The Death of Comrade President

by Alain Mabanckou

  The Military Committee of the Party invites the people to stay alert and do whatever is required to protect the Revolution and the national Union, for which President Marien Ngouabi gave his life. A month of national mourning has been declared, starting today.

  Victory or death!

  All for the people!

  Only for the people!

  Mboua Mabé stops eating, stares at the radio, pricks up his ears, turns around and dashes out of the plot, barking, while Maman Pauline shouts after him:

  ‘Come back here, Mboua Mabé! Come back, or I swear I’ll re-sell you at the Grand Marché!’

  He’s far away already; we can’t even hear him bark …

  Chilli in your eyes

  There are groups of people everywhere, even outside our house.

  People have come out of their homes and are mingling with passers-by – yellow taxis screeching to a halt, Zairian rickshaw boys dumping their produce at the roadside; they’re all standing round arguing loudly, as though they could somehow bring Comrade President Marien Ngouabi back to life. It seems to me that the people standing outside our plot are looking for trouble, Papa Roger’s going to get annoyed with them because they’re stopping him listening to the radio, where they haven’t yet explained how our president came to die with his weapon in his hand yesterday, Friday 18 March 1977 at 14:30 hours, as the report just said.

  Some go into our neighbours’ house to check if all the radios in the neighbourhood reported the same bad news.

  Others are weeping, rolling on the ground, clutching the photo of the leader of the Congolese Revolution, shouting that they don’t want to live any more, their lives have no point, they want be buried with their Comrade President Marien Ngouabi, they don’t know what will become of them, or our country, in the years ahead. They say there will be no electricity, even in the neighbourhoods of the black capitalists; that there’ll be shortages of oil, beer and salted fish; that the price of manioc will be higher than pork, pork higher than rents, rents higher than salaries, etc.

  I’m meant to cry too; I try, but it’s hard. The only way is to rub chilli in my eyes like widows do when they can’t squeeze out a tear for their husbands. These widows are just manipulators, putting on an act when actually they’re thinking about what they’re going to inherit; they know the rest of the family is going to decide on the basis of how many tears they’ve shed whether they’ll get the house or the car, or whether the whole lot will go to the sister-in-law or mother-in-law.

  I really want to cry because Comrade President Marien Ngouabi was a good man, and it’s sad hearing the Voice of the Congolese Revolution replay the speech he made five days ago for the celebrations of the Revolutionary Union of Congolese Women. When you listen to it, it’s as if he’s still alive, or knew that he was going to die and is leaving us some profound words, knowing we’d analyse them down to the very last detail after he’d gone.

  In this final speech he promised to do whatever he could to prevent us suffering from the economic crisis created by the rich countries, and he added that our people must try to build peace, in spite of the mess made by the imperialists who, after stealing industrial quantities of our wealth, seem to have nothing better to do than hang around and make trouble.

  The reason I say that Comrade President Marien Ngouabi definitely knew he was going to leave us for good is because he ended his speech with the words:

  When your country is sullied, and has no lasting peace, the only way to wash it and make it whole is with your blood …

  The cranes fly over

  If I do use chilli pepper to bring tears to my eyes, like the widows of Pointe-Noire, Maman Pauline’s going to get cross with me and probably rub some more in. So to make myself feel sad, I think about the citizenship classes we used to have every week at primary school.

  We’d listen to a tape recorder playing the Soviet hymn ‘The White Cranes’, and we’d have to sing along and though I don’t like to boast, I was actually the only one who managed it the whole way through, Russian seems quite a normal language, though of course only a poor shadow compared to French.

  There were other Soviet songs too, much the same, with violins, accordion and piano. And the Soviets sing in big deep voices, like us at funerals when we sing like that to compliment the corpse, so at least it feels it was someone important, even though it was actually someone really annoying that no one liked. If you listen carefully, the sadness in the Soviet voices is quite different to the sadness of our singers! We have this false sadness, whereas the Soviets are serious, and sometimes even they forget this isn’t just a song for entertainment, and they start weeping for real in their own language. When we put on a sad voice it’s actually to explain to the deceased, who’s refusing to go and live in the land of the dead, that that’s enough now, we haven’t an endless supply of tears to carry on weeping for weeks as though he was the unhappiest dead man the country had ever seen. We explain to the corpse it’s time to stop acting like he doesn’t know any better, like he’s completely and utterly without shame before his family. We remind him the neighbours have come round, they’ve given money, coffee, candles to place around the dead man’s bed, white sheets to cover him, they’ve clubbed together to buy a coffin, so his final voyage passes off smoothly and the other dead people don’t make fun of him because his family got into debt to pay for his funeral.

  I could sing ‘The White Cranes’ without any mistakes because my memory helpfully whispered in my ear how many times I’d already been whipped into learning it. The teacher had translated it all into French for us, in case we didn’t understand what the Soviets had planted in the words. So every morning after we’d said lots of nice things about Comrade Marien Ngouabi while standing by the national flag in the playground, the minute we got into the classroom, even before we started the fables of Jean de La Fontaine, which we liked because they had intelligent animals in them, animals who could speak French without making any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors, as though they’d been to school too, we recited the first eight lines. I sat in the front row, especially when we’d been warned that some members of the Congolese Party of Labour were coming from Brazzaville to visit the schools in Pointe-Noire. I’ve still got it in my head:

  Sometimes it seems to me the soldiers

  Who died upon our blood-soaked battlefields

  (soaked in blood)

  Don’t lie in rest, interred in this good earth

  But change into white cranes and fly away …

  And since that time, and to this very day,

  They fly above us, moaning as they go

  (how they moan)

  And is that why we stand in silence here

  And wait and watch the sky above?

  According to our teacher, those of us about to take the Certificate of Primary Education were the white cranes of the Congolese Socialist Revolution and Comrade President Marien Ngouabi was counting on us to help him develop our country, our continent and the other continents too, including all the European countries who think they’re already developed, though they’re forever changing presidents and, unfortunately for them, the people vote for the leader, instead of creating a Congolese Party of Labour of their own to teach them how to arrange for their comrade president to stay in power till the day he dies.

  When the teacher had finished telling us we were the white cranes of the Congolese Workers’ Revolution, he asked a second time, to check if we’d really understood:

  ‘Who are you?’

  And we all chanted:

  ‘We are the white cranes of the Congolese Socialist Revolution!’

  ‘And what is your mission as white cranes of the Congolese Socialist Revolution?’

  And we all chanted:

  ‘Our mission is to sacrifice our lives for the success of the supreme Mission of Comrade President Marien Ngouabi, for the development of our country, our continent and other continents too, including the countries in Europe who believe they are already d
eveloped, even though they’re always changing presidents and, unfortunately for them, the people vote for the leader, instead of creating a Congolese Party of Labour of their own to teach them how to arrange for their comrade president to stay in power till the day he dies.’

  And he’d ask the final question, this time louder:

  ‘And who are you?’

  And we’d reply, this time louder:

  ‘We are the white cranes of the Congolese Socialist Revolution!!!’

  And we’d jump for joy. We cheered everything, while despising the poor Europeans and their presidents who couldn’t even stay in power until they died. We were flattered that Comrade President Ngouabi and the people in the government loved us so dearly, and had given us such an important mission, unlike the poor pupils in other countries, whose presidents were not Comrade Marien Ngouabi.

  I felt very proud singing ‘The White Cranes’, even if I wondered how exactly Russian soldiers who’d died in combat turned themselves into white cranes, who fly above us, moaning as they go, if they weren’t sorcerers, like the ones we have here. Also, you had to actually be there when the white cranes arrived in Pointe-Noire, otherwise you’d never see one. All I know is whenever I saw them on the Côte Sauvage I was disappointed, because although they’re called white cranes they don’t have one hundred per cent white feathers, their feathers are mixed in with black feathers, the black being in the minority – if they’d been in the majority everyone would have muddled up the white and the black cranes.

  In spite of everything, our lives were happy. Often we were required to recite the names of the foreign presidents the leader of our Socialist Congolese Revolution had met. Some only came as far as Brazzaville but others made it to Pointe-Noire, and it was up to us, the white cranes of the Congolese Socialist Revolution, to welcome them. We had to prepare for a whole week, so we’d all seem like nice intelligent children, even if the idiots turned straight back into idiots, which was what usually happened. We were told about the lives of each of these foreign presidents and how they’d been born to be leaders. We had to learn by heart the potted history of their countries, likewise their geography, and sometimes we even had to dress like their people. We’d be wearing coats, gloves, furs and shoes under the midday sun, like Europeans do in the depths of winter, because the sun doesn’t always shine over there, which is why lots of countries in that continent went off to colonise hotter places, so they could go there on holiday with their wives, children, sick grandparents, not to mention cats and dogs.

  If we weren’t dressed up in the costume of foreign countries, we’d go to the airport to welcome the presidents at Pointe-Noire airport dressed just in our school uniform, the girls all in pink and the boys with a khaki shirt and shorts the colour of the sky in the dry season. You had to have your red kerchief round your neck and the badge of the National Pioneer Movement, or the head of the school would cancel the opportunity of a lifetime to see up close the heroes who ruled the entire world and were coming to pick the brains of Comrade President Marien Ngouabi. Some of the names of the presidents were easy to remember, but others were more difficult because they were so complicated that we wondered (privately) how people with such names ever came to be presidents in the first place. But you had to pronounce them correctly and know how to write them out the whole way through. We thought some of the names were written just as they were pronounced or pronounced just as they were written, though we couldn’t have been more wrong, so we had to keep practising and putting them into songs to be sung in front of the leaders because if a name’s in a song you can’t possibly pronounce it wrong, or forget it. Also, there were names that changed all the time, like that of the president of the Popular Republic of China: did you say Mao Zedong, Mao Tsé-toung, Mao Tsé-tung or Mao Tso-tung?

  We’d say nice things about the presidents in the hope that they’d give us gifts to take home to show our parents. But when they walked down from their airplanes all they ever gave the schoolchildren was flowers. For this reason the head always put the pretty girls at the front and hid the non-pretty ones behind the really tall boys.

  I was at Pointe-Noire airport the day our president greeted Comrade President Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania. This president had come with his wife, and they were very happy when they heard us singing:

  Papa Nicolae Ceauşescu has come,

  No more hunger

  Papa Nicolae Ceauşecsu has come

  Eternal light will shine

  Maman Elena Ceauşescu is the

  Most beautiful woman in the world

  Maman Elena Ceauşescu has eyes that are

  Brighter than water!

  Papa Nicolae Ceauşescu, hurrah!

  Maman Elena Ceauşescu, hurrah!

  Maman Elena Ceauşescu, hurrah!

  Now what Papa Nicolae Ceauşescu and Maman Elena Ceauşescu didn’t know was that when a different president came all we did was change the name and keep the same song. If the next president didn’t have his wife with him we just had to sing the president’s name on its own at the end.

  I was there the day we greeted the president of France. We’d been forbidden to call him ‘Comrade President Georges Pompidou’, the French Revolution had passed its sell-by date a long time back, and anyway, it wasn’t this president who’d started it. We had to call him ‘Uncle Pompidou’, because according to the teacher and the headmaster he was related to our family, by colonisation, which had been brought to us by his country, and by its language, which we all spoke. Now actually that suited us very well, because we really liked the name Pompidou, it sounded like the name of a good little baby that drinks its bottle and goes to sleep without bothering its parents before seven in the morning. His hair was all combed back, he smiled the whole time, as if he knew us and we were his nieces and nephews. We smiled at him the whole time too, as if we knew him, and he was our real uncle, when in fact he wasn’t even black, or Congolese.

  I was also there when we sang the name of Comrade Amilcar Cabral, even if he wasn’t president of his Republic. They told us he’d helped Guinea Bissau and Cap Vert to become independent countries, when the Portuguese colonisers wouldn’t hear of it. Comrade Amilcar Cabral was the one who got the loudest cheers in Pointe-Noire, but unfortunately a year after his visit he was assassinated by Black accomplices and Portuguese imperialists. So he never lived to see independence, which followed in his wake, six months after his death. We were pleased, even so, because thanks to him Guinea Bissau and Cap Vert got independence, like our country. Comrade President Marien Ngouabi loved him, which is why, quite near Brazzaville, there’s a school called the Amilcar Cabral Agricultural Lycée. That’s where you go if you want to train to be an agricultural engineer, even though people say that there’s no point training for that, everyone knows how to do agriculture and how to use a hoe to pick out weeds and plant peanuts, yams and sweet potatoes in the Bouenza region …

  After the foreign presidents stopped coming to see us, Comrade President Marien Ngouabi started going to see them. I couldn’t tell you if the schoolgirls and schoolboys in the countries he visited apart from Romania and the USSR, Hungary and Bulgaria, sang his name, like we sang the names of their presidents. Once the leader of our revolution returned from his travels, our radio always said he was very pleased, he’d been applauded by millions and millions of people in tears, who didn’t want him to leave, but he made his excuses and left because he had not completed his mission, which was to develop our country.

  Comrade President Marien Ngouabi had been to see the Ethiopians and greeted their emperor, who was called Haile Selassie I, who Bob Marley sings about in his reggae songs that we listen to in Pointe-Noire. When I saw pictures of the emperor in the newspaper, I asked Papa Roger where the guy got his fine gold medals made – he wears them on his chest, and they’re better than the ones the American blacks are given for winning races at the Olympic Games. Papa Roger replied that Haile Selassie I was the King of Kings on this earth. So he was above Comrade Pr
esident Marien Ngouabi, but they couldn’t say that on our radio or the leader of our revolution would be furious. This emperor was so strong and so determined, that even when the whites colonised his country he went on shouting that he was the King of Kings, and refused to recognise white rule.

  Our president also met the Comrade President of the People’s Republic of China, the one called Mao Zedong, Mao Tsé-toung, Mao Tsé-tung or Mao Tsutung, which isn’t surprising, our two countries are brothers, but even so China’s the big sister, it was China that funded our hospitals and built the Mouloukoulou dam in Bembé country for us for free, and Papa Roger says it’s thanks to the dam that there’s electricity all the way to Zaire.

  In China schoolgirls and boys turned out to greet Comrade President Marien Ngouabi as this was actually a technique we’d copied from them and the Soviets.

  The leader of the Socialist Revolution of the Congo had said something that we had to learn by heart, and which Comrade President Mao Zedong, Mao Tsé-toung, Mao Tsé-tung or Mao Tsötung had liked:

  Your people have become a symbol of honour, an example to the entire world of how success can come through hard and honest work. We have come today to drink at the source of this exciting and enriching experiment.

  Thanks to these kind words we stopped privately making fun of the name of the Chinese Prime Minister, Chou En-lai. Even so, it did make us laugh, and we’d draw a ‘chou’ and an ‘ail’, cabbage and garlic, side by side, and burst out laughing. But since Comrade President Marien Ngouabi had said that it was at the source of this rich and exciting experience that he’d gone to China to drink, we’d left off teasing Chou En-lai, in case he got really cross and went and put poison in said source, which would become like our River Tchinouka, where the poor fish swim about surrounded by a huge army of microbes, gradually dying off before they were lucky enough to be fished and eaten for lunch with foufou, manioc and red pepper.