by W. T. Tyler
Dr. Bizenga was critical of the speech in a lengthy discourse of his own, employing the same poisonous epithets of which he was so fond and which made his monthly address to the assembled party plenary so obscure—“oligarchic parasitism, monopolistic capitalistic combines, obscurantist revanchism.”
Pierre Masakita, who had wandered in searching for the party librarian, was intrigued by Dr. Bizenga’s remarks, and sat down to listen. The jeunesse secretary gave him a copy of Crispin’s speech. Bizenga told the group that Crispin’s speech was amateurish. What was its origin—vanity? A wounded vanity? Bitter, yes, but the social conscience was still embryonic, now punishing words in place of a leather ball. Perhaps it was what might be expected from an ex-soccer player. A wounded vanity had little to do with the struggle for political, social, and economic justice.
“I think it’s a good speech,” Masakita had disagreed. “Vanity is useful. Even humiliation is a revolutionary impulse, isn’t it? Who said that. Marx, I think. What matters is strong roots, not the soil that nourished them. So humiliation can make strong roots too. No, I think Mongoy has made a good beginning.”
Dr. Bizenga disagreed violently and launched into another tirade as Masakita listened patiently.
“Well, it’s not my business,” he said finally, “but you have to be careful about these speeches of yours—careful that your words don’t become an end in themselves. Otherwise they’ll soon be bought up by the bourgeois press, by the broadsheets where salon intellectuals purge their literary consciences.” He seemed to be smiling as he spoke, but Dr. Bizenga wasn’t amused. “But the end of humiliation isn’t words,” Masakita continued. “It’s action, social action. ‘Clowns, they chase after words!’ Who said that?” He looked at the students who sat at the table with Bizenga. “Was it Lenin? Possibly. But that’s not important either, identifying authorship. Does the fact that it was Lenin make it any more true? No, of course not. Pedantry becomes an end in itself, doesn’t it?—like words? No, I think it was a useful speech, and I’m sure Mongoy has learned from it.”
After Masakita had left, Dr. Bizenga had again disagreed. As an ex-soccer player, Crispin had understood.
But now Masakita had disappeared along with Dr. Bizenga. Many of his friends were dead. Had he found a gun too, he would have joined them, fought as they fought, and won his martyrdom in the streets of Malunga as they had won theirs. In the bottom of his tin suitcase under the bed was a small nickel-plated Belgian revolver he’d bought from a young boy in the Ivory Market, a pursesnatcher, to add to the cache of small arms concealed at the compound; but even if he’d had it with him, it would have been of little use. Only four rusty cartridges were in the chamber.
He felt physically ill, denied first the heroism of dying in Malunga and now denied his future as well. For a second time his life had been taken from him. This afternoon, N’Sika would speak in Martyr’s Square. The captured jeunesse and their guns would be shown to the nation.
It was almost noon, and the heat beyond the window was hellish, the yard nearly empty. Flies drifted out of the scalding light of the dusty courtyard and into the hot shadows. In the deathless, sterile silence, his despair knew no bounds: body and mind floated free. The universe floated like dust around him; the thin, weak life-giving aromas of cooking manioc and rice that stirred from the dark doorways where the midday meals were being prepared made him giddy and nauseated.
He peeled off his shirt and went out to the courtyard again weak with vertigo, to bend to the faucet to drink, and then to slap his body alive with cold water.
As he returned, an old woman stirred indolently through the heat to gather up the clothes that had been spread to dry in the sun over a small leafless shrub near Kalemba’s door. She was chewing on a piece of goat meat, isolating the fatty gristle as she chewed without touching it.
He looked at her with loathing. She spat the meat into her hand. “Is the green mamba changing its skin to a fish?” she asked, looking at his wet shoulders and face—“to a strong wet fish, mbisi makasi?”
“One day you will talk the gold out of your teeth, old grandmother. Why do you eat my feet like this?”
In his room he changed into a clean shirt, slipped into a pair of rubber thongs, pulled a pair of sunglasses on, and went down the corridor to the room of Kimbi, the basket maker. Kimbi sat as he always sat in the darkened room, his back to the door, facing the gauze-covered window, the powerful stump of his body rising from the burlap mound, his strong fingers weaving the mats, baskets, and imitation tribal masks which vendors bought from him to sell in the tourist markets. Next to the burlap mound was the wooden dolly on which Kimbi sat when he left his dark room, his weaver’s hands protected from the gravel, concrete, and laterite by a pair of rubber pads cut from old automobile tires.
He only left the room at night. The same lorry accident that had amputated his legs had taken away his face. The flaming gasoline had left only the skull, the bone covered by the sheerest membrane of pink flesh and scar tissue. The stubs of his teeth stuck out at odd angles, like stumps in a burned-out field.
Kimbi didn’t turn as Crispin entered. His hands stopped. He waited as Crispin took a few baskets and mats from the rear wall, reached behind him to take the numbered scraps of newspaper that Crispin pulled from each item, and didn’t move again until the door had closed.
The old woman laughed as she watched Crispin, the ex-soccer player and jeunesse militant, carrying the baskets across the yard like any girl or old woman, off to the Ivory Market near the foreign embassies to sell his wares to the tourists and flamands.
“Mbisi!” the old woman called. “Don’t let the fishermen catch you!”
In the gathering dusk thousands gathered in Martyr’s Square under a sickle moon, some carrying placards and banners, others with wares to sell, like Crispin, but all of them eager and restless. The soldiers came first in trucks and weapons carriers. The speed and recklessness of their arrival terrified those close to the barricades near the wooden platform in the center of the square. They surged away, pressing wildly against those who were crowding forward, many of them clapping their hands rhythmically, urged forward by the paid political hucksters who moved through the throng. The soldiers restored order with their gun butts.
The motorcycle brigade followed the trucks, gliding eerily through the dusk without sirens, lights on. Military officers emerged from the sedans and dispersed themselves along the platform, but only a single figure climbed the steps and stood in the glare of the strobe lights, his voice amplified a hundredfold by the sound trucks which surrounded the open square and sent it reverberating far into the dark streets and boulevards.
He spoke in Lingala, not French. The crowd throbbed and chattered, straining from the rear ranks to better see the distant lonely figure who confronted them. The voice brought him closer:
“… learning of the insurrection in Malunga, we went to the President, who’d locked himself away in the palace with his lackeys, terrified of the news that the jeunesse had guns, but even more terrified of what the poor wretches in Malunga might do, those whose daily companions weren’t guns but misery and deprivation. So what did we find? A President terrified by the misery of his own people …”
Wet black faces, kerosene lanterns here and there, the clatter of a distant helicopter. Few turned to look. The words, sentences, and paragraphs came pouring out:
“… and what strange state of affairs is this? A President so terrified by the suffering of his people that he hasn’t the courage to lift one finger on their behalf! Listen! Listen to me! Did you come here to chatter like parrots, like old women!…”
Crispin moved closer, carrying his unsold baskets, oblivious of the soldiers dispersed through the crowd.
“… so we put a simple proposal to the President! We would put down the fighting in Malunga ourselves! The soldiers would do it, imposing martial law, and after calm was restored, we would return to our barracks! We would let the people decide whether what we did wa
s right or wrong! But the President betrayed us, just as he betrayed you! He sent word to the national police that we were to be arrested—me, N’Sika, Lutete, and Fumbe—all of us. Could we permit that? No! Never! If we were to be arrested let it be done after the rebels in Malunga were disarmed. If we soldiers were to be brought to justice, then let us be brought before the people with Pierre Masakita, Lule, and those others who gave guns to their followers in Malunga! Let us be brought to justice with those vin rouge intellectuals who would have made the blood run in the ditches of Malunga as the vin rouge had run in the veins of the colonizers, the same vin rouge these killers had drunk to get their courage up! Vin rouge imported from abroad, red wine, the white man’s drink, not ours, not masinga ya mbila, the palm wine of our own forests!
“If we soldiers were to be brought to justice, then let us be brought before the people with the President and his cabinet, with those politicians who talked the money out of the people’s pockets and into their own, who talked of economic progress and social progress, of education for the masses, maize for the hungry, and unity for the nation, who talked of this and that, night and day, day and night, who talked of everything but their villas in Belgium and Switzerland, the Mercedeses in their garages, their fleets of taxis and trucks, their coffee and palm oil plantations, their lackeys and whores. Progress here, progress there, but what progress? Quel progrès? What progress? Progrès à wapi!”
Crispin stopped, distraught, as the roar swept the front ranks first and then engulfed the rear, drowning N’Sika’s voice:
“Progrès à wapi! Progrès à wapi! Progrès à wapi!”
“Listen to me! Shut up and listen! There are other things too! Other things we discovered! After the minister of finance and the governor of the national bank heard about the fighting in Malunga, they tried to flee the country! Why would they do that? Why would they run away like criminals? Were they criminals? Of course they were criminals! Listen, the old President once talked of how vast our cash reserves were, as vast as the great river over there behind you! Was that true? Did you believe him? Of course it wasn’t true! So these two thieves were discovered hiding away in the airport baggage room, where we found them, their suitcases filled with dollars. Diamonds too! Of course.
“And what about these reserves, all this money that the country had accumulated, all these reserves! Do you know what these reserves were, what they are! Just three pieces—underwear, pants, and shirt! That’s all! Just what you’re wearing—underwear, pants, and shirt! Three pieces, that’s all. Where has the money gone! To Belgium, of course—to Belgium, France, and Switzerland! And what did these Belgians and Frenchmen give back in return? Peacocks for the presidential garden! So we shot them! The Revolutionary Court sentenced them and we shot them! So we shot these thieves, this scum that these years of confusion and anarchy had given us—shot them as we’ll shoot others who’ll be tried and sentenced by the Revolutionary Court …”
The crowd was deathly silent.
Canvas-covered trucks had moved slowly down the closed street and stopped near the wooden platform.
“… so we cast out the politicians, just as we smashed the rebels in Malunga. What choice did we have? We had no choice! Because their leaders, the provocateurs Masakita and Lule, had given them something more dangerous than the drunkenness of foreign ideology! What was it? You know what it was—something that kills like the mamba, something that kills ten, twenty, thirty men with a single flick of his red tongue—moko, moko, moko, one by one, all of us, each of you.…”
He held up the automatic rifle, holding it high over his head as the crowd roared its anger: “Te, te, te!”
The soldiers dragged the ragged, frightened youths from the truck beds and herded them, fifty or sixty strong, along the cockpit of green grass in front of the platform. Their uniforms were torn, black with grime and blood, their hands shackled behind their backs. Many were in their early twenties, but they looked younger now, as helpless as Ivory Market thieves trussed up by the police after their capture. Some were in their teens, the orphans of the Kwilu or Orientale, their families dead in the rebellions, harvested from the dense green forests and savannahs by an inept government to rot in the urban slums.
Crispin was too far away to recognize any of the faces.
“… and there you see the green mambas of Malunga, the hoodlums and thieves who were misled, betrayed, corrupted, first by the old politicians, and then by the vin rouge ideologues! But look at them now! Their jaws are empty, their fangs drawn, their poison gone!”
They brought the guns. The paras carried them from a pair of flatbed trucks, slung heavily in tarpaulins or pine crates and dumped in the roadbed with that heavy ironlike resonance unmistakable anyplace on earth. The flashbulbs flared in the darkness. Photographers and cameramen leaned over the restraining ropes.
“… revolution is a man’s work, not a child’s. It’s our work—forget about the green mambas! Listen to me! Listen! The revolution is won together or not at all. But it takes work, hard work! Eeer wa! Do you hear me! Eeer wa! We must push and pull together, all of us!…”
Crispin listened as the crowd began to take up the work chant of the riverboats and barges, fields and forests, heard wherever two or more Africans had labored together, driven under the lash of that primitive chant.
N’Sika was holding something aloft, a paper taken from his pocket, lifted in the glare of the klieg lights, but Crispin had missed his words.
“… and it won’t be easy! Never! Many will be against us. They will talk against us, lie against us, plan against us! They will say we’ve cheated them! All right! Let them talk! But it’s our copper we’re taking back, our mines, our minerals! The order is here—in my hand! We won’t change that—never! We can’t change our pride, our manhood, our revolution! Can we be children again, crawling back through our own filth? No! Never! So let our enemies know that—that we can no more change our revolution than we can change our race or the color of our skin! No! Never! And if others seek to humiliate us because of that, we must either submit to our own degradation or we must fight! Only weak men and women, prostitutes and lackeys, are accomplices in their own degradation! We are what God has made us—Africans! We will fight! But it is the revolution that will carry our battle, not plots or counterplots! Only hard work will win it, not words or foreign guns! So together we will change the condition of this nation! But peacefully, with hard work and sacrifice! I have talked too much tonight. I’ll talk to you again. For tonight, it is enough. There is much work to do.”
Crispin stood hollow and frightened in the surging crowd, baskets at his feet, watching N’Sika leave. N’Sika had nationalized the economy. His party’s revolution had been stolen by the new regime, his life denied him for a third time.
Reddish stood on the fringes of the crowd near the wooden barricade.
“Flamand,” a nearby voice whispered to him. “Flamand! Ecoutez, flamand! Monoko non ngui! Français te. Français na yo te! Listen, European, white man, or whoever you are! Listen! He speaks our language, not yours! Lingala, not French! What are you doing here? Go home, eh. Home is where you belong, flamand!”
Reddish turned to see an old man stick his tongue into his fist and then hurl its imaginary demon to the ground.
The crowd was slow to disperse. The faces Reddish passed as he moved away still wore the exhilaration of victory, like spectators leaving a victorious soccer match. On the boulevard a limousine from the Belgian Embassy led a cortege of diplomatic cars through the thinning crowd. The driver stupidly tried to force his way through the foot traffic and honked his horn furiously. A crowd surrounded the limousine almost immediately, a few beginning to rock it back and forth as they took up Colonel N’Sika’s work chant, “EEER wa! Eeer wa!” The mood wasn’t ugly, just jubilant. A squad of soldiers put an end to the demonstration.
He walked back to the embassy through the dark streets. Lowenthal was in shirtsleeves at his desk, the outer suite in confusion as old files
were being rifled for copies of the Belgian minerals accords and the treaties and agreements protecting Western investment. The embassy didn’t yet have a copy of N’Sika’s speech, but Dick Franz at USIS had taped it, and one of the USIS locals was translating it.
“They say he didn’t mention the Soviets,” Lowenthal greeted him in agitation. “He didn’t talk about Russian guns?”
Reddish sank down on the sofa next to the door. “He talked a little about foreign ideology—vin rouge—but it was ambiguous.”
“But certainly the Soviet guns were there. He couldn’t hide them.”
“The guns he showed were a grab bag—Belgian NATO rifles, some old Enfields, some Soviet carbines, even a few M-14s.”
“So he’s not going to throw the Russians out? Everyone thought the mob would march on the Soviet and East German missions. That’s where most of the press corps was, on the street outside the two embassies, waiting.”
Reddish said, “N’Sika tricked them off the scent. No one was thinking nationalization. They were thinking about the guns. He couldn’t very well nationalize the economy and shut down the Russians. He needs to keep his options open.” He searched his pockets for a cigarette, but the package was empty. “But it was a good speech. It worked. I didn’t think he could do it, but he did.”
“It doesn’t worry you?”
“A lot of things worry me. I just haven’t had a chance to think about them. Hello, Abner.”
Colonel Selvey stood angrily in the doorway. “What the shit’s going on? I almost got my goddamned window busted out again.”
“Andy and I were just talking about it,” Lowenthal said.
“What’d N’Sika tell those baboons, anyway?”
“What they’ve been waiting to hear,” Reddish replied.
