Black Bazaar

by Alain Mabanckou

  Sure enough, my coffee had gone cold. Mr Hippocratic noticed my attention waning, I was more interested in a girl who was sitting out on the terrace.

  “That is the drama of the African!” declared Mr Hippocratic, pointing to the girl.

  He stood up and went over to say something to her. He stayed for more than five minutes, doing all the talking.

  When he came to sit back down again, he seemed vexed.

  “Did you see what she was about to do, that halfcaste? Well, she was going to light a cigarette! I told her not to do it or else to leave the premises. I mean, who does she think she is? Right, now where was I? Ah yes, colonisation … You were beaten about a bit, but it was for your own good. At school you were banned from speaking your barbarian languages in the playground. Civilisation or barbarism, you had to choose, because black nations and culture were incompatible. You were being offered civilisation! So Jules Ferry’s free primary schooling was copper-bottomed. It marked the end of pidgin grammar, for example: ‘the banana me is eating’ was replaced with ‘da banana me eat’. Enough was enough, thanks to colonisation. Your forefathers had become Gauls too. And those Gauls made their magic potion with the help of your oil, seeing as you were stupid and gullible. So the settler took that black gold to refine it. Well, come on, wasn’t this in your own interests? And, between you and me, life working as a houseboy for a settler was better than a strange destiny as a hunter or a fetish man. The colonial town wasn’t as cruel as all that. You shouldn’t believe what your intellectuals have told you. And not only that but when you people grew old and you’d given up your children to go and fight for France in Europe, you were eligible for a medal which you received from the Cercle Commander. Do you think medals are just given out willy-nilly? It’s all positive, I’m telling you. The negroes didn’t have anything before the Whites arrived. It was empty, chaos, anarchy, nothing in Timbuktu, no Malian Empire, no soul, no culture, no Gods, no religion, no political or social structure! They had to choose for their survival: a black skin or a white mask. And the cleverest among them chose the white mask because black skin is the curse of Ham. Do you see the problem? I’m going to stop now, but you need to know that I’m not railing against you, I don’t like people who are ungrateful, I’m just saying things the way they are. Afterwards, you can take my words or toss them into the bins down in our basement where we often run into each other, it’s up to you. It was all positive, I’m telling you. From now on, since you’re going to die soon, let us bury the hatchet, come and see me if you want to discuss some of these issues before your death, but let us live in peace. I know everything about you, your woman, your child and that man who played the tom-toms. That’s not a problem, that’s life. Find yourself another woman, preferably a white one instead of clinging to your original colour …”

  He took out a note from his wallet and put it down on the table. The waiter gave him ten centimes in change, which Mr Hippocratic immediately pocketed:

  “I made it clear there would be no tip for you, so why are you standing in front of me like a moron?”

  * * *

  As we were leaving the café Mr Hippocratic said to me:

  “I remember now: the name of that African who wrote Bound To Violence is Yambo Ouologuem. You should read it, he at least was a proper gentleman. That’s why everybody ganged up against him …”

  It happened at Jip’s when the other pals hadn’t showed up yet. I wasn’t in the mood to talk because I was on my way back from Porte de la Chapelle where I’d done a Western Union to pay the maintenance allowance to the home country. I ordered a beer and a man who was sitting at the back of the bar got up and made his way over to me. He said he was Breton, that he liked Africa, that in fact all Bretons liked Africa. He was a fan of B-sides too, so we watched the girls going by and I explained to him how to tell the character of this or that girl just by watching her backside move. All of a sudden we switched topics and landed on politics instead of getting a nice eyeful, as groups of Italian and American girls passed by.

  I told him there are spies everywhere, and that’s why I hate discussing politics in a bar with people I don’t know.

  “Do I really look like a spy?”

  I looked at him closely, he was the spitting image of the Thompson Twins in Tintin. Same baldness, same moustache, same dark suit. He bought me two rounds of Pelfort.

  “I simply want to know what you Africans make of our politics and to find out how things happen where you come from.”

  I have a feeling this man will remember me for the rest of his life. I’ve never talked for as long in a bar sat opposite a stranger. I don’t give a monkey’s if he was a spy, what I said came from the bottom of my heart …

  * * *

  When I told the Breton that I was from the Congo, the tiny Congo, a patch of land measuring three hundred and forty-two thousand square kilometres with a window that gives onto the Atlantic Ocean and a river that ranks amongst the biggest in the world, a country that should on no count be confused with the Congo opposite which is bigger and which used to be the private property of the King of the Belgians, he didn’t agree with me:

  “Pah, historically the two Congos were part of the same territory, let’s not make a whole song and dance about it!”

  I paused for a moment. And then I said, NO, NO, NO, you mustn’t muddle up the two countries or I’ll lose my temper. I know only too well that the borders separating us are the result of a carving up between France and Belgium because these two nations would have ripped each other’s guts out if there hadn’t been a conference in Berlin to calm their belligerent moods. I don’t want to hear about any of that! I wasn’t there when the French and the Belgians were calling each other every name under the sun across the banks of our river. And you weren’t there either, Mr Breton! I have my country of origin, and the Congolese opposite have theirs, there are borders, end of story. I don’t want any confusion on that front. Everybody must stay on his own plot of land and cultivate his own garden. Your ancestors know why they decided there should be borders between our two Congos. It’s not for me to contradict their scheming. I am very angry with the big Congo because they reverted to the name of Congo when they had already decided their country would be called Zaire, whereas we stuck with Congo all along, so that makes things even more confusing when I am faced with people who know nothing about the geography of the region and I have to clarify that I come from the smaller of the two Congos, not to mention the fact that all their whores come and work in our country where they have imported the Horizontal Revolution. You have no idea what I’m talking about when I say the Horizontal Revolution. Can you believe that it is these women from the big Congo who are governing us right now? That they’re the ones who determine our purchasing power, our pensions, the distribution of dividends for our oil and the nature of our foreign policy? Did you know that important historians have published theses in which they maintain that this massive migration by ladies of pleasure from the country opposite towards our country was due to the good health of our money, the CFA Franc, a well rated currency in the bush, and one that is stronger than the currency of the big Congo, which also used to be called the zaire? Theirs was a real monkey currency, it dropped in value with every hair-brained rumour of a coup d’état, of their Finance Minister’s acute gonorrhoea or of the death of their president for life whose austere face, big clown-like glasses, walking stick and leopard-skin headgear could be admired on every bank note. They, meaning the people from the country opposite, were obsessed with calling everything zaire: their huge country, their currency, their whores, their river and everything that couldn’t be named while they waited for their President with the austere face to trace back the genealogical tree of his tribe and unearth a pithecanthrope whose unpronounceable name they would borrow in order to rename by presidential decree either a boulevard in the town centre, or a roundabout leading to the embassies of France, the United States or Belgium, but never a dead-end place in a popular district w
hose streets bear no name, and whose roads don’t all lead to Rome. And since in our little country we didn’t have enough room to lodge these myriads of women who crossed the river in their canoe-loads, to come to us with their belongings on their heads, so it was that this transhumance brought about the Horizontal Revolution, one that was within the reach of every wallet, and we had masses of women, a whole spate of them, at knock-down prices. Do you see how things came about, eh? We would have preferred a different kind of revolution, but we were aware that the other revolutions, which were all the rage around the world, ended up being too expensive for the people. In any case, given that our State coffers were empty at the very beginning of the Horizontal Revolution, pillaged down to the last centime by the government and the local official liquidator who always paid his own salary in cash first, we would never have had the financial means to give ourselves a revolution in the style of 1789 which you French haven’t yet finished picking up the tab for because there are still privileges here, taxes with features that ruin the people of ordinary means, in short inequalities that make everybody laugh who reads The Declaration of Human and Citizen X’s Rights. With a bit more political courage, we could have bought ourselves a revised and corrected version of the French Revolution, and France herself would gladly have handed it over to us with immediate effect, offering twenty-four-seven customer service and a Freefone number in the event of the revolution breaking down at night and nobody in the country being able to change the nuts and bolts or replace the dud bulbs caused by a surge in the lights! So all right, that way we would have had our own 1789. But then what, eh? That revolution would have been a luxury product for us. It would have required a longer preparation period, and a shifting of mindsets. We’d have had to find a local Napoleon Bonaparte, for example, whose mission would have been to stage, ten years after 1789, a small Coup d’Etat of 18 Brumaire fomented from the residence of a lady with big buttocks the way I like them, a lady who would also have been called Joséphine de Beauharnais. And then, you can’t have a revolution without ideas. So, on that front too, we’d have had to come up with a legacy of revolutionary ideas for future generations so they wouldn’t take us for full-time fools who’d been lucky enough to grasp a revolution in their hands but who hadn’t bust a gut when it came to the ideas to go with it. But who would have sacrificed themselves for ideas as well as being prepared to die for them when, as your great singer with the moustache says, by forcing the pace of things too much you might die for ideas that don’t matter the next day? As a result, without a 1789 that would have been too costly for our plebian pockets and which you would have refused to sell us even on credit because we’ve got a reputation for never paying off our debts but of going cap in hand to the United Nations and begging shamelessly for them to be cancelled, pure and simple, our small Congo first inherited the Red Revolution which the Russians were selling half-price, in the Marxist-Leninist version, and then, a bit later on and most importantly, the free Horizontal Revolution with the women from the country opposite who set themselves up on every street corner and made our papas lose their heads. Our authorities realised that the aforementioned Horizontal Revolution was of no small consequence and that it had an unfair advantage over the real one, the authentic Red Revolution of our country which many years ago had fallen into the boiling pot of communism without Soviets or electricity, of the dialectics of pure hard knocks, of the kolkhozes and the sovkhozes, of socialism that was more or less scientific, of materialism that was roughly historical. And even our president at the time, the one who didn’t wear clown’s glasses or leopard skin headgear, His Most High Excellency Meka Okangama, was a pain in the neck with his daily messages for those enslaved to hunger, for the proletarians waiting for goodness knows what in order to unite while making do with factory line work when the Red Revolution was meant to be there for the final struggle, for a world in which there would no longer be employees but just bosses with big bellies and Cuban cigars clamped between their lips. Did you know that already during that time, in order to counter the Horizontal Revolution that was turning up at our borders, our president would only swear on long passages taken from a tome by Engels – pronounced by him as “Angel” – a book entitled Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, a book he was never without as if he had written it himself? These were real political moments, Mr Breton! I’m not kidding with this story, even if I am a bit drunk! When our Marxist president was on form, the sweat dripping from his bulging forehead, his tie badly knotted like a suicidal who’d finally managed to hang himself, he would lay into the whole lot of your philosophers from Antiquity, that bunch of lechers who were too quick to extol life’s pleasures such as premature ejaculation and masturbation with the help of boa grease, who didn’t worry about anything except their beard and who quite possibly, between two slapdash lessons in the Agora, did the business with pretty mummified girls barely out of puberty. Our president did not forget to denounce your vagabonds from the past who lived in barrels, were stupid enough to light hurricane lamps in broad daylight and didn’t even have it in them to whet our enthusiasm, to offer us a unanimous definition of philosophy, a definition that would at least have had the eternal merit of exempting young secondary school students from splitting hairs during their end-of-year exams when they run down their pens answering perennial questions such as: “What is Philosophy?” This is not a topic to joke about, Mr Breton! Our President had read a lot even if he didn’t have his primary school certificate and peeled potatoes in the kitchens of the French army during the Second World War. Like all dictators, he knew his classics, looked down his nose at the moderns whom he reproached for having abandoned the imperfect subjunctive from one day to the next in exchange for a language that had more freedom but was inevitably less elegant. And it was by drawing on his general culture, for which his people envied him, that he also presented us with Capital by Karl Marx, just after citing Engels – and the scandal-spreaders concluded that the President was very fond of the books of Marx and his wife Angel. His Most High Excellency wasn’t just anybody, and you should know that, you French! In his opinion your visionary men from bygone eras, also known as philosophers, had simply interpreted the world, but from now on it needed changing with Rwandan machetes and Kalashnikovs imported directly from Russia via the narrow border with Cabinda even if the Angolans and their rebels didn’t agree …

  The Breton paid the bill and said goodbye. Willy who had been half-listening to us came over and whispered to me: