published in 2004, consolidated his literary reputation in the Portuguese-speaking world. Ondjaki’s most recent book, Os da minha rua, (“The People from My Street”), published in 2007, marks a return to the urban Luanda neighbourhoods of his childhood. The title echoes the title of Nós, os do Makulusu (“We, the People from the Makulusu District”), the seminal novel of the reclusive Angolan experimental writer, José Luandino Vieira, whose influence on Ondjaki’s prose is at its most pronounced in Quantas madrugadas tem a noite.
If the characters and action in Good Morning Comrades feel vivid and immediate, it may be in part because most are drawn from life. Ondjaki, who already has nine books to his credit, admits that this is his most autobiographical work. “Everything in Good Morning Comrades, all of the people, all of the situations, come from life. The only part that isn’t very true to life is the sequence of events.” The author’s rearrangement of his memories to create an artistic effect evokes the urban Angola of his adolescence: “I tried to bring to life the Luanda of the 1980s, which wasn’t very present in literature. . . . I tried to speak of the Cuban presence here, which had not been worked through in Angolan fiction.” Between 1975 and 1991, more than 400,000 Cubans served in Angola as soldiers, doctors and teachers. For Angolans of the generation of Ondjaki, and his narrator, Ndalu, born in the years following independence in 1975, Cubans were selfless, strange, naive, and known to be ferocious fighters. They were valued accomplices in bringing Angola to full nationhood after nearly five centuries of Portuguese colonialism.
Angola’s colonial experience was among the world’s longest. The first Portuguese explorers reached the southern part of the Congo region in 1482. Angola soon developed into a coveted source of slaves for Portugal’s most prized colony, Brazil. Until the early 20th century, relatively few Europeans settled in the colony. Between the 16th and the late 19th centuries the slave trade, and most other business, was managed by the outward-looking commercial classes of the country’s coastal areas. Dominant among this group were people known as Creoles: Africans, many of them with European surnames and some distant European ancestry as a result of marriage alliances made with Portuguese or Dutch traders, who had adopted a Catholic, Portuguese-speaking culture and, in most cases, no longer spoke African languages. In the late 19th century, as Portuguese immigration into Angola increased, the Portuguese government made its first efforts to separate the races in what had been a society of vigorous racial and cultural mixing. Under the fascist-influenced dictator António Salazar, who ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1968, a “New State” was implemented, which raised barriers between the races and accelerated Portuguese immigration into the colony. The New State’s trampling of the Creole and mestiço (mixed race) middle and upper classes in order to create greater economic opportunities for poorly educated immigrants from rural Portugal, pushed tensions in the colony to breaking point. Protests were greeted with brutal oppression, and in 1961 guerrilla warfare broke out. By the time that Marcelo Caetano, Salazar’s successor, was driven from office by a left-wing military coup in Portugal on April 25, 1974, three different guerrilla movements were fighting against the Portuguese government in Angola. None of these movements, however, succeeded in inflicting military defeat on the Portuguese army. In contrast to events in the Portuguese African colony of Guinea Bissau, for example, where independence was declared before the military coup in Lisbon, the guerrillas in Angola were denied the defining moment of a military victory over the colonizers. As a result, when the last Portuguese proconsul to Luanda slipped away under cover of night on November 10, 1975, the three insurgent groups were left to compete for power. The most politically conservative of the three movements, Holden Roberto’s Angolan National Liberation Front (FNLA, in Portuguese), which received substantial support from Western powers by way of Zaire, was also the weakest in military terms, and was soon eliminated. The Marxist MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola), whose support was strongest in the culturally Creolized coastal regions, extended its power from Luanda into much of the rest of the country. Jonas Savimbi, the unpredictable, often egomaniacal leader of UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), enjoyed the support of the Ovimbundu people of the central highlands, Angola’s most numerous ethnic group. Savimbi’s foreign alliances included, at different times, representatives of almost every known ideological tendency. Originally Maoist in orientation and backed by Beijing, the Swiss-educated, Chinese-trained Savimbi later became a proxy of apartheid South Africa, Ronald Reagan’s White House and, in the post-Cold War era, of Ukrainian arms dealers and international diamond smugglers.
