Chapter Eleven
Johnny, Known as Mad Dog
He treated me like a goddamn simpleton, a retard. Who did he think I was? Had he forgotten that he owed everything to me, and that if he was now the commander, it was because I myself hadn’t wanted to be? I knew people were ungrateful, but this was the limit!
He’d risen a few notches in the world since those days, the jerk—a guy whose only pleasure until then had been to come in his pants while watching women writhe in pain from the pepper he rubbed in their eyes, because he couldn’t fuck them normally the way we did. Now he wasn’t only the leader of our little group, the Mata Mata, but after the capture of the radio and TV stations he’d been promoted by our new president and had been made commander of all the militias. Really, you should never be surprised at anything in life, for that’s often the way things turn out—the nonentities become leaders, and the most intelligent ones are always ignored. And he was a nonentity, Giap—a real zero. He wasn’t even clever enough to think of a good nom de guerre for himself, and if it hadn’t been for my brilliant suggestion, which had transformed him into a new man, he would have been stuck forever with that ridiculous name Pili Pili he’d thought was so cool. It was even thanks to me that he’d been recruited in the first place.
When the fighting had started, it was the usual story: all we knew was that two political leaders were struggling for power after a round of elections, which one guy claimed were rigged and the other guy swore were democratic and transparent. We didn’t give a damn, because we knew what the politicians in our country were like. Con men all. They got you drunk with words that were sweeter than fresh palm wine, and just as you let yourself be lulled by the soothing purr of those fine words, they leaped on your back to shinny up the greasy pole they valued so much—and once they were at the top, rich and well fed, they treated you like shit. In this particular battle, the two camps had mobilized their supporters, who’d progressed from shouting insults to exchanging punches, then to throwing rocks, then to shooting at each other with pistols. Finally they wound up trading heavy-arms fire.
It was at the height of these disputes that one fine morning we saw newcomers in our district—young men, heavily armed, who obviously weren’t messing around. They rousted us out of our homes; they closed down the marketplace; they raided the school and brought the little kids—frightened, confused, some of them crying—to the spot where they’d gathered everyone together. They told us they were with the Movement For the Democratic Liberation of the People, the MFDLP, and that they were fighting against the partisans of the Movement For the Total Liberation of the People, the MFTLP. They asked us to take up arms and help them. MFDLP versus MFTLP—to us, frankly, it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. Why should we take sides?
Then they explained things to us. The leader of the MFDLP was from our region, so his party was automatically our party and any man or woman who was against him was a traitor. Be on the lookout for traitors in the region! This great party that apparently was ours had won the elections—but the MFTLP, which was then in power, refused to abide by the results. Its members wanted to stay in office forever so that they could continue to pillage the national treasury, gobble up the income from the country’s oil and diamonds, and above all bully us. The situation was dire, we were told: it was essential that everyone who was a native of our region—and this meant the majority of the residents in our district of the city—take up arms to chase the president out of office and give his tribesmen, the Mayi-Dogos, a lesson they’d never forget.
I’m sure the militants weren’t expecting to hear the response they got. Speaking in our name, a number of elders from the district, both men and women, refused to believe the tales told by these individuals, rabble-rousers who’d come from god knows where. The elders told them in no uncertain terms that they didn’t like being taken for idiots and that they were familiar with political tactics: when all was going well for the politicians, they ignored the people and no one ever saw them, whereas when they were in trouble they came and stirred up ill will among the ethnic groups to keep themselves in power.
“We’re sick of your nonsense—it’s nothing but a pack of lies. Go away and leave us in peace! We don’t want to see you in our district anymore!” one woman had finally shouted. All of us applauded.
Hearing this, the young militants—zealots all—became angry. They clubbed four people with the butts of their guns and threatened to kill two others, among them the woman who’d shouted the words we applauded. Since this big mess of a civil war had done away with the national army that could have protected us, the people who felt like objecting were cowed. They swallowed their protests and said nothing.
Taking advantage of our silence and the relative order imposed by the militants, a man I’d never seen until then came forward. He was older than most of the commandos, had a serious air, wore a suit and tie, and so on. He must have been their leader, for as soon as he made a signal someone handed him a bulging briefcase. He pulled out a bunch of color photos and shoved them under our noses. They showed mutilated corpses, people with frightful machete wounds, skin festering with burns . . . unbearable things. I closed my eyes, didn’t want to see any more. Then the guy started to speak.
The photos, he said, were of people from our ethnic group and our region who’d been attacked by Mayi-Dogo bandits in the pay of our current president. These thugs captured pregnant women and dismembered them alive; they crushed babies to death; they ran red-hot irons over the backs of our men; they chopped off noses, ears, and arms—committed countless atrocities. It seemed incredible that anyone had managed to photograph all that, but we shuddered in horror.
“We have to avenge our people!” the man said over and over. “For if we do nothing, the Mayi-Dogos (those stinking rats!) will kill us all—our women, our children, our chickens, and our goats.”
I must admit that, like the individuals who’d protested aloud and been beaten for their words, I didn’t believe what he was saying, and for a very simple reason: until that day, until the very moment he’d shown up to tell us these things, we’d never had any problem with the Mayi-Dogos. Moreover, among the young people our age, no one even knew who was a Mayi-Dogo and who wasn’t. Most of us had been born in the city; we’d never set foot in the native regions of our parents, and very few of us spoke the tribal patois. Our language was that of the city—a lingua franca, often coded, which we spoke among ourselves and which our parents, whether they were from the north, south, east, or west, couldn’t make head or tail of. We had our neighborhood soccer teams, and if there was any rivalry or fistfighting, it was with guys from other districts when they beat us at soccer, or won prizes for their elegant clothes in SAPE competitions, or stole our girlfriends. We’d never lived our lives in tribal terms. Besides, wasn’t my current girl a Mayi-Dogo? I adored her. And I called her Lovelita, a name I’d taken from a romantic song I’d heard on the radio.
And now, all of a sudden, these militiamen were revealing that we were two different peoples, that we were enemies. We didn’t know it, but in reality there were secular hatreds between us, hatreds that were just waiting for an opportunity to flare up. The proof? That they’d been so well hidden, of course! Hard to believe, right?
But that wasn’t all. We were also told that because a party leader was a native of the same region our mother or father came from, we automatically owed him our support; his party became our party, and refusing to join it was tantamount to betraying our native region. This was pretty hard to swallow. What was so special about being from the same village, the same region, or the same tribe? For me, nothing! At least until I heard that man speak.
He began his talk by introducing himself as a native of the region. That didn’t impress me much, since we were all natives of the region—or rather, of our country. It didn’t impress me, because even though all of us had roots in the same region and the same tribe, our parents’ generation had been rife with thievery, betrayals, jealous
ies, and feuds. I even knew of two guys who’d killed each other over a stolen rooster—a petty quarrel that had gotten out of hand. And not only had they been from the same village and the same tribe, they’d even been from the same clan. So once again you’d have to point to something more than the hallowed tribe if you wanted me to swear blind allegiance to a politician.
And then suddenly everything got turned around: the man said he was a doctor of something or other, a professor at some university. At that point I pricked up my ears. He was an intellectual! In our country, the people who were widely admired, especially by kids, were politicians, soldiers, musicians, soccer players. No one looked up to intellectuals, and certainly not to professors. But I had great respect for them. They had impressive diplomas and spoke flawless French; they were more intelligent than politicians because they’d read a great many books on politology, polemology, pharmacology, phrenology, phenomenology, topology, geology—too many things for me even to mention (since I can cite only the disciplines I’ve heard of, and I’m sure they’d read books in fields I’ve never heard of). Some of them had libraries where the books were piled up to the ceiling and spread all over the floor for lack of space; yet this didn’t prevent them from continuing to buy more, so that they could keep nourishing their brains already saturated with knowledge. That’s what an intellectual is. So believe me, if I were asked to take the word of a soldier, a businessman, a magician, or an intellectual, I wouldn’t hesitate to put my faith in the intellectual. With so much knowledge in their heads, people like that couldn’t possibly lie.
In any case, I myself was already a bit of an intellectual, and if anyone in this district could understand what our countryman was saying, it was me. I had completed fourth grade, after all! So my mind immediately felt an intellectual rapport with the mind of this doctor of something or other, and I realized that the Mayi-Dogos were actually our secular enemies and that we had to kill them. I applauded. That must have pleased him, and I was the first to be recruited. It wasn’t Giap.
Right away I was assigned an important, even preeminent role in the cell that our party, the MFDLP, wound up organizing in our district. The leader of the cell was a young man who’d come with the organizers and who called himself Major Rambo. The name Rambo wasn’t typical of our region, and I knew immediately it was a nom de guerre he’d taken from some American film, since I’d seen dozens of them. I was the second in command, and was given the task of recruiting young people not only in the district but also in the surrounding villages—recruiting them by force, if necessary. Since charity begins at home, I decided to start by signing up my immediate friends, and it’s a fact that the most difficult to recruit was the guy who just now was treating me like an idiot.
I’ve always said that it helps to be an intellectual, because then you can grasp things very quickly. This has been the case with me, for even if I did quit school after the fourth grade, I was actually at fifth-grade level. But Giap, whose brain was slow to catch fire, didn’t always understand the need for the battle we had to wage.
“Why should I fight the Mayi-Dogos?” he snapped at me with a scornful expression. “They’ve never done anything to me. Tell me—you know me pretty well: Who’s my best friend in the whole world? Even you aren’t as close to me as he is. Who is it?”
“Dovo.”
“And who’s Dovo? He wouldn’t happen to be a Mayi-Dogo, now, would he? Well, I’m not joining up with you. I don’t get into fights with my friends.”
“You don’t understand anything! He’s not your friend because he’s a Mayi-Dogo. That has nothing to do with it. You’re buddies because both of you are troublemakers—you can sell a rotten fish to someone and make him think you’ve just caught it. You’ve even tried to pull that trick on me! But at the moment I’m not talking about buddies or friends or fish. I’m talking about politics. Our current president is a Mayi-Dogo. He runs a corrupt and tribalist government that serves only the interests of his native region.”
“Look me in the eye and tell me: Do you know anyone who chose his native region or his native village? Aren’t we all born somewhere by chance? You could have been born a Mayi-Dogo, too.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t. Do you like staying poor while your buddy is rich, or will become rich, simply because one of his tribesmen is in power? Because whoever’s in power controls the country’s oil income and—”
“That’s not true,” he interrupted. “I know a lot of MayiDogos who are poor just like you and me. You think the president gives them a thought when he’s raiding the coffers? He thinks first of his own pockets, then of his children and nephews, and then of the bootlickers that hang around him. Don’t be taken in by those politicos, my friend—let them fight it out among themselves, and let them kill each other if they want to.”
“You don’t understand. If you found out they were doing something shady, you’d take up arms against them right away! They’re arrogant, they think they’re smarter than we are, and above all they’re always insulting us. What’s more,” I flung at him, “they’re threatening our power—and that’s worse!”
He laughed at me, the shit.
“ ‘Our power’? I didn’t know you had any power. How come you’re not tooling around in a Mercedes, instead of pushing a broom for a bunch of Malian and Lebanese shopkeepers?”
At that point I almost lost my temper, but with an effort I controlled myself and kept my cool. I said, confidently and enthusiastically:
“You’ll see. All of that will change when we return to power.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” he demanded. His sluggish brain still didn’t understand what I was talking about.
“Well—us,” I retorted. “If one man from our region has power, it’s our power.”
He laughed sarcastically.
“So if a guy from our tribe becomes president, the mosquitoes will respectfully avoid us and will sting only the people from tribes that aren’t in power? No more malaria for us, right? All of a sudden we’ll be able to stuff our faces every day while other tribes are dying of hunger. Plus, overnight I’ll acquire enough money to buy the multisystem VCR I’ve been dreaming about for the past two years. Paradise, huh?”
Honestly, I nearly wept at his crass stupidity. I couldn’t understand him at all. What did power have to do with mosquitoes and malaria? Or with the fact that sometimes we didn’t have enough to eat? He was always earthbound, Giap. He saw only what he encountered in daily life, and not the ideals that ought to guide us. It wasn’t worth the trouble—I decided to let the matter drop. Too bad for him. Impossible to get anything out of that ignoramus; yet he would have made a great soldier, with those bulging calf muscles and biceps (even though he couldn’t get a hard-on like a real man). Perhaps he’d closed his mind because he thought all those ideas were my own? So then I tried a sledgehammer argument, the one that had toppled me. Or rather, I invoked the imposing authority behind the argument that had led me to support going to war with the MayiDogos, those Mayi-Dogos who up till then had successfully made us believe we were all brothers and sisters sharing one country.
“Did you see the guy in the suit and tie who came to speak to us the first day? Well, he’s a doctor.”
“So why didn’t he give us medicines to help the sick? All he did was wave those horrible photos around, and then he left.”
“No, no,” I said patiently. “He isn’t the sort of doctor who takes care of sick people. He’s the kind who has diplomas and who has read half of all the books in the world.”
“You mean even books written in Chinese?”
“Yes.”
“In Kikongo?”
“Yes.”
“In Kpellé?”
I’d never heard of that language, much less of any books being written in it, but I responded with the confidence proper to an intellectual:
“Yes.”
He remained silent for a moment. Then, with a triumphant air, as if he’d hit upon an insuperable difficulty for our doctor:
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“Does he have his elementary school diploma?”
“Of course! Ten times more than that. He has two doctorates.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’s intelligent and an intellectual.”
“And what’s that, exactly—an intellectual?”
Just as I’d suspected—he didn’t even know what an intellectual was.
“An intellectual is a man who’s extremely intelligent and who has read a great many books. Even when he’s asleep, his brain keeps working away, finding solutions to problems that don’t yet exist.”
“Aha!” he exclaimed triumphantly. “You see? He creates problems! Where there aren’t any, he creates them—and then he finds solutions. He creates false problems so that he can find false solutions. Like this business with the Mayi-Dogos. You know there have never been any problems between them and us. Besides, your girlfriend, Lovelita—isn’t she a Mayi-Dogo? Are you going to kill her, too?”
My god, his mind was a mess! And he was always so flatfooted and unimaginative. What did my girlfriend have to do with it? Instead of conceiving of the situation on a higher level, as a battle for power—power that we ought to win and keep—he was unable to think of anything but our personal lives. He continued to speak, and got more and more heated. To hear him, you’d have thought that he was the intellectual and I was the village idiot.
“Do you really believe that because a guy has an elementary school diploma and knows how to read Chinese, Kikongo, and Kpellé, he knows what people’s lives are like? That he knows how much suffering we all endure? I bet he doesn’t even know whether the rooster or the duck covers its female longer when it mates. And you’re going to kill Lovelita for a guy like him? I thought you were smarter than that.”
“You leave Lovelita out of this!” I warned. “Nobody’s asking us to kill all the Mayi-Dogos. We’re only being asked to fight some of them—the ones who blindly follow the current president just because he’s from their region or a member of their ethnic group. That’s called tribalism, and we should resist tribalism because it’s bad for our country. It has nothing to do with Lovelita.”
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