Black Moses

by Alain Mabanckou

  ‘That’s perfect, the front of the car’s already facing the exit!’

  The girls, meanwhile, merely worked through the steps of the dance of the Zairian Pygmies, solemnly observing the taboos on their sex which we boys knew had been dreamed up at the dawn of time by men, to stop women discovering the little pleasures of life. For example, they were forbidden to eat boa meat, even though it was considered a delicacy in our country. If they ate it anyway, their breasts would drop to their ankles. Perhaps that was why the girls among us believed that if they sat behind the wheel of a car like Papa Moupelo’s, they would sprout a little beard and their sexual organ would suddenly put on a growth spurt and turn into one like ours? At any rate, they distanced themselves from the boys playing at cars and discreetly held their fingers to their chest, as if the very act of looking for a few seconds at a boy pretending to drive a vehicle might bring them bad luck.

  The warders that worried Bonaventure so much, Old Koukouba and Little Vimba, stood a little apart, engaging in secret talks of their own, a behaviour we had never previously observed in them. Old Koukouba was yelling at his young colleague:

  ‘Stop pointing at the hut or they’re going to guess what’s happening and the Director will blame me!’

  Suddenly a great nervousness whipped through the crowd. The warders stood to attention like soldiers. Bonaventure and I were the last to look over towards the main building where Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako had just appeared on the platform with the six supervisors, the severe expression on their faces contrasting with the more relaxed impression the Director was struggling to convey.

  Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako was an old, fat, bald man of Bembé descent, a people known for settling the slightest disagreement with a knife, feeding children cat meat, and judging the wealth of any given person solely by the number of pigs he slaughtered during the New Year festival, weddings or periods of mourning. But which ethnic group did not stand accused of strange eating habits in that country? The Lari from the Pool region were known as caterpillar eaters; the Vili, on the other hand, from the Kouilou region, were coast dwellers and therefore said to be crazy for shark meat; the Tékés, present in several regions, were addicted to dog meat, while in the north of the country, a number of ethnic groups fed off the crocodile, even though they held the crocodile sacred.

  ‘He shouldn’t be smiling at us like that!’ said Bonaventure, stifling his sobs behind me.

  I turned to face him:

  ‘If they beat us, I swear I’ll beat you up later in the dormitory!’

  ‘It’s the Director – look at him! He’s trying to be nice, so we don’t cry when they tell us Papa Moupelo’s dead! I want to start crying right now, not afterwards! I want to be the first to cry, because if I cry after the others how will they know I’ve been crying too?’

  He was right up to a point: although the Director had for once put aside his dreadful beating stick, leaving the supervisors to do his dirty work, his apparent good humour didn’t make him seem any more human. The tell-tale twitching in his right hand told you something was missing between those fingers, clawed and keen as an eagle’s talons. Even when he plunged his hand into his pocket, pretending to scratch his thigh, he drew it out again almost at once, by reflex, and it dangled, ineffective and absurd, against his leg.

  His presence on the platform was like a staged event of such mediocrity that the strings were visible the moment he communicated with the wardens opposite him with clumsy eye-winking, which we all could easily interpret.

  The idiots playing at cars had stopped their little display and were trying to look like good little children, their eyes fixed, all the while, on the most feared man in the whole institution.

  After maybe twelve minutes, the Director reverted to the man we knew and hated most in all the world: his face locked and bolted, jaws clamped tight, drooping moustache. He didn’t usually persecute us at weekends, in case he got a sermon from Papa Moupelo, who once had told him that if he mistreated children he would have to answer for it one day on high, since those he was hurting were as like the Almighty as peas in a pod. What did we have to fear?

  Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako was preparing to make an announcement, and so far, it looked as though Bonaventure was right. It was the first time our priest had been late by more than an hour and a half, almost half the time he was due to spend with us.

  But even so, I was confident and refused to give up hope: Papa Moupelo would arrive any moment now, and would have his usual struggle to park in the main yard, as we stood by and applauded. He’d be wearing new robes, which he kept in a metal trunk, as he liked to tell us, to keep them safe from cockroaches and clothes moths.

  ‘I like to look after my clothes! I keep them in my trunk, with a few moth balls on top, to stop the mites spoiling them…’

  The odour of naphthalene mingled with that of our sweat. We never found a single clothes moth in our catechism rooms, probably thanks to this smell, which was ever present.

  Yes, Papa Moupelo would be here any moment, and as though all this had just been one of Bonaventure’s bad dreams, he’d hand out slips of paper bearing the words of old-fashioned songs, and we’d gather round him, clapping, and singing as loud as we could.

  My illusions were swiftly curtailed when, with a solemn air, Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako began to walk towards Papa Moupelo’s quarters, with the corridor wardens in pursuit. At a wink from his boss, Old Koukouba caught up with him, hammer in hand. Little Vimba was already inside, and emerged with a massive cardboard box, which he could scarcely shift.

  Bonaventure found another way to annoy me: ‘Moses, maybe that’s Papa Moupelo’s corpse, inside that big box!’

  ‘Kokolo, don’t call me Moses…’

  ‘Why do you call me Kokolo, then? You know I don’t like it.’

  ‘See my fist? You want it in your face?’

  We were too scared to go up to the box, even though we were dying with curiosity. Little Vimba was slitting it open with a Stanley knife, deliberately protracting the suspense.

  ‘Why are you all hanging back like that? Come on, over here!’ ordered the Director.

  Inside the packaging we found red kerchiefs, and a plaque on which was written:

  MEETING HUT FOR THE NATIONAL MOVEMENT OF PIONEERS OF THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION OF CONGO

  Horrified, Bonaventure whispered to me:

  ‘That’s the plaque they’re going to put on Papa Moupelo’s tomb!’

  The Director was rapping out orders to his wardens, like some harassed master of ceremonies. He showed Little Vimba the spot where the sign should be fixed, so it would be visible as soon as you entered the orphanage. Then Vieux Koukouba was asked to hammer it up, since the Director insisted it should be the ‘doyen’ of his staff who had the privilege of putting it in place. This particular warden, who we secretly referred to as the ‘Australopithecus’, looked like an ancient chameleon, with his crooked back and eyes that pointed out left and right, without him moving his head.

  But Old Koukouba couldn’t get the nails in, and kept dropping them at his own feet. He leaned over to pick them up with clenched teeth, and we realised, seeing how much pain it caused him, that he had long since parted company with his cartilages.

  Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako yelled at him:

  ‘What the hell are you doing man?’

  The old man apologised profusely:

  ‘Boss, sir, it’s the sun in my eyes. Instead of one nail, I see four or five, and I don’t know which one to hit, but I hit it anyway. And another thing, these modern nails, they’re smaller than the old ones we used to make coffins with, even the corpses never complained, because those nails…’

  ‘Don’t start in on the Pointe-Noire morgue again, we all know you used to work there! Don’t worry, if you miss it, we’ll send you right back!’

  We didn’t understand what the Director meant by this, but all of a sudden Old Koukouba straightened himself up and his eyes swivelled in their orbits as he focussed hard on hammering h
ome the one nail he’d managed to pick up off the ground. He spat on the spot where he meant to plant it, and drew aim with the hammer held high above his head. Alas, again, he missed his mark…

  Out of sheer frustration, Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako snatched the hammer from his hands, grabbed a nail himself and struck one mighty blow, the loud clang terrifying all three hundred and three of us orphans, and even the colony of cotton birds perched in the filao trees. After a dozen more blows, he stepped back, and looked with satisfaction at the plaque which was now nailed to the door of Papa Moupelo’s room. He called the corridor wardens standing round him, and murmured something to them. The six men were falling over each other in their haste to hand out the red scarves and show us how to tie them round our necks. Each of us looked at our scarf, thinking it was similar to the flag these same wardens had fixed to the mast a month earlier, and which now fluttered in the middle of the yard, with a curious emblem on it: two green palm trees encircling a crossed hoe and yellow hammer, with a five pointed gold star above.

  ‘So Moses, you still think Papa Moupelo isn’t dead?’

  ‘Shut it, Kokolo!’

  Back on the platform again, still with his escort of wardens, Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako launched into grand-orator mode, explaining how we were the builders and protectors of the Scientific Socialist Revolution. On his jacket, just above ‘where his heart beat’, as some people put it, gleamed a badge with three letters on: CWP. You had to get up really close to read, in small writing under the letters: Congolese Workers’ Party…

  Halfway through his speech, which we applauded throughout, under pressure from the menacing looks of the wardens, the Director went out of his way to explain to us the significance of the emblems on the flag, which were also to be found on our kerchiefs. The red symbolised our country’s struggle for independence during the 1960s; green was the colour of nature, so glorious, so bountiful, throughout our land; yellow, the wealth of our natural resources, pillaged and stolen by Europe, until our emancipation. The hoe and the hammer were there to exhort us to work, to engage in manual labour, while the yellow star was to remind us always to look ahead, to track down the enemies of the Revolution, including those living in our own country, with the same colour skin as ours, who were referred to as the ‘local lackeys of imperialism’. In his view they were the most dangerous adversaries of all, blending in with the population, the better to undermine us from within. And in our orphanage there were already some local lackeys of imperialism.

  His voice became more paternal, with the occasional catch in it:

  ‘Yes, dear children, a new age is dawning, a liberating rainbow sent to us all the way from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics! We will be answerable for the Congo of tomorrow and of the day after tomorrow if we don’t settle our scores with those who for so long have trampled on our dignity, stamped on our gods, raped our most beautiful women, and imprisoned the most beautiful, the strongest and racially purest of our children. This new age belongs to you, my children, you must not allow the imperialists and their local lackeys to deter you from your goal. They know how to lull us to sleep, and strip us of all we possess. I will even go as far as to share with you the wise words of Jomo Kenyatta, the great militant and President of Kenya, our brotherland: When the Whites arrived in Africa, we had land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed: when we opened them again, we found the Whites had the land and we had the Bible. Also remember, dear children, the words of wisdom spoken by the President of our own Republic, for he too is a wise man, he too has a Jovian appetite for communicating and building bridges, lantern in hand, illuminating the dark labyrinth of our innermost hearts and minds. ‘What is this Revolution?’ I hear you cry. ‘Yes indeed, what is it? The Revolution is something we create every day, by changing our old habits, and being vigilant in the face of the deviousness of Imperialism and its local lackeys. You’ll find our President has made it quite clear: we must not get so carried away by Revolution and scientific socialism that we start believing they have magic powers. They are there simply to stimulate and guide our actions, not to act as lucky talismans. The development of our country, the development of every area of our lives in no way depends for its success on our being more-revolutionary-than-thou, but on our ability to act with patience, courage and good sense. Harmonious transformation, not fake transfiguration, revolution and progress, not depersonalisation, these should be our goals if we wish the Congolese Revolution, with its captivating youthful dynamism, to maintain that originality for which it has become a byword within the vast, unstoppable movement of world revolution, so incompatible with the slumber imposed on us by Religion until now…’

  We listened to the Director with one ear, while the other was trained on the main entrance to the orphanage as we continued to wonder what had happened to our Papa Moupelo since the Director even avoided mentioning his name, as though he had never existed.

  At the end of the speech, the applause went on for at least ten minutes, before the corridor wardens told us to disperse. Some, like Bonaventure and myself, went over to the library to do our homework for the next week. Others dashed off to the play area, behind the main building. The girls went back to their quarters where they were met by their governess, Makilia Mabé and her five colleagues, Marianne Konkosso, Justine Batalébé, Pierette Moukila, Célestine Bouanga and Henriette Mayalama, all of them Bembés, hired by Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako.

  Our sleeping quarters were so huge that sometimes if you wanted to go over and have a word with another of the children you had to take really big strides, and there had never been as much noise as the evening they announced the Revolution. Our quarters comprised twenty numbered dormitories, each with ten beds, sometimes bunks, sometimes placed side by side with a small space between, as was the case for me and Bonaventure, so that it felt like living in a big, lively neighbourhood in which the smallest item of gossip would be picked over and analysed until late into the night.

  Speculation over Papa Moupelo’s absence spread from one end of the dormitory to the other, and led to lively discussion throughout all twenty dormitories. The priest had gone back to his native Zaire, they said, where the faithful believed he was a messenger from God, even though he didn’t have a big grizzled beard like the prophets in the Bible. Overjoyed by his triumphant welcome, they said, he had built a church from okumé planks financed by the donations of the local population and the financial support of President Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga who, according to the same rumours, walked with a stick and wore a hat made from leopard skin when he wasn’t busy throwing his opponents into the River Congo or having them shot and buried in a stadium. Across the water, the lame recovered the use of their limbs when Papa Moupelo cried, ‘Take up your bed and walk!’; barren women brought forth twins while impotent men woke in the morning with their whatsit waving up above their navel. In short, Papa Moupelo had gone to a world that was more tolerant than ours and where he could do miracles which he couldn’t here because the Director and his corridor wardens didn’t believe. On this hopeful note we drifted off to sleep, some of us dreaming that Papa Moupelo was now dressed all in white, with wings on which he could fly up to paradise, while others like me thought he was already seated at the right hand of God.

  When, over the following days, we passed Papa Moupelo’s old rooms with hearts heavy from grief and regret, we pictured our orphaned shades still singing away inside, clapping their hands and dancing to the rhythm of the Pygmies of Zaire. Except we couldn’t imagine the priest having much fun with them. The smell of naphthalene was stronger than ever, probably because it was buried deep inside us, or else because we couldn’t think of Papa Moupelo without picturing his clothes packed away in an iron trunk and protected by the chemical that repelled or wiped out every kind of insect.

  With every week that passed, the precious words we’d memorised with the help of our priest faded a little, along with the tunes of the songs that once gave us courage to face
the week at school…

  THE DIRECTOR HAD BEEN pulling strings to get his nephews Mfoumbou Ngoulmoumako, Bissoulou Ngoulmoumako and Dongo-Dongo Ngoulmoumako onto an ideological training course in Pointe-Noire so they could later become section leaders of the National Movement of Pioneers for our orphanage. They still remained under the control of their paternal uncle and particularly under that of two members of the USYC (Union of Socialist Youth of Congo), which was seen as the ‘nursery’ of the Congolese Workers’ Party because it was within this organisation that the government identified the young people who would go on one day to occupy positions of political responsibility in our country. The Director’s three nephews were thus promoted to a glorious future, which annoyed his three other nephews, on his mother’s side, Mpassi, Moutété and Mvoumbi, who were still stuck in their jobs as corridor wardens, though they too dreamed of becoming the orphanage’s section leaders of the National Movement of Pioneers. Unable to express their discontent to their uncle, they took it out on us instead. Their uncle had clearly favoured the paternal line over a family mix which might have calmed things down. Mpassi, Moutété and Mvoumbi felt they’d become underlings to the Director’s other nephews and we revelled in the stormy atmosphere among the wardens, which sometimes looked like spilling over into violence, until the Director intervened and threatened to replace them with northerners – which was enough to bring them to their senses…

  It does not fall to everyone to become a section leader of the Union of Socialist Youth of Congo. The government sifted through the applications carefully, taking account of the ethnic origin of the candidates. As the northerners were in power – in particular the Mbochis – the leaders of the USYC were also Mbochis, an ethnic group which represented a scant 3.5 per cent of the national population. In other words, Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako had had to fight to fix the appointment of his three nephews, who were not Mbochi from the north, but Bembé from the south. In fact he had only partly got what he wanted because although they accepted his request, the political leaders of the Kouilou region suggested he go halves: his nephews could be section leaders, but under the command of the two northerners, Oyo Ngoki and Mokélé Mbembé, who in turn would be accountable to the national division at the annual congress in Brazzaville, to be attended by the President of the Republic himself.