The Death of Comrade President

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The Death of Comrade President Page 10

by Alain Mabanckou


  ‘What? So when those people in Brazzaville decided to kill my brother, that was a good idea, was it? Because my brother was just anyone, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘You mustn’t go to see that woman, Pauline, especially not alone and—’

  ‘I’ll go with Michel then! In any case, you’ll be sleeping at your other wife, Martine’s house, that’s all you think of at the moment; I don’t even know what you’re doing here right now!’

  ‘Now you’re just bringing up things that have nothing to do with what we’re talking about, Pauline …’

  ‘Are you trying to make me believe you’re not happy you’re going back to see Martine? You’re not happy to be seeing your real children? Why don’t you just go now, are you afraid of the curfew too?’

  She’s crying; my father comforts her, begs her not to cut her hair, not to go to the market to pick a fight with the northern stall holder who isn’t just anyone. I think to myself that my mother’s not just anyone either. She is the daughter of Grégoire Massengo, who was head of the village of Louboulou.

  Maman Pauline’s sobs gradually subside and no one’s speaking in my parents’ bedroom now. I feel like there’s sand in my eyes that I can’t get rid of. I keep rubbing at them. I yawn, and feel really weak, I can’t move my hands or my feet, as though I’ve been tied to the bed. The house starts spinning, spinning on its own axis, slowly at first, then really fast, just at the moment my eyes close …

  Sunday 20 March 1977

  The Voice of the Congolese Revolution

  Papa Roger doesn’t want to listen to the Voice of the Congolese Revolution this morning, he’s tuned into Voice of America. He thinks the Americans are the only people who know what’s happening in the world. When you think you know about the news before they do they burst out laughing, because they have tiny tape recorders, the size of a grain of corn, which they hide in the houses of the presidents of Africa who are going to get assassinated. So today I’m not surprised when they give out loads of details that our Congolese journalists can’t know because they don’t have hidden tape recorders the size of a grain of corn. The Voice of the Congolese Revolution is still waiting for the Military Committee of the Party to let them know what they’re meant to report about the fact that our Comrade President Marien Ngouabi was bumped off on 18 March at 14.30, a time when normally people are having their siesta because it’s so hot everywhere. If the Military Committee of the Party began saying that Comrade President Marien Ngouabi had done a Jesus and resurrected, as if death was just like a mini siesta, the Congolese journalists would repeat it without checking. But as the Military Committee of the Party still haven’t said anything, the Voice of the Congolese Revolution just carry on broadcasting Soviet military songs that make me dream of snow and Soviet soldiers marching on snow but not getting cold feet because they have special boots, which our soldiers will never have because we don’t have snow over here.

  Every now and then they played old speeches by the deceased leader of the Revolution, and Papa Roger got fed up and switched over to listen to American radio where the journalists speak in French especially for us Africans.

  Another thing that irritated Papa Roger on our national radio was a journalist with a voice like an alcoholic telling all these stories about Marien Ngouabi’s life as though he had lived with him or had actually been there on the day our leader of the Revolution was born. He wept as he told us that our leader of the Revolution wasn’t the son of rich folk, that he was poor, like most Congolese, and born in a little village, called Ombellé way up in the north. It was a real bush village, the kind you only ever find in books by white people talking about blacks, with a few huts and where everyone knows everyone else because they’re all related and they all have children with each other without worrying about having babies with deformities like a boar’s mouth or pig’s feet. Also, in this village called Ombellé there actually are pigs that just hang around all day because they’ve got nothing to do but eat poop and wait for the day when they’ll be eaten or sold. In this village, Ombellé, there are also cockerels who always get the time wrong, and go cock-a-doodle-doo at midday, thinking that will make night-time come, when they should be going cock-a-doodle-doo at dawn, so the peasants won’t be late to go and weed the fields and plant sweet potatoes and taros and yams. No one can ask God to be born in Ombellé, but this journalist with a voice like an alcoholic said that it was the most beautiful village in the world and that on 31 December 1938, the baby they called Marien Ngouabi, only son of Maman Mboualé Abemba and Dominique Osséré m’Opoma could not have been born in any other place, or he’d never have become our comrade president of the Republic! The ancestors had decreed it, they were present at the birth, and really excited, blessing the baby, telling him to tread carefully in life because nothing’s a straight line, to be truly good and just till the day he died. Apparently the angels were zipping up and down between up there and down here, to check that they hadn’t given the wrong baby this mega important mission.

  In this village, the journalist with the voice of an alcoholic continued, the children can go fishing and hunting once they turn seven, as if they were adults. They know how to make traps to catch birds and mice and our comrade president was already really smart at all that, he wasn’t afraid of the dark, had no fear of devils, ghosts, snake or other beasts that usually scare children of his age. He spent his childhood in this remote spot, then went to primary school a few kilometres away, in a town called Owando – if a tiny village like Ombellé had a school there would only be two or three people in the class because up there all you find is a few old people with white beards sweeping their floors and old people don’t go to school. The journalist with the voice of an alcoholic even swore by Almighty God that when he crossed the River Koyo to go to school little Marien Ngouabi refused the help of the boatmen, and chose to swim across himself. At this point I wondered why he didn’t explain how Marien Ngouabi managed not to get his school books wet while swimming, or how come he never got eaten up mid-stream by dangerous crocodiles. Perhaps the ancestors protected him and the crocodiles became all nice and friendly and helped him to get to the other side of the river before the boatmen, and the crocodiles actually waited for him there to bring him back to the other side after school.

  The journalist with the voice of an alcoholic had told us that it was clear that young Marien Ngouabi was going to become an important man, because he’d been class leader and captain of the football team in his primary school. And at this point our journalist friend told us a secret about the youth of the defunct comrade president, to prove to the doubters that he was brave even as a boy, and that death did not frighten him. He told the tale in some detail:

  The president was in middle school, just turned fourteen. One day the pupils were bathing in the River Koyo, where the waters were high, when suddenly there was uproar right across the river. ‘A child is drowning! A child is drowning! In the beginners’ class!’ As the bathers scrambled hastily from the water, updates on the situation came thick and fast: ‘A crocodile’s snatched the child!’ Who will risk their life to save the child as he struggles weakly, caught in the dark currents of the powerful River Koyo? Before a terrified crowd, scorning wind and weather, young Marien Ngouabi flings himself into the water, swims quickly over to the child, who actually is drowning, grabs hold of him and returns victorious with him to the riverbank, to the great satisfaction of all concerned. In fact, the child pulled from the water was not from the same village as young Ngouabi. He was a pupil at the school in Elinginawe, the next village on from Owando, son of Olouengué, a little boy named Olouengué François. In 1976 President Marien Ngouabi granted an audience to this ‘Moses’, now a full-grown man and a history teacher at one of our country’s lycées. And this meeting took place in the presence of our current Minister for Foreign Affairs, Théophile Obenga, whose poignant account I read word for word, and which is indelibly printed in the memory of the Congolese people, because it’s part
of our history too …

  Then the journalist said something about little Marien Ngouabi’s studies at the Military Preparatory school Général-Leclerc in Brazzaville, after his Certificate of Primary and Elementary Studies. I myself was able to go to the Three-Glorious-Days because I got this qualification, and I’m going to try really hard for the Karl Marx Lycée, which is close to the sea, and where I’ll be able to watch the white cranes ‘fly above us, moaning as they go’. Little Marien Ngouabi, on the other hand, did not go to the Three-Glorious-Days, but to Général-Leclerc, which, according to the journalist, has become the school for Young Revolutionaries, and they are the ones who’ll go on to be leaders of the country, because they’re already learning to be soldiers. From here he went to Oubangi-Chari, where he became a sergeant. Next he went off to Cameroon with the French Army. Papa Roger whispered something to me that the journalist hadn’t said, but was very important: the French army was massacring the poor Cameroonians, who were demanding independence, and during these massacres, aided by the Cameroonian army, a man had been killed who was as important as Patrice Lumumba, whose name was Ruben Um Nyobè. This great man opposed colonisation; he wanted independence for his country. He was caught because the Africans actually told the whites where he was hiding in the scrubland, and the militiamen first shot him down then dishonoured his body, dragging it about, so it scraped on the ground, and getting him so covered in mud you couldn’t even recognise him as Ruben Um Nyobè.

  The journalist then explained that the situation was such that young Marien Ngouabi wanted to resign from being a soldier but he couldn’t because first he had to pay back to the French army the money he’d been lent for his studies, and like most students his pockets, even though they were deep army-issue pockets, were empty. So he stayed in the French army, who put him in with the Cameroonians of the Bamiléké group. These Cameroonians are the most stubborn fighters, you don’t mess with them, they don’t care if their enemies are white or black, they defend their territory and the people of their ethnic group to the death, even with spoons, forks and water laced with chilli pepper. After his time with the Bamilékés, he was sent to Douala, then finally left Cameroon to come back here, to Owando, which is near his home village of Ombellé. Just after our independence, on 15 August 1969, the young soldier was sent to the military training school in Strasbourg. So he went to France, and was accepted at the Military Academy of Saint-Cyr, for officer training. It was at Saint-Cyr that he met my Uncle Kimbouala-Nkaya and other members of the current Military Committee of the Party and while he was there he fell in love with a French woman, Clotilde Martin, a waitress in a tea shop, with whom he had two children, Roland Ngouabi and Marien Ngouabi Junior (which didn’t mean the comrade president loved him more than Roland, just so as not to get him mixed up with the leader of the Congolese Revolution because there’s only one Marien Ngouabi in this world).

  The idea was that Clotilde Martin would become his wife, but she got very annoyed and decided to go back and live in her own country because Comrade President Ngouabi had taken a second wife called Céline Mvouka, who we called Maman Céline Ngouabi. The journalist with the voice of an alcoholic explained that his marriage to Clotilde Martin didn’t bother the Congolese because it was good to show that we weren’t racist, that we can marry white women of all different kinds and even embrace them as our national maman, whereas Uncle Pompidou was unlikely to leave his white wife, today or tomorrow, for a nice big black woman from our country, or even keep his white wife and add in another one, black as the day she was born, and make all the French exclaim: ‘What’s going on?’ The journalist was quick to point out that back in 1962, when the young Marien Ngouabi married Clotilde Martin, the poor waitress didn’t realise she’d married a man who would later become comrade president of the Republic, and that she’d become our national white maman. So people who went round spreading stories, such as that the white woman had taken advantage of the situation, were idiots who didn’t understand that it’s not written on a baby’s brow that they’re going to be president, that would just create all sorts of problems for the baby and they’d spend their childhood dealing with jealous people and people trying to make money by saying they were related and stuff like that. The journalist also said that when he got back here after independence in 1963, young Lieutenant Marien Ngouabi was living in Pointe-Noire, as a military commander, just like my Uncle Kimbouala-Nkaya. Five years later, because of all the troubles in our country, Lieutenant Marien Ngouabi became too famous, he made the president, Alphonse Massamba-Débat, step down and became comrade president of the Republic himself …

  The journalist from the Voice of the Congolese Revolution didn’t explain it all as well as my Uncle René did. He missed out dates and names because he knew the Military Committee of the Party always listens to the radio and can ask for everything to be cut and the whole story to be retold the way it wants it. Also, while he was telling us all this, his story was constantly being interrupted by reports from the spokesman for the Military Committee of the Party, a man called Florent Ntsiba, who is from an ethnic group in the interior of our country. I recognised his voice because it was the same one that had announced the day before yesterday:

  Now, with its back to the wall and in its death throes, imperialism has used a suicide unit to launch a cowardly attack on the life of our dynamic leader of the Congolese Revolution, Comrade Marien Ngouabi, who died in combat with his weapon in his hand, this Friday, 18 March 1977, at 14:30 hours.

  The last report we heard before we finally switched stations was when the spokesman, Florent Ntsiba, announced what the Military Committee of the Party had said to the foreign ambassadors who were also trying to figure out how Comrade President Marien Ngouabi came to die. He read without drawing breath, as if war had come within an arm’s length of the River Congo and we needed to prepare to take up arms:

  Gentlemen Ambassadors and Heads of Diplomatic Service, In the name of the Military Committee of the Party set up last night by the Central Committee of the Congolese Party of Labour, invested with all necessary powers and on behalf of the government, it is our sad duty to announce to you the brutal death of Comrade Marien Ngouabi, President of the Republic, President of the Central Committee of the Congolese Party of Labour and Head of State. The killing of the leader of the Congolese Revolution, perpetrated by imperialism and its lackeys, occurred on Friday 18 March 1977 at 14:30 hours, at the official residence of the General Staff. This heinous crime was committed by ex-captain Barthélemy Kikadidi. Two members of the commando unit were killed and two others, including ex-captain Barthélemy Kikadidi are on the run—

  At this point Papa Roger switched off the radio, even before we’d finished listening to the report, and told me he was only listening to the Voice of the Congolese Revolution because he needed to know what the instructions were for the period of national mourning, not to listen to explanations that no one was going to take seriously, because there was no proof and had been no investigation, and already they were giving out the names of people they were trying to catch even before they secretly crossed the borders into countries like Zaire, Gabon or Cameroon.

  On the Voice of the Congolese Revolution we didn’t learn anything about the period of national mourning, but I wouldn’t expect it to be a normal kind of mourning, where the women totally shave their heads, and people go and drink coffee, meet up with girls, and take their mats outside to sleep beside the corpse, which is kept in a palm leaf store. We can’t expect that, because we don’t have the body with us, we can’t sleep beside it till the day of the burial. The body is somewhere back in Brazzaville. Why would you mourn someone when you haven’t actually got the dead person in front of you?

  Since we had no instructions, people just said what they felt like saying. Everyone wants a proper mourning period, and some people are saying we should wear a piece of black material on our right arm, even so, so people out in the street can see we’re sad. Other people say that anyone seen crying
a lot will be in favour with the Military Committee of the Party, while people who don’t cry at all will have big problems. They also say that music in the bars shouldn’t be played too loud; it should be mostly traditional songs from the different ethnic groups, not rumbas by Franco or Tabu Ley or hits from Papa Wemba or Zaiko Langa Langa, because their rhythms are too upbeat when people are in mourning. Flags mustn’t be raised to the top of the mast and they mustn’t fly just any old how, even if there’s a wind. Friday 19 March, they announced on the radio, was a paid holiday. That means people are paid even if they don’t go to work. We also heard that people who worked in State offices were returning to work on Monday and apparently they are required to wear a black cloth round their right arm in the office. The borders with the countries that surround us are now closed. This also means that no one can come into the country, and no one can leave it, except for the members of the Congolese Party of Labour, who have to show their round red badges that make me think of Father Weyler’s wafers at Saint-Jean-Bosco’s during catechism.

  School is closed till Tuesday; there are no classes till Wednesday. We can go out during the day but we have to be home by seven o’clock and stay there till seven in the morning or get whipped by the police with a Motobécane AV42 drive chain …

  Voice of America

  So now Papa Roger and I are listening to Voice of America, and it’s all quite different. There are two journalists commenting on the bad news of two days ago, a woman and a man, but it’s the woman who’s in charge, because she always asks the difficult questions and the man answers like a pupil who’s learned his times tables, or maybe he knows everything about our country because he’s lived in Brazzaville and works for this woman, who I imagine being very tall, very beautiful, with high heels like the ones Maman Pauline wears when she goes into town and drops in to say hello to Papa Roger at the Victory Palace Hotel, so my father can see she’s an elegant woman with her wrap knotted tightly about her and gold-plated earrings, which do look like gold from a distance.

 

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