‘Those two old northerners who come every week for consciousness-raising sessions, how come they’re members of the Union of Youth, when they’re not youthful and their hair is whiter than manioc flour?’
Bonaventure was always pushing me to the limit. It was true that Oyo Ngoki and Mokélé Mbembé were the kind of adult who looked as though they’d never been young, with their dark suits, and myopic glasses. Either they spoke to us as though we were two- or three-year-olds, or they used their own special language which one of them had picked up in Moscow, the other in Romania. Mfoumbou Ngoulmoumako, Bissoulou Ngoulmoumako and Dongo-Dongo Ngoulmoumako copied their way of speaking, using the same expressions, which they didn’t understand and in which every sentence contained the word ‘dialectic’, or, as an adverb, ‘dialectically’:
‘You need to consider the problem dialectically,’ Bissoulou Ngoulmoumako would say.
‘Dialectically speaking, our history has been written by the imperialists and their local lackeys, we must overthrow the system, the superstructure must not be allowed to outweigh the infrastructure,’ Dongo-Dongo would affirm.
We never forgot, though, that before the Revolution the three former corridor wardens were just bruisers with zero intelligence. Now the Director had given them an office close to his on the first floor. They shut themselves in there to prepare Pioneers Awake!, a propaganda sheet that they posted on the wall of the hut of the National Movement of Pioneers every Monday morning. We had to read this publication before going in to class.
In fact all Mfoumbou Ngoulmoumako, Bissoulou Ngoulmoumako and Dongo-Dongo Ngoulmoumako did was reproduce extracts from speeches by the President of the Republic that were reported back to them by the northerners, Oyo Ngoki and Mokélé Mbembé. Each issue also contained a passionate editorial by the Director, addressed to the President of the Republic. Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako worked hard on it, believing that the Head of State would read it on a Monday morning before summoning his government to lavish praise on him. He’d announce in his weekly column that the President of the Republic was invincible and had been sent to us by our Bantu ancestors. The saga of his life was one of the most extraordinary ever told on the black continent: as a teenager he had captured a crocodile by the tail on the bank of the River Kouyou, struck it with his bare hand, stunned it and brought it home alive to his grandmother, Maman Bowoulé, so she could cook it and feed it to the entire village. While our future President was busy terrorising the entire population of crocodiles who no longer dared even leave the water and come up onto the bank to breathe on account of the presence of this exceptional boy, his playmates were struggling to catch palm rats in their parents’ fields, or kill sparrows with catapults that couldn’t have broken so much as a tsetse fly’s foot. From which it can be seen that from a tender age our President was possessed of a sense of community spirit and a sense of sacrifice. He parleyed with mountain gorillas, protected elephants from poachers and spoke the language of the Pygmies, even though he had never actually learned it.
His second act of bravura was said to have taken place during the ethnic war between north and south, the former owing their victory to the intelligence of this precocious child, who advised the leader of his local combatants to dress up as an old lady and take him by the hand, as though he were her grandson. They crossed the line and arrived in the southerners’ camp, where, by eliminating their leader, Ngutu Ya Mpangala, and his lieutenant, Nkodia Nkoutata, they provoked a stampede, followed by the humiliating discovery, the next day, that they had actually been defeated by a toothless old lady and her grandson, and that neither of them possessed a single firearm. This exploit, and the adolescent’s intelligence in the art of war, so impressed the chief of Ombélé, the village where the prodigy lived, that he decided to send him to the military academy in Brazzaville. He was later posted to the Central African Republic, found himself in Cameroon with the rank of sergeant, and participated in the war being waged by the French against the Cameroons. When our country became independent, he was sent to Europe to complete his military training before returning to the fold with the rank of sub-lieutenant and all the aggression of a young wolf who wants to change everything as fast as possible. He had no time for the government he found in place, and therefore at the age of twenty-eight initiated the political upheaval which would carry him to power.
In his editorials, Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako underlined in bold that this was not a ‘coup d’état’, as was reported in certain books written by Europeans, who were known to be frontline enemies of our Revolution, because we’d claimed our independence and when they’d been slow about granting it, had shed our own blood for our liberty. The President’s mission was liberation, and he had fulfilled it with courage, and self-sacrifice. In creating the Congolese Workers’ Party, the Union of Socialist Youth of Congo, and the National Movement of Pioneers, he was simply obeying the word of our ancestors, whispered to him in his sleep. The days when he’d covered endless kilometres on foot with a piece of manioc and a bit of smoked crocodile meat for sustenance were behind him now. According to Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, the President was on a par with Jesus Christ, carrying on his shoulders all the sins of the Congolese people since the dawn of time…
I remember it was the first issue of Pioneers Awake! that confirmed that the government had decided to ban religion in all public institutions, including orphanages, with immediate effect, as the enemies of the Revolution were extremely keen to put a stop to our march towards the future. This same government decreed that the teaching of Marxism–Leninism should be our country’s priority. When we struggled to understand how Papa Moupelo could possibly be an undesirable, since he had nothing to do with politics, the news sheet said that it was because he was one of the accomplices of the imperialists, that they often used priests to undermine our youthful scientific socialist Revolution. We don’t know which, but one of Mfoumbou Ngoulmoumako, Bissoulou Ngoulmoumako or Dongo-Dongo Ngoulmoumako had drawn a crude caricature of our priest, showing him dressed as a magician from hell, hypnotising his audience, with the caption written in bold: Religion is the opiate of the people.
It was clear that Mfoumbou Ngoulmoumako, Bissoulou Ngoulmoumako and Dongo-Dongo Ngoulmoumako were incapable of running a news sheet which was so eloquent and intelligent in its expression. Most of the articles were thought up and written by Oyo Ngoki and Mokélé Mbembé, those two ‘oldsters’, who were probably also the ghost writers for Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako.
As for the hundred or so girls in the orphanage, they were put under the control of Madame Maboké, who spoke on behalf of the First Lady, President of the Revolutionary Union of Women in the Congo (RUWC).
The name of the President’s wife was constantly on Mme Maboké’s lips, and she would assure the girls that the First Lady was aware of their situation. On odd occasions she would arrive with an army of old mamas who would teach our young friends the rudiments of cooking with minuscule utensils which were supposedly appropriate to the age of the girls. Other times it was young girls who turned up to share with them the secrets of braiding and manicures. At these times the orphanage would be on the alert, and, in our separate dormitories, we’d rush to the window to catch a look at the ‘gazelles from Pointe-Noire’, as we called them, dressed in tight trousers and pointed heels, with their pagne pulled tight about them and their backsides popping like grains of corn in boiling palm oil. They’d wander about the yard and wave to us from a distance, until those bruisers Mpassi, Mvoumbi and Moutété appeared, objecting to these women from Pointe-Noire showing a kindly interest in us, when they scarcely even looked at them.
We longed to be little mice, and hide secretly in the girls’ building and watch what the gazelles from Pointe-Noire taught them. In any case, our fellow inmates of the opposite gender were wreathed in smiles – perhaps to show us they were happier than we were – and we’d hear the echo of their laughter or applause, the cause of which wasn’t clear, but which we joined in with anyway, from our own building
s, just to show them that we envied their happiness, and that we too would have liked to be girls like them, in these moments of delight.
Two hours later, the gazelles of Pointe-Noire crossed back over the yard, looking round for us, to thank us for having applauded even though we’d seen nothing, but we didn’t dare brave the three corridor wardens, who were hiding out somewhere, not to watch us, but to get a sight of these lovely creatures’ backsides. We would hear, with some sadness, the sound of an engine of a less tubercular variety than that of Papa Moupelo’s vehicle: it was Madame Maboké’s car. Not for one single moment had she taken her eyes off these young members of the Revolutionary Union of Women in the Congo, whose mission was to do the rounds of the orphanages, seeing to the proper education of our girls…
IN FACT, UNTIL THE YEAR the Revolution fell on us like a rainfall which even the most celebrated fetishers hadn’t seen coming, I believed the orphanage at Loango was not an institution for minors who were parentless, or had been mistreated, or who had been born into a problem family, but rather a school for the very gifted. Bonaventure was more realistic, he said it was a place where they kept all the kids no one wanted, because if you love someone, if you want them, you take them out, go for walks with them, you don’t shut them up in some old building, as if they were in captivity. He based this on his own experience, and on his own inability to understand how a mother such as his own, who was still alive, could leave him there, surrounded by all these other boys and girls, each with their own ‘serious problem’, which led inevitably to their admission to Loango.
In my mind, our studies at Loango were designed to make us superior to most other children in the Congo. This was the impression we got from Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako. He liked to boast that he was Director of one of those public establishments whose academic results were equal in every way to those of the state primaries, secondaries and lycées. He’d puff out his chest and declare proudly that the masters and teachers at Loango earned more than their colleagues at the Charles-Miningou primary, Roger-Kimangou secondary and even the Pauline-Kengué lycée, the most prestigious lycée in Pointe-Noire. He was careful not to admit that if these teachers were indeed better paid, it was no thanks to the charity of the President of the Republic. The running costs of the orphanage and the salaries of the staff were provided for by the descendants of the former kingdom of Loango, who wanted to show that their monarchy continued to exist, at least symbolically, through the generosity of its heirs. However, as I perceived it, our orphanage was separate from the rest of the Congo, in fact from the whole of the rest of the world. Since the school was in the hinterland, we knew nothing of the neighbouring agglomerations of Mabindou, Poumba, Loubou, Tchiyèndi, or our own economic capital, Pointe-Noire, which was spoken of as though it was the promised land Papa Moupelo used to talk to us about.
Yet the village of Loango was only about twenty kilometres from Pointe-Noire, and according to Monsieur Doukou Daka, our history teacher, it had once been the capital of the kingdom of Loango, founded in the 15th century by the ancestors of the Vili people and other southerners. It was here that their descendants had been taken into slavery. Monsieur Doukou Daka raged against the whites who had taken our strongest men, our most beautiful women, and piled them up in the ship’s hold to make that dreadful voyage to the land of the Americas, where they were branded with irons, some had their legs amputated, some were left with only one arm, because they’d tried to run away, even though it would have been impossible to find the path back to their village.
Monsieur Doukou Daka would turn his back, lower his voice, and look out of the window, as though worried he might be overheard, then confide in us, in aggrieved tones, that many of the rich business people in Loango had been involved in the trafficking and had sent their sons to a region of France called Brittany to study the secrets of the trade.
‘You see,’ he’d murmur. ‘Sometimes we were sold by our own people, and if ever, one day, you meet a black American, remember, he could be a member of your family!’
He seemed to bear a grudge against the Vili, particularly since he himself was a Yombé, an ethnic group despised by the Vili, who considered it a tribe of barbarians from the Mayombe forest. The Vili and the Yombés, even though they were in the majority in the Kouilou region, each held the other responsible for the misfortunes of our ancestors.
We were shocked when, with his arms pressed to his sides, as though to emphasise his disappointment, Monsieur Doukou Daka shouted:
‘What’s more, the Vili took the people of my own ethnic group into slavery and sold them to neighbouring kingdoms! So don’t come telling me that it was the white men who taught them about the bonds of slavery! White men still hadn’t arrived at that point. End of story!’
Then, to lighten the atmosphere a little, since we were astounded to learn that blacks had sold blacks, he said we must wake up to the fact that we lived in a place that was drenched in History, that the former palace of the Vili King was less than two kilometres from the orphanage, at Diosso, and that it had been transformed into a museum, which some of us would be lucky enough to visit in years to come, providing we passed our intermediate General School Certificate.
Meanwhile, in the school yard, the corridor supervisors began to notice that most of the children talked constantly about Pointe-Noire, that magical and mysterious town, much praised by Monsieur Doukou Daka, who had been born there. In an attempt to remove any temptation we might feel to run away to this paradise on earth, they informed us that for our own good we had been separated from the children of the economic capital, and were being kept on an island, the most beautiful island in the world. If we escaped we would end up in the sea, devoured by the hungriest sharks in the Atlantic Ocean. The sharks were evil spirits, they told us, whose innate and fatal wickedness was stirred up by the sorcerers of Pointe-Noire. Why else would the bodies found on the Côte Sauvage be those of minors? The tragedy played out the same way every time: the victim-to-be came face to face with Mami Wata, half-woman, half-fish, who leapt up out of the sea, bare-breasted, with golden hair falling down about her shoulders and eyes as blue as the sky under the midday sun. The woman smiled at the child, opening wide her arms. As the child moved towards her, crying ‘Maman! Maman!’, she broke into laughter, its echo whipping up the waves to anger, so that suddenly they rose higher than the tallest apartment blocks, while the fish-woman abruptly transformed into a tough old shark, dragging the poor little sproglet down into the briny deep. The next day everyone would say it was Nzinga, the ancestress of the Kongo kingdom, who had taken the life of the hapless child, when in fact it was all the work of a few sorceresses from Pointe-Noire, wearing the mask of the one we were all descended from, so it looked as though she was to blame for the tragedy. The corridor supervisors exploited our fear and doubt, pointing out that when a kid vanished on the Côte Sauvage, people always said they’d been eaten by a shark sent by the ancestress, Nzinga, even if the body was discovered two days later, without a single scratch, spewed up and rejected by the sea.
Monsieur Doukou Daka laughed at these improbable stories – why, he asked us, would our ancestress Nzinga send us down into the deep belly of the ocean when she was mother to all of us, and had given birth to the great kingdom of Kongo? Why would she set upon children, when she already had three of her own: the twins, N’vita and Mpaânzu a Nimi, and a daughter, Lukeni Lwa Nimi? If she hadn’t had them, we’d never have had the Kongo people, and our country would never have existed, he concluded…
We were not surprised when Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako struck Monsieur Doukou Daka off the list of teachers at Loango, and sent him to his own town of Pointe-Noire, since he seemed so fond of it. The Director had explained to his staff, in a long letter, that our history teacher was an imposter who incited the children to run away from the orphanage and taught them to hate the Vili, putting it about that they had collaborated with the whites in the slave trade and that the blacks also sold other blacks. Since the Department o
f School Inspections and the regional department of Primary and Secondary School Teachers was run by Vili, it was not difficult for Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako to obtain the head of Monsieur Doukou Daka on a platter, and get him sent to a school in Mpaka, an outlying suburb of Pointe-Noire. Another history teacher, Monsieur Montoir, replaced him. He was white, and taught us mostly French history, featuring none of the characters Monsieur Doukou Daka had taught us about. There was no more kingdom of the Kongo, no more kingdom of Loango, and we heard no more about the Vili, the Téké, the Yombé, and even less about our ancestress, Nzinga, and her children N’vita Numi, Mpaânzu a Nimi and Lukeni Lwa Nimi. It was in fact the first time many of us had ever seen a white man close up; we’d always thought people of that colour were imperialists working with the local lackeys to put a spoke in the wheels of our Revolution. The Director understood our concern and told us one day in his daily address, before the raising of the flag, and in the presence of a blushing Monsieur Montoir:
‘This white man is no imperialist, he is the exception that proves the rule, and at least what he teaches you will make you more intelligent than the little white children of France, because that imbecile Doukou Daka was an imposter, and I still wonder where he got his diploma from! Now, a nice round of applause for the white man!’
Black Moses Page 3