Black Moses

by Alain Mabanckou

  I didn’t doubt for a moment what Tala-Tala told me. For a long time I had been aware that in our country, twins are born with supernatural powers. At least, I said to myself, they had finally done something useful with their lives, and perhaps the guilt for gouging out their comrade’s eye would lie less heavily upon them…

  We slept in the Grand Marché in Pointe-Noire with some other teenagers we’d found there, each occupying a stall and acting as though it was their own private property. We had to clear out before five in the morning, though, when the market sellers from all over town arrived in lorries with exhaust pipes that rattled like damp farts. The people we feared most were the fish sellers and the vegetable sellers, who, in November, arrived at the weekends around two in the morning. They stared at us from a distance in silence, and their presence alone made us shudder. Legend had it that they actually sold something other than fish and vegetables, that their business was just a cover to mask their sorcery. From November onwards they transformed the Grand Marché into a huge meeting place for the scum of Pointe-Noire and bartered the souls of those due to be ‘eaten’ during the end-of-year celebrations. This didn’t mean tearing them apart and boiling them up in a cooking pot! Each soul for sale was symbolically represented by a fish or a vegetable, and the person who’d been sold would then suddenly fall sick and die without anyone understanding what was wrong with them, despite the attentions of doctors and healers, who all drew a blank. Only the fetishers who came to the funerals were able to ‘see’ with their third eye that the person had been ‘eaten’, that his soul had been traded at the Grand Marché and there was nothing to be done…

  The fish and vegetable sellers gave us a terrible time if we slept too deep and forgot to get up, because we were exhausted and had spent the day wandering around, pinching meat kebabs from the old mamas who sold them along the main highways, or stealing electrical gadgets from the Moroccan shops on the Avenue of Independence, offloading them quickly in bars, and fighting with rival gangs who objected to our presence in the capital.

  The twins’ success in seizing control of the Grand Marché from the other gangs was due to the fact that the people we met there were old friends from the orphanage in Pointe-Noire, who remembered the time the two brothers had gouged out the eye of an older boy. In my opinion, though, that wasn’t the real reason they had become big shots in the market. I think it was mostly because they had confronted a young man who had ruled the roost in these parts before we arrived, and was known as Robin the Terrible.

  Robin the Terrible was head of the oldest, most organised and feared gang in Pointe-Noire. Before long there was a face-off, and it occurred as soon as Robin the Terrible heard the twins were trying to oust him, and proclaim themselves bosses of his territory. Along with ten members of his gang, he dashed over to Chez Gaspard, the restaurant where we usually spent the day waiting for the customers to give us a few coins as they came out. At that time our gang had only a dozen or so members, most of them little clowns who would never do anything brave unless the twins were at their side.

  As soon as I saw Robin the Terrible I felt my legs give way under me, but I tried not to show the twins I was intimidated by him, though he was a big guy, with very dark skin and the muscular physique of a Benin fisherman. I had heard his ‘legend’ from some boys who’d joined us after being kicked out of his group on one of his whims, which according to them were wildly unpredictable. He was nicknamed Robin the Terrible because he saw himself as Robin Hood, the hero of the Middle Ages, who hid out with his band of brigands in a forest in Europe and robbed the rich to hand out money to the poor. Except that Robin the Terrible had never set foot in a forest and took money from rich and poor alike. The same boys said his obsession with Robin Hood went back to childhood, when he’d shut himself up in the library at St Jean Bosco Church after school and read the adventures of his favourite character, finally putting a face to his name. He loved the colour illustrations, but he’d get in a muddle, turn back to the previous page, read it again out loud, scratching his head, wondering: ‘Why is Little John, Robin Hood’s friend, called “little” John, when he’s not little at all, the whole point is he’s tall and strong, and he’s the chief of the outlaws in the forest?’ A few pages later, he would almost jump for joy when he realised that Little John had been head of the outlaws before Robin Hood turned up, and was not going to yield a shred of influence without putting up a fight. Little John and Robin Hood were suspicious of each other from the start, because the cock of the yard won’t let a newcomer take over and give all the other birds the impression he’s the one ruling the roost now. He admired Little John’s courage in challenging Robin Hood to a duel with a stick before the two men became best friends forever. It was a lesson in survival he would learn early on himself, and which would later serve him well in the streets of Pointe-Noire where, if you wanted to gain respect, you couldn’t just shout at someone, you also had to flex your muscles and defend your territory by whatever means you could. If your opponent was stronger, then, like Little John, you were better off smoking the pipe of peace with him, becoming his ally, not his opponent.

  Later, when he quit school, he ran away from his parents’ home in order to live, as he put it, like Robin Hood. There was a little forest in the Comapon quarter, with just a few mango and eucalyptus trees that no longer even produced any fruit. Robin the Terrible would sit at the foot of one of the eucalyptus trees, bored stiff, with not one single kid prepared to join in his adventure. So he ditched the idea of the forest and took to roaming the streets of Pointe-Noire, since for him streets were like forests too. He made himself a bow, dressed in clothes he claimed were medieval, when in fact he stole them from the flea market on the port at Pointe-Noire, except for the green hood, which he’d had made by the Malian tailors in the Grand Marché and which was much envied. He was the only young bandit in town who went round with bow and arrows. Of course you had to know how to use such a weapon, because although it looked pretty basic it required a lot of skill in the handling, and regular practice, which he lacked. So the very sight of his outfit and his weapon had the bandits of Pointe-Noire, especially the ones at the Grand Marché, fleeing or falling to their knees before him. He controlled the whole territory, and sometimes you would even read accounts of his adventures in the town newspapers.

  Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala were a threat to his regime. Robin the Terrible wasn’t fooled: he knew that twin-ness conveyed secret powers. For this reason, he came to the twins and asked them to become deputies of his gang.

  ‘Power can’t be given,’ Tala-Tala replied curtly. ‘You’ll have to be our deputy, or else fight and show your men you’re stronger than us!’

  ‘That’s easy to say – you’re two against one!’

  The twins looked at each other, and Songi-Songi suggested:

  ‘Keep your bow and arrows, we’ll fight with our bare hands!’

  Those of us in the twins’ gang were astounded. Why was he proposing such an unequal contest?

  Robin the Terrible leaped at the opportunity and stood poised with his arrow. Before his right hand could even draw back the string of his bow, Songi-Songi pounced on him like a cat and seized his weapon, while Tala-Tala snatched his quiver. It all happened so quickly, we scarcely had time to blink, Tala-Tala was using the arrow to gouge out Robin the Terrible’s right eye, while the other members of his gang all turned on their heels in terror and ran. The five or six who were left – too frightened to run – swore allegiance to the twins and joined our gang.

  At the sound of police sirens approaching we quickly made ourselves scarce, and Robin the Terrible ran off too, because he knew the police wouldn’t care about his eye, they’d just ask him about the various crimes and misdemeanours he’d committed in the town since he’d become a self-styled Robin Hood.

  Some time later, Robin the Terrible begged the twins to be allowed to join our gang.

  ‘I’ll stop being Robin Hood, but please let me be Little John…’
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br />   Tala-Tala answered witheringly:

  ‘You can’t be Robin Hood, or Robin the Terrible either. It’s over! And you can’t be Little John, because we’ve got a Little John, but we’re calling him “Little Pepper”, because he proved his worth with pepper, and you’ll just be an ordinary member of the gang, like all the rest…’

  Robin the Terrible looked like a pirate now, with his little green hat and a piece of cloth covering his eye. But finding himself the laughing stock of those who’d previously trembled at the sight of him, he vanished from circulation. We never saw him at the Grand Marché, and one day someone from his old gang came and told us the body of his former boss had been fished out of the River Tchinouka, having been stabbed and thrown into the water by gangsters from the Mbota quarter, whose chief claimed he’d once stolen his old ma’s savings from the Grand Marché…

  AFTER A YEAR AND A HALF of living under the twins’ protection and carrying out all sorts of jobs for them – stealing scooters or car tyres, mugging whites in the town centre, setting ambushes for lovers near the Martyrs’ Bridge, then stealing their purses – I felt increasingly like their second-in-command. I was proud of my nickname of Little Pepper, since it meant they acknowledged I had guts. Lots of people in our gang thought I was called that because I was always sticking my nose into things – or my ‘snout’, as they said, to wind me up – and was as excitable as a swamp mosquito. It’s true, I was in on everything. I was the back-up for all the twins’ tricks, and sometimes I was even the unpaid instigator, because afterwards, when they came to divide the spoils, I’d be left like a dog who’d hunted like a mad thing, and got not even a bone from his masters in return.

  Since I was their scout, I knew where all the usual suspects hung out, the talentless crooks, the petty thieves who’d get into a scrap at a street party, or steal Michelin tyres, the trainee burglars, the blade-carrying pickpockets, the swindlers with a criminal record so long that the judge would release them after an hour saying, irritably:

  ‘Don’t let me catch you at it again! I’m sick of you petty criminals holding up my retirement!’

  Not only had I changed physically, I also spoke like the other members of the gang, and had managed to cast off the cultivated speech required of us in Loango. Now I was the one dreaming of being Robin Hood, adopting his name, possessing what had eluded the late Robin the Terrible: that character’s generous heart. And if by chance I found a mango thief being chased by some redneck from the Grand Marché, I’d chase the pursuer, I’d helpfully put out my foot and the redneck would go down, while the delinquent, to my huge satisfaction, was able to scarper, jabbing his right thumb at me to express his thanks. This was my way of redistributing riches to the poor, telling myself that these poor gangsters were acting in good faith and were repossessing the goods that had been accumulated by the wicked capitalists in our midst. But the twins put me right on that one, making it clear that unless we wanted all the bandits to throw in the towel, the stuff about Robin Hood had to stop. They insisted on me keeping my nickname of ‘Little Pepper’, and continuing as their second-in-command, and if they caught me still stealing things at the Grand Marché and handing them over to the poor at the mosque or on the Lumumba roundabout, I’d have to face their anger and get into a fight with them, and risk losing my own right eye…

  We accepted anyone in our gang. I got on very well with the paralytics, who thought it was ridiculous, shocking, quite possibly even unacceptable to have two legs; with the blind, who could find a needle in a haystack, or those with only one eye, who took turns to lend each other their good eye, in exchange for meals or a stash of beer.

  I’d say to them: ‘If you’re blind, why don’t you make some arrangement with the paralytics, that way they could be your eyes, and you could be their legs?’

  But the short-sighted weren’t interested in being friends with paralytics and the blind, who were likewise in quite opposite camps. When they ate together, the blind always complained and accused the paralytics of taking all the biggest pieces.

  ‘How do you know we’ve taken the biggest pieces if you’re blind?’ the paralytics would say.

  And the blind would reply: ‘A piece of meat’s big if you spend more than forty seconds chewing it before you swallow!’

  Then I’d go and mix with other people, like St Francis of a Titty, a twenty-year-old pervert who drew old ladies’ breasts on the front of public buildings and claimed it would get him into paradise without waiting in line with all the rest of us, who were too ignorant to appreciate his mammary art. Of all the people at the Grand Marché, he was the most moderate, and I could count on him if I had any problems, even with the twins.

  What more can I tell you? There was the stammerer, who kept on repeating: ‘Gr-gr-grosso modo doesn’t mean perhaps, it means approximately!’, and the band made up from the flocks of the Pentecostal churches, furious at their pastors, who’d promised them mountains and miracles and had delivered neither. They maintained that the route to paradise was via the Côte Sauvage, and they went to gaze at it at four in the morning, trying, without success, to walk on the water, because their guru had drummed it into them that since Jesus had pulled off this feat, his worshippers should be able to do it standing on their heads, and let the devil burn in hell. The fire brigade had sometimes had to rescue the faithful when they were drowning and screaming for help, though normally if you’re intent on killing yourself you don’t go bothering folk who just want to get on with their lives…

  WE WITHDREW TO THE Côte Sauvage after a widely publicised operation, led by the town council against the ‘mosquitoes of the Grand Marché’. Put bluntly, we were harmful insects, getting in the way of François Makélé, the foremost citizen of the town. He was seeking election for a fourth term, and his picture was on posters at every intersection, all over town. When I stopped to look at one, I was struck by his hypocritical smile, which reminded me of that of Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako two years earlier, when he appeared on the stage at the main building of the orphanage in Loango to announce the Revolution. What mattered to François Makélé was his re-election, and in order to achieve it he used methods of a most spectacular kind. By calling us ‘the mosquitoes of the Grand Marché’, he had found a way of arousing the antipathy of the entire population against us. On one of the posters for his electoral campaign he was spraying Flytox under the tables at the Grand Marché…

  François Makélé took it upon himself to send out militia armed with water guns, coshes and tear gas to deal with us. It was a battle we couldn’t win. We were forced to beat a retreat. And thus to help François Makélé remain in his cosy seat, flexing his muscles, and letting it be known that he had succeeded in ridding the Grand Marché of Pointe-Noire of its low-life.

  On the Côte Sauvage we could breathe freely at last.

  We had to prepare our own food, where previously we’d ‘helped ourselves’ at the Grand Marché. When I say food, I’m talking about cat meat and dog meat, because Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala were of the Bembé tribe and some of their friends were Tékés – that was what the Bembés and Tékés did. If you’d told me I was going to eat meat like that, I’d have given it four seconds’ thought before stuffing great chunks of it into my mouth, which had never known wheat from chaff anyway, and had a distinct preference for the chaff over the wheat. As a rule, when you’re hungry, your belly will push you to do pretty much anything, and if it all goes wrong inside, unjustly blame the eyes for lack of vigilance. And anyway, I couldn’t imagine that the twins and their Téké friends had time to go around doing all this trapping.

  I only found out much later that I’d been eating dog and cat food for weeks on end. One day I caught the Bembés talking about a big black cat who always did its business in the sand on the Côte Sauvage and covered it up discreetly. I saw them making a trap which I find it hard to describe here. It was, if I recall correctly, an aluminium pot of some sort, which they’d adapted, closely following a method passed down by their ancesto
rs, with a lid that snapped shut in the second the animal tried to get the bait they’d left inside. They would lure the hapless felines with peanut butter, which cats adore – this is the reason they’ve chosen to stay domestic, rather than go and live in the bush, where they could live with their feet up, away from the Bembés. Now, cats don’t know that true freedom is to be found in the wild. They have clearly never read the story of the town mouse and the country mouse because if they had read it, as I did, in the library at Loango, they would have opted for a life in the bush, where the country mice eat their fill with pleasure untainted by the fear which assails their cousins in the town.