The Death of Comrade President

by Alain Mabanckou

  When Monsieur Mindondo has guests who wear ties, his colleagues from the Congolese Party of Labour, they park their cars all over the place, even outside our lot. Monsieur Mindondo’s already had a run-in with Papa Roger, who’d asked him to stop letting these guys in ties park outside our house, because some people might think it was our car, that we’ve suddenly turned into black capitalists. Old Mindondo didn’t even hear the end of my father’s remark about black capitalists, he thought Papa Roger was criticising his car because it wasn’t French or Japanese, it was a Volvo 343, so he couldn’t have bought it at the CFAO in the rue Côte-Matève where my Uncle René is a big boss, in charge of lots of people. Monsieur Mindondo said Papa Roger was just a poor little hotel receptionist, who’d never be able to buy a Volvo 343. Maman Pauline waded in and yelled at Madame Léopoldine Mindondo, who’d called her an ignorant banana seller. She also added that my mother only had one child, and the child wasn’t even a girl, just a lazy boy child, who spent his whole time daydreaming, writing things down on pieces of paper, as though roaches were fighting in his brain. That’s me, Michel. Also, again according to Madame Léopoldine Mindondo, the reason I’d never had to repeat a year since I’d been in primary school was nothing to do with intelligence, but because Madame Pauline had greased the palms of the teachers, male and female, and of the head of the school too, and would grease the palms of the teachers at the Three-Glorious-Days the same, and after that at the Karl Marx Lycée. What hurt my mother most was when Madame Léopoldine Mindondo said that if her son Michel – that’s me – died tomorrow, my mother would be all alone, and everyone would say she was a witch and had given her only child to the spirits in exchange for supernatural powers and worldly success. In fact, what Madame Léopoldine Mindondo meant was that the only reason my mother’s business had been doing so well for years was because she used her gris-gris to bewitch the customers and that she’d happily sacrifice me to the spirits to make herself even more money.

  Maman Pauline had not appreciated these accusations. That evening, she said to me, in front of Papa Roger, who seemed to agree with her:

  ‘Michel, do me a big favour: if you see that imbecile Thomas Aquinas in the street, give him a thump!’

  I said I would, just to calm her down. Thomas Aquinas already has the muscles of a black African sportsman. He plays sport with real machines at the French school, Charlemagne. He’s been picked for the Kioulou regional athletics championships and Papa Roger had shown me his photo in La Semaine, with a huge headline: ‘Thomas Aquinas Mindondo, the great hope of Pontenegrin athletics.’

  If she wanted me to do her this big favour, I felt like asking her why she had forbidden Monsieur Malonga to make me a kamon …

  Case by Case

  Here’s Ma Moubobi’s shop, Case by Case, just off the Avenue of Independence. It’s pretty untidy and really small, and smells of salt fish and peanut butter. There are no set prices; it depends on whether or not you know Ma Moubobi, that’s why the shop’s called Case by Case.

  Papa Roger and Maman Pauline do know Ma Moubobi. Me too – that’s me, Michel: she sees me every week in her shop, and I went to primary school with Olivier Moubobi, her only child, like I’m Maman Pauline’s only child. They used to make fun of him because he was always late, and the teacher would tell him to kneel down in the corner for an hour. When he was allowed back to his seat he’d sleep, and as soon as he started to snore the teacher would grab him by the ear and drag him back into the corner, and he had to stay there on his knees until the end of lessons. Ma Moubobi took him out of school for good, so they’d stop teasing him. Before that she’d created mayhem right through the school. She’d insulted everyone, including the head teacher. She and her son threw stones everywhere, and we all ran around like crazy trying to avoid getting hit in the face by a stone and ending up in the emergency room at Adolphe-Cissé.

  Ma Moubobi was yelling:

  ‘I’m gonna put a jinx on you! I’m gonna put a jinx on you! Hey, look at me!’

  She lifted her pagne to show something I’m not going to go into here, or people will say Michel always exaggerates, and sometimes he says rude things without meaning to … We closed our eyes, because it’s serious stuff, seeing a maman in her bare skin, you could easily have to repeat the year because of a jinx like that.

  Ma Moubobi had vanished with Olivier Moubobi, and that was the last time we saw him in class.

  For a while now, Olivier’s been hanging out in his mother’s shop. He won’t even talk to me these days. He says I was one of the kids he had to leave school because of, and if he’d stayed he’d be like me, one of the best pupils in the Kouilou region, and already have his Primary School Certificate and be at Three-Glorious-Days and be going on to the Karl Marx Lycée after he’d taken the Intermediate Studies diploma.

  Maman Pauline says I mustn’t go round saying that Ma Moubobi is gross and sits snoring by her counter when there are no customers in her shop. You don’t choose to be like that; sometimes you get fat from an illness you’re born with, or because evil spirits are jealous of how much money you earn. Ma Moubobi manages very well on her own, even without a husband, that’s why the jealous spirits have landed her with fatness and snoring instead of giving it to the bad people.

  We only go and do little shops at Case by Case, when we’ve run out of something. We could go to the Grand Marché, but it’s too far, you have to wait for the bus over the Voungou Bridge, and beyond the Fond Tié-Tié crossroads. The bus goes straight on then turns right further on, at the Mawata roundabout. The driver mustn’t get it wrong or he’ll end up in Fouks or Makaya-Makaya, when he was meant to be making for the Trois-Cents, Rex and Duo neighbourhoods, on past the West Africans’ mosque till he gets to the Grand Marché. It’s too complicated, especially as on the way there he has to swerve round the potholes in the Avenue Moe-Prat, and watch out for the tramps at the crossroads of the Boulevard Félix-Tchicaya and the Avenue Alphonse-Demosso. They cross the road without looking left or right, like sheep blindly following the one in front, so that when one of them stupidly plunges into a ditch the whole flock stupidly plunges into the ditch after it.

  Anyway, if you want to go to the Grand Marché you’d best not be in a hurry and get into one of the so-called fula-fula buses. They pull up at every bus stop even when they’re already full, the conductor’s job is to yell at the top of his voice and force people on, without warning them there’s no room left and they’ll be stuck together like sardines. It’s hot in there, the passengers are all sweating like they’ve got taps running from their armpits. Some people from Voungou prefer the two-hour walk, and not because they haven’t got the money for the fula-fula ticket, just to avoid getting drenched with the sweat of people they don’t know and who maybe only ever wash accidently, when it’s raining …

  Ma Moubobi is sitting behind her counter, which isn’t a real one, she’s just put two barrels side by side with a plank of okumé between them, and lots of packets of Kojak sweets. It’s her technique for attracting children. And if their parents won’t buy them any, the kids roll around on the floor crying, moaning that they’ve got stomach ache and Ma Moubobi’s Kojak sweets are the only cure.

  Salted fish hang from the ceiling on strings of elastic. When there’s a draught from outside, the fish swing from side to side, just centimetres from Ma Moubobi’s head. And if someone wants to buy one, she raises her arm, catches a fish by its tail, and tugs hard. The elastic goes ping! and the fish drops down on to the okumé board!

  Ma Moubobi grabs it and sniffs.

  ‘Hmm, not gone off yet …What will you give me?’

  She starts arguing about the price with the customer, then ends up saying:

  ‘OK, never mind, your price is my price, but just so as you know, I’ll make nothing from it, I’m only doing it for your children, not for you …’

  Behind Ma Moubobi, on the wall of the building, there’s a framed photo of Comrade President Marien Ngouabi. When you promise to pay her by t
he end of the month, Ma Moubobi turns round and points at the president’s portrait.

  ‘You’d better pay by the date we agreed, as Comrade President Marien Ngouabi’s my witness …’

  The customer looks at the photo of our leader of the Congolese Socialist Revolution with respect and fear. It’s the same one we had in our classroom at primary school. Comrade President Marien Ngouabi is wearing a military cap and is looking away to his right. His military jacket is magnificent, the top button’s fastened, and just above his right-hand pocket is the badge of the para-commandos, which proves he can jump from a helicopter or a plane and land on the ground without breaking his skull, thanks to his parachute. Comrade President Marien Ngouabi looks sad in this photo. Maybe it’s dawned on him that it’s not easy being a leader of the Revolution in a country where people all want to pay later.

  The customers are convinced that Comrade President Ngouabi is in the shop, watching them, and they just can’t not pay their debts on time when a president’s witnessed them taking their goods without getting their money out …

  I’m in the queue behind three grown-up men.

  The first one has paid for his two tins of sardines and left.

  The second one places a soursap, a pineapple and a packet of manioc flour on the counter and gets some money out of his pocket to pay.

  The third one hasn’t picked up anything; he’s just holding us all up, chit-chatting away with Ma Moubobi, asking her where Olivier is.

  Ma Moubobi’s really happy someone’s interested in her son.

  ‘Oh, Olivier? Thank God, he’s got a job on a fula-fula bus now, he’s a conductor. I told his boss he’d better not push my son around, or he’ll find me undressing in front of his bus and all his passengers!’

  And they both laugh. I can’t see what’s funny about it myself. It reminds me of the day Ma Moubobi stripped off in our school and I tried not to see her naked form, because of the jinx that would have come down on me and stopped me getting my Primary School Certificate and going on to Three-Glorious-Days.

  I don’t know what this gossipy guy is whispering in Ma Moubobi’s ear, she keeps bursting out laughing and patting her hair. Is she falling in love with him or is he chatting her up to get some free produce?

  Ma Moubobi finally sees me standing behind the guy chatting her up when the second customer’s finished paying and walks out.

  ‘Who’s this then? Pauline Kengué’s boy! So, are you going to lose your parents’ change again today?’

  The chatty guy turns round and jeers:

  ‘Look at you, boy! Well, well! Just look at yourself! Aren’t you ashamed? Olivier’s your age and he’s already working on a fula-fula, he’ll be a full-time conductor soon, and you turn up in Ma Moubobi’s shop dressed like that? Have you no respect, or is that just the fashion now?’

  I examine myself from top to toe: my shirt’s on backwards! I take a step back, to leave the shop, but the chatty man’s arm shoots out and catches me by the shoulder.

  ‘Go behind Ma Moubobi’s counter and put your shirt on properly!’

  Ma Moubobi closes her eyes while I change my shirt round. The man closes his eyes too, even though we’re the same sex.

  I put my shirt back on right, and come out to line up behind the chatty man.

  ‘You go first, my boy, I’ll be here for a while, I haven’t finished telling Ma Moubobi about when I—’

  He stops short, looks me up and down again.

  ‘You doing it on purpose, boy? You haven’t done up your bottom button. Trying to show us all your great big belly button?’

  I do up the button, rather annoyed at him saying I have a big belly button. Still, it’ll teach me to go round criticising Ma Moubobi for being fat and snoring.

  It’s my turn at the till now. I can’t find the money I had in my hand. Ma Moubobi waves a five thousand CFA franc note with no creases in it, as though someone had washed it and ironed it with a smoothing iron to keep it clean and flat.

  ‘It fell on the floor while you were putting your shirt on properly …’

  Now I can breathe again. I was already imagining what Papa Roger would say. I say a prayer that Ma Moubobi won’t mention this to my father. I can’t count on her, she tells everyone everything, her mouth has no stop button, that’s what they say about her at Voungou, that’s why she hasn’t had a husband since Olivier’s father, who left her before the child could even walk.

  She gives me a large packet. I glance inside at the contents: I see Maggi stock cubes, palm oil and peanut butter. It’s Maman Pauline’s order, but there are still some things missing. Before I can ask her, Ma Moubobi says:

  ‘Look carefully, I’ve put your father’s wine and tobacco right at the bottom. The change is in a little bag inside …’

  Bad mood

  Maman Pauline is home already, and I get the feeling she’s really cross. She snatches the bag of shopping from me. She rummages inside, hands me back the bottle of wine and Papa Roger’s tobacco and keeps the rest.

  I know it’s not because of us she’s in a bad mood. Things probably went wrong wherever she went first thing this morning, when the lorries from the Pointe-Noire highway collect the bins outside the houses of the black capitalists and pretend not to notice if there’s rubbish outside the plots of people like the Malongas and the rest of us.

  My mother had left us clear instructions: we must start boiling the pork at ten o’clock on the dot, so that when she got back she’d only have to add the things I’d just bought at Ma Moubobi’s shop.

  Every weekend she goes to ask some of the shopkeepers for the money they’ve owed her for months. She can’t really force them to pay, because these women are friends she drinks Primus with in the bars at the Grand Marché. Besides, many of them come from the same village as her, Louboulou. They all played together there as children, went to fetch water from the stream, badmouthing the boys who tried to do things with them that I can’t go into here or people will say Michel’s always exaggerating, sometimes he even says rude things without meaning to. So the shopkeepers take advantage of Maman Pauline’s kindness. Papa Roger’s always telling her off, saying she’ll never make any profit, when she actually needs a lot of money to buy bananas in bulk from the peasants in Les Bandas, and pay the young guys who transport them to the station at Loubomo, and reserve a whole freight car of the Congo-Ocean railway, and hand over lots of ten thousand CFA franc notes to the people who load the produce into the train, then later on to the people who take it off at the station in Pointe-Noire, and finally also to the people who transport it to the Grand Marché. Sometimes she’s unlucky, the train derails and the CO railway informs her that they can’t compensate her for her bananas because it’s a case of ‘force majeure’, which, as Papa Roger explained to me, means that no one could have known in advance that the train would be derailed. Now everyone knows that derailments happen all the time at Dolisie, Dechavanne, Mont Bélo, Hamon and Baratier stations. Trains can get stuck there for ten to fifteen days before the European technicians arrive from Brazzaville in a handcar and fix the tracks. They’re wily ones, these white technicians, they hide their technique from our railway workers, so they’ll get lots of money, when all they’re doing is giving orders to the Congolese who lug huge stones around in the hot sun, lay tracks and tighten bolts with no gloves on their hands. When there are derailments, Maman Pauline hands out her bananas to the CO railway workers, otherwise the wild animals will eat them. Some passengers try to give her money, but she refuses, she says it’s fine, she’ll have better luck next time. And the conductors, who are completely and utterly without shame, help themselves, as though the bananas were a gift from the CO railway. But since it’s obvious at a glance how nice my mother is to their clients, who rudely stuff themselves silly, without a word of thanks, they promise her that next time she travels she’ll go first class, along with the whites and the black capitalists, on condition she keeps her mouth shut in front of the other shopkeepers, because there ar
en’t enough seats in the carriage, the only one in the whole Micheline with air conditioning. Even if she accepts her air-conditioned present, it’s nothing like the value of the produce she lost through the derailment. And when she comes home empty-handed she’s pretty grumpy with us, and really tired from her long, fruitless journey, and she sits down next to Papa Roger in the living room and watches him do long, complicated sums on pieces of paper until my father, looking very concerned, throws the Biro down on the table in front of him and says:

  ‘It’s no good, Pauline …You know, I can help you at the end of the month with my salary from the hotel.’

  My mother is too proud, she refuses Papa Roger’s helping hand, and he worries a lot, because it’s hard to eat or sleep well if you have money problems. It was the same proud streak that drove her to buy our plot and have our house built. She didn’t want to be like the other women in Pointe-Noire who just expect their husbands to pay for everything, even sewing needles or threads for weaving in their hair. Maman Pauline is so proud, she promises Papa Roger every time that she’ll manage fine on her own, she’ll make sure her business doesn’t go under. But when she makes that promise Papa Roger and I always know that means she’ll go and force the shopkeepers at the Grand Marché to pay back what they owe her. And I bet that to this very day not one of those shopkeepers has settled their debt …

  I set the bottle of wine in front of Papa Roger, along with a glass and corkscrew. He’s stopped listening to the Voice of the Congolese Revolution, and is now listening to Voice of America, and looking very sad.

  ‘Michel, shots were fired yesterday in Brazzaville …’

  I’d like to ask him why they didn’t announce that yesterday on the Voice of the Congolese Revolution, why we’re being told by Voice of America the next day.