“So when they support a leader who’s from their region, they’re being tribalists—but when we support one who’s from our region, as you say we ought to, we’re not tribalists?”
“It isn’t the same thing!” I shouted. “It’s . . . it’s . . . How can I explain? With us it’s . . . it’s a positive tribalism! . . . Meaning that when our group gets to power, we’re going to stamp out tribalism! We’re going to give great jobs to everyone, even the Mayi-Dogos!”
“And what if they want to do that, too?”
Exasperating. Hopeless. Demoralizing. No sense wasting my breath—his skull was thicker than a coconut. I gave up.
It was the unexpected appearance of Major Rambo that saved him. Just as I was about to turn my back on him and walk away, leaving him to his dreary future as a good-for-nothing, we saw a car pull out of a nearby side street and pass the corner where I was trying to convert him to our cause. The vehicle came to a screeching stop next to me. Major Rambo was at the wheel. Three kids jumped out, brandishing guns. I knew them well because they’d been recruited at the same time as me, or shortly after me, and they served as Rambo’s bodyguards. One of them fired his Kalashnikov into the air, just to show off. It was Smoking Cannon, a guy who was slightly crazy and unpredictable—he could go from extreme gentleness to the most uncontrollable rage with no warning at all. A psycho with a machine gun in his hand. The two others were also in a state of great excitement. They had two girls in the car, as well as a stereo, an impressive number of CDs, and a giant television.
“We were just at Hojej’s place—the Lebanese guy. We knew he had a big photo of the president tacked up on the wall in his store. It proved he was in league with the government. We beat him up and looted the store.”
Actually, every merchant licensed to run a business was required to display a picture of the head of state—this rule had been established by the Ministry of Commerce. So according to the way these guys were thinking, all the businessmen in the country were supporters of the current government. But right now we were the ones, machine guns in hand, who were rewriting the law. There had to be a reason for looting, just as there had to be a reason for drowning one’s dog; well, instead of saying we were eliminating rabies, we had decreed that every person owning a likeness of that “tribalist” and “regionalist” president was a traitor. Especially if the person had valuables worth looting.
“We’re heading over to Tomla’s now—there’s good stuff at his place, too.”
Tomla was a well-known merchant in our district, the only one of our countrymen who could compete with the shopkeepers from Mali and Lebanon. But before I could say anything, our future Giap—the guy for whose sake I’d been wasting my precious time—exclaimed, his eyes glittering with barely concealed greed:
“To Tomla’s! Hey, he sells multisystem VCRs!”
“So come with us and get yourself one!” said Smoking Cannon, who knew him well, since they were both from the same district.
The car door opened. A Kalashnikov was tossed to the future Giap, who seized it and jumped into the vehicle. Slam went the door, and there was just enough time for my question:
“But Tomla’s one of us! He’s not a Mayi-Dogo!”
“He’s got a photo of the current president in his shop—he’s a traitor to our region!”
This was shouted from the window, with the car already far away, wrenched from a standstill with a squealing of tires as Rambo floored the accelerator . . .
So that’s how, thanks to me, the guy who would return from Tomla’s shop with a multisystem VCR, dozens of videocassettes, and the nickname Pili Pili had been recruited into our group, the little band that would soon become the Mata Mata commandos, fearsome enemy of the Mayi-Dogo militiamen known as the Chechens. And this was the guy who had dared to treat me like an idiot on the phone!
I turned off the phone and stuffed it in my pocket. I was furious. Little Pepper, Stud, and Piston were watching me in silence, as if they’d guessed it was Giap I’d just been speaking with. I hoped they hadn’t heard him treating me like a dummy, calling me Turf and suggesting that Stud should have been made head of the unit instead of me. I eyed Stud closely.
One thing sure: from a physical standpoint, he was completely unlike me. He made people quake in their boots with nothing but his gorillalike size and strength. Between him and Idi Amin, I’d say he was the more impressively muscled. He wore only one fetish, which consisted of a couple of red parrot feathers stuck in his hair. Since these feathers were inserted through two holes in his cap—which he never took off, even when sleeping—he looked as if he had antennae on his head, like a wasp or a grasshopper. His thing, unlike Giap’s, worked perfectly. I’d even heard that when it was excited, it grew as big as an elephant’s trunk and would become so heavy that he had trouble hoisting it all by himself—which is how he got the name Stud, allegedly given to him by the women who helped him lift it. He loved boxing with his American brass knuckles, which he would slip onto his fingers like gloves, one set on each hand. Last but not least, Stud had it all in his fists, his cock, and his calf muscles—nothing above the neck. Looking at the guy, I came to the conclusion that Giap didn’t have an ounce of common sense. The fact that he’d even considered appointing a Neanderthal with such a stupid name to the post of unit commander proved that his powers of judgment weren’t worth five CFA francs. A real leader would never have screwed up like that . . . But all of a sudden I realized that if anyone had screwed up, it was me and not Giap. It wasn’t his fault if he continued to call me Turf—I’d never let him know that I’d changed my name!
I’d adopted a new nom de guerre just after debaptizing and rebaptizing my Roaring Tiger Commandos. Changing names hadn’t been easy, since the guys in the unit had no imagination whatsoever—almost none of them had been to school, the way I had. Their brains could come up with nothing but ordinary names that had no warlike punch. Some of them had even suggested that the unit should take the name of a soccer team! I’d had to exert all of my authority, intelligence, and dexterity—breaking down and reassembling a Kalashnikov in ninety seconds with my eyes closed—to get them to accept my choice.
To have confidence is good, but it’s always wise to tether your goat when it’s grazing. So before we swooped down on the city like a flock of falcons, I wanted to get the men’s blood up by making them chant our slogan, our new name.
Holding my head high and straight, with my cap turned backward to display my commanding gaze, my chest giving off flashes of light from the dozens of mirror fragments I’d glued to my combat T-shirt to deflect bullets, I surveyed my men lined up at attention and shouted at them the way Giap had taught us:
“What’s our name?”
“The Roaring Tigers!” they yelled in unison, without the slightest hesitation.
I felt as proud as a rooster who’s beaten all his rivals in a race to mount the finest hen.
“What?”
“The Roaring Tigers!” they repeated.
Seized with euphoria at this new demonstration of my authority, I hurled at them like a roaring tiger:
“And what’s the name of your leader?”
There was a silence. The men stared at me as if puzzled by my question. Then, timidly, Little Pepper said:
“Matiti Mabé.”
“Turf!” Twin-Head shouted triumphantly with a big smile, as if he’d drawn the winning number in the national lottery. Seeing that happy, imbecilic grin on their buddy’s face, all the others thought they’d made a blunder and yelled with one voice:
“Turf!”
Was I angry? I was fucking furious! I seized my gun to blow Twin-Head away, just like Giap had done with Gator—but when I saw how they were looking at me, I had second thoughts. To begin by eliminating one of my men was perhaps not an intelligent thing to do, since I hadn’t yet fully established my authority. Moreover, it wasn’t their fault—it was the fault of that idiot Giap, who in front of everyone had called me Turf, harmless grass, when my
real name was Matiti Mabé: evil, poisonous, deadly weed; the mushroom that kills, that sends you ad patres, to the land of your ancestors; the cannabis whose smoke makes your head explode into a thousand psychedelic pieces; the beautiful, mysterious, yet carnivorous flower that feeds on live animals . . . But since my brain was capable of doing more than one thing at a time—talking and thinking simultaneously, for example—I said to myself that maybe it was a bad idea for a military leader to adopt a name like that. After all, a plant, even a poisonous one, won’t scare the shit out of an enemy. With a pair of good boots, you can safely walk on it, trample it. Even piss on it. Cat piss, sheep piss. Bush-pig dung, dog shit. No, it was a stupid name—I had to change it. And I had to think of something quick, because all eyes were on me.
And wham! a name exploded in my brain, which is always working even when I’m not paying attention, running all by itself like an idling motor that needs only a touch on the accelerator to come roaring to life. A strong, powerful name. A name that inspires the same gut-wrenching terror that a condemned man feels before the firing squad, a name that makes people tremble when they see it on a sign.
“Forget Turf and Matiti Mabé. From now I’m MAD DOG!” I shouted. “What’s my name?”
“Mad Dog!” they answered all together.
“Twin-Head, I couldn’t hear you very well. What’s my name?”
“Mad Dog!” he yelled, with an expression that showed he understood completely.
Then, convinced that I’d reestablished the natural order of things, I gave the command for them to fall upon the city like roaring, bounding tigers.
Now I realized I’d never told Giap that I’d changed my name. I’d do it for sure the next time we talked. I was angry with myself. And with Stud, Little Pepper, and Piston.
“Change of plans. We’ve been ordered to go to the other end of the district, where we were before. Seems the guys we left there have been unable to maintain the blockades and many of the refugees are fleeing toward the foreign embassies. Understood?”
“Yessir,” said the three of them.
“And what’s the name of your leader?” I asked, before giving the order to get back in the vehicle.
“Mad Dog, sir!” they repeated once more.
Satisfied, I gave the order to get in the car and head back the way we had come.
Chapter Twelve
Laokolé
The armored gate of the first embassy remained stubbornly and hopelessly shut.
The heavy metal panels shook but did not give way before the dozens of weary fists that pounded it like clubs, accompanied by cries of anger and fear. The crowd then broke into smaller groups, and two, three, four other embassies were besieged, likewise without success. It seemed that all of them had received the same warning: Don’t open your gates.
Abruptly, like a leaden pall, complete silence descended on that welter of people. A strange phenomenon, as if those thousands of individuals had suddenly exhausted the energy of their despair and had decided as one to pass without transition from chaotic Brownian movement to utter inertia. As if a raging ocean, seething with thousands of foaming waves and whipped furiously by the wind, had suddenly become a calm, flat, glassy sea.
One by one, the people sat down. First the women. They began by spreading a pagne on the ground and thus staking their claim to a bit of space amid the tangle of feet and legs; they consolidated their occupation of the conquered territory by placing on it the bundles they’d been carrying and then sitting down themselves, along with their children and relatives. Within a few minutes, men, women, children, virtually everyone in the crowd was sitting down. Bodices were promptly opened and breasts were slipped into the mouths of hungry infants; wet and soiled diapers were removed from babies’ bottoms and replaced with dry, clean ones; cups of water, which was now tepid from the heat, were passed from hand to hand. Those who’d brought something to eat took out their provisions, from a motley assortment of containers—plastic bags, cassava leaves, sheets of paper torn from bags of cement. The stores included bread, boiled cassava, fried dough, corn mush, bananas, raw and roasted groundnuts. One man who probably had nothing to eat made a general offer to the people around him: five chloroquine tablets in exchange for a baguette of bread or ten fingers of banana. As if that had been a signal, other voices piped up and offered various other objects for barter. Thus, a refugee camp formed spontaneously in front of the diplomatic missions, beneath the sweltering sun of Central Africa, where men and women had been turned into refugees in their own country. The heat was indeed oppressive, and there wasn’t a single tree to protect us from the sun, though the city was famous for its greenery.
I was exhausted. After lowering the wheelbarrow onto its supports and helping Mama to get out, I shed the bundle I’d been toting on my back, rubbed my palms against each other, flexed my fingers several times to ease the stiffness and get the blood flowing again, and sat down. Mama crawled over to sit on the mat I’d spread on the ground, and looked at me. She wasn’t crying, but I knew that her sufferings were not merely physical. There comes a moment in every daughter’s life when she becomes a mother to her mother. For me, this was that moment. I knelt so that I was on a level with her and tried as best I could to assuage her bodily pain, if only by finding a slightly more comfortable position for her wounded, swollen stump. I examined the bit of her leg that was left below the knee. I was afraid that gangrene was setting in, and, not knowing what to do, I turned my eyes away and began rummaging in the bundle I’d been carrying on my back. I pulled out a bottle of water and handed it to her. She barely wet her lips and handed it hack. I took a good swallow, and as I was unwrapping a bit of dried fish, I heard:
“Do you think Fofo will he able to find something to drink?”
Fofo! My god, where was he? I was overcome by a wave of anguish. I had pushed the thought of his disappearance to the back of my mind, consoling myself with the fervent hope that he was safe and sound in one of the embassies. Now their firmly closed gates brought me face to face with the stark reality. What should I do? Begin searching? But where? And should I abandon Mama to go look for Fofo, or stay with her and abandon him? My god, what should I do?
Heat. Cries of babies. Sweat. If we didn’t die from the militias’ bullets, we’d surely be baked to death by the sun. Mama had to be protected from sunstroke. I took out a pagne and draped it over her head. Look, there was one of Fofo’s caps! The orange one. Since I’d lost my green scarf, I put on the cap to protect my forehead and neck from the intense rays of the sun. I must have looked like an American tennis player. But I couldn’t avoid answering Mama’s question. Where was Fofo?
I told Mama that I wanted to take advantage of this brief respite to begin looking for her child. I wouldn’t go very far, and I’d come back to check on her every fifteen minutes. She acquiesced with a nod. Perhaps she thought that if she said anything, I’d put off leaving or would change my mind.
I started wending my way through the crowd. Moving about was difficult because many other people were also walking around, looking for a child, a sister, a parent. Names and cries flew back and forth and blended with each other. “Lolo!” on one side, “Milete!” on another; “Michel!” over here, “Mandala!” over there. I tried to make myself heard above all these noises by emphasizing the two o’s of “Fofo” and producing the sound from my diaphragm like an opera singer. I looked everywhere. A head of hair that I thought I recognized made me run in one direction; the color of a shirt drew me in another. Then I’d return to the wheelbarrow to see if Mama was still safe . . . I was going to die of sunstroke . . . Scant mouthful of water, bottle handed back to Mama, and I was once more wading into the crowd, searching ever farther, toward the place where I thought I’d heard a “Lao-o-o!” echo in response to my “Fofo-o-o!” Alas, still no Fofo on the horizon. Was he perhaps farther away, with the group that was besieging the fifth embassy? I decided to cover more ground on my next foray and leave Mama for a full hour. I knew she wouldn�
�t object. With Fofo’s cap firmly on my head and my eyes shaded from the sun by its visor, my leather bag still slung like a bandolier across my front, I began to elbow my way through the crowd toward the fifth embassy. I hadn’t gone very far, ten meters perhaps, when I heard the first gunshots.
No doubt about it—the militia fighters who’d been pursuing us had come back and were beginning to fire on us. The refugees, just settling into the routines of their life as survivors, again rose to their feet in panic and prepared to flee. Quickly, children were tied onto backs, bundles replaced on heads. People gathered up what they could and left the rest—this was no time to dawdle. In fact, though, we were trapped. The gunfire was coming from the south, behind us; we had nowhere to go but forward, yet ahead of us were only the walls of that International Community that had let us down. As for me, I had only one thought: Find Mama!
I set about forcing my way diagonally through the dense crowd, which was moving in a direction parallel to mine. It wasn’t easy. I was hemmed in, buffeted, jostled, knocked this way and that, at the whim of its movements. I no longer knew if I was going the right way, but I continued moving, and by a lucky chance I fell over the wheelbarrow. It was upside down; the mat that I’d spread on the ground for Mama was in shreds, as if it had been trampled by a herd of elephants. Miraculously, the bundle containing our things was still intact after being kicked and stepped on by thousands of feet. But Mama was nowhere to be seen. I looked around frantically.
When the ocean tide recedes from a beach, fish are often left stranded. Torn from their natural environment, exposed to the sun and the wind, they thrash desperately on the sand as they die. This was the impression I had when I looked toward the south, toward the area that the human tide had just abandoned in its chaotic flight. Shoes, pagnes, plastic bags and bottles, great quantities of dust—and here and there, amid the unidentifiable flotsam and jetsam, forms lying on the ground. Human forms. And on one of them I recognized the color of the camisole, the color and pattern of the pagne knotted around the waist. I recognized the . . . “Mama! Mama!”
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