Black Moses

by Alain Mabanckou

  The day of the first appointment, I turned up at his place looking neat as a new pin. One of my friends by the Tchinouka had cut my hair with a Gillette razor blade and another had lent me his clothes.

  The healer congratulated me:

  ‘How well-dressed you are! Though I don’t know what idiot did your hair, they made a mess of it, it’s sticking out all over!’

  With his chin he indicated the six sinister-looking masks suspended above our heads:

  ‘Have you seen those masks?’

  I looked up anxiously:

  ‘They’re so ugly! They look like monsters!’

  ‘You be careful, they’re listening to us, I’ve spent the whole night talking with them…’

  ‘Have you now!’

  ‘You won’t get better without their help.’

  ‘And how are they going to do that, they’d have to get themselves down from there and…’

  It was as if an insect had stung him. His eyes turned red and bulged out of his face and he launched into a long tirade:

  ‘Listen, dialogue with masks isn’t your area, it’s a job for Ngampika, the exceptional being sitting opposite you now! I am the direct and legitimate descendant of King Makoko, first cousin of King Mâ Loango and distant relative of the royal family of Rudolf Doula Manga Bell, whose son, Doula Manga Bell, when he became King, was hanged by the Germans in 1914 because he opposed the urbanisation project whose aim was to dispossess the Doula people! The Doulas were Congolese, like you and me, my friend, except they were always on the move, and in the 16th century, after they’d had enough of moving around, they made a settlement near the estuary of the Wouri, which would later become the town we know as Doula! That’s why, when I go to Cameroon to buy a few gris-gris for my hernia – I mean the kind of hernia that makes your testicles swell up bigger than a papaya – I’m able to speak Doula without an accent! Let me tell you this, Little Pepper, my ancestors were rich, they had gold, many wives and shedloads of slaves. And what did they do with it all? They gave their entire fortune away, sharing the fate of those who suffer, helping them, interpreting the messages of our spirit ancestors! These masks represent my riches, and I’m not in this business to make money, if I were I wouldn’t be the only person who asks for payment on complete recovery only, while the doctors in this country get paid by the social security even when they don’t achieve a cure! Does that seem right to you? If you give your car to a mechanic round here, do you pay him even if he doesn’t fix it? It’s unheard of! They can teach you anything in these schools of medicine, here or anywhere else, but the spirits of our ancestors will forever remain a mystery. Starting today, tell yourself that your troubles are all behind you. You’ve come to the right place. After a few sessions, your memory will be so clear, you’ll remember everything, right back to the taste of your first tears, as you left your mother’s womb!’

  All I had to do with Ngampika was drink what he gave me while he went through a few chants for the spirits. According to him, their role was to inscribe in huge letters everything that had been wiped from my memory and to supply me with millions more blank pages on which to write my present and my future in capital letters. He gave me cricket’s piss to drink, and green mamba blood, toad’s spit, elephant hair mixed with kaolin and sparrow turds. Ngampika treated me like one of his family, inviting me to share his midday meal before the start of each consultation.

  ‘Do the white doctors know you have to get someone to eat before you can treat them? I’ve had sick people here who weren’t actually sick at all, they were just hungry, and you should have seen them eat! Like you!’

  It was almost as though I was going to Ngampika’s place just for the food. I could be sure of a generous lunch, lovingly prepared by his wife, a toothless old woman who disappeared immediately after placing two big aluminium bowls before us. I’d lift the lid, find my pieces of meat in peanut sauce, and manioc balls, which I devoured rapidly, because she really knew how to cook. I don’t know what she put in her food, but I couldn’t stop, and she had to give me two helpings. And if the pot was empty, Ngampika, who nibbled rather than ate, gave me what was left in his plate.

  I ate many things at the healer’s house, but my favourite was the antelope dish. The aroma of peanut sauce, mixed with strong spices and the smell of pepper, drove me wild. I swallowed the pieces of manioc and meatballs without chewing them, and the pepper prickled my guts. Then I’d lick my plate to show my hosts that my belly still wasn’t full. And when I got diarrhoea for a few days, Ngampika wasn’t concerned:

  ‘It’s to be expected, it’s all the bad things hidden in your brain coming out at last!’

  ‘Why are they coming out the far end?’

  ‘Where did you think they’d come out?’

  ‘Through my mouth…’

  ‘Oh no, in traditional healing, all the diseases of the upper parts, that’s to say, of the head, come out the bottom end, and all the lower diseases come out the top end. Your cure is underway, Little Pepper!’

  One evening, after several glasses of palm wine, Ngampika suggested I spend the night at his place.

  ‘My masks need to watch you sleep. While you’re asleep they can enter your head and remove the impurities that stop your memory working properly.’

  His wife laid out a mat for me in the living room with a sheet, all covered in blood stains. Seeing me look at the sheet in disgust, Ngampika said:

  ‘We have washed the sheet, but blood doesn’t come out easily! It’s nothing to worry about…’

  The one hurricane lamp in the house had been extinguished, and it felt as though the eyes of the masks were turned on me like torches. Ngampika and his wife were snoring away in the only bedroom. Curiously, the snores seemed to be coming from the masks. As luck would have it, I eventually managed to doze off. But at once, in my dream, I found myself pursued by an army of masks, cackling and pointing spears at me. I ran faster than them, as swiftly and easily as you’d expect of a man wearing seven league boots. I leaped over lakes, jumped across rivers, sometimes took off into the air on the edge of a forest and landed at the top of a tree to take a few minutes’ rest, proud to have shaken off my pursuers. Then, to my despair, I heard them less than five hundred metres away. As I plunged onwards with gritted teeth and fists clenched, they went down other, darker paths, through tangled bush, dense forest, infested with mosquitoes, green mambas and ravenous boas. I heard the poor masks screaming in pain, probably from thorns and insect bites.

  This hectic chase came to an end at the first cock crow and when I mercifully woke to find day breaking and the masks restored to their places on the wall, sulking because I’d won out against them, I knew Ngampika would have difficulty curing me…

  As I wasn’t getting better, Ngampika couldn’t be paid. He was huffy with me now, and we sat looking at each other like china dogs. He no longer railed against Dr Lucien Kilahou or boasted of his roots going back through the kingdoms of Congo, via Angola and Cameroon.

  ‘No food here today’, he announced one day, as he stood in the doorway.

  ‘You should have warned me! I haven’t eaten since this morning, I thought I was going to eat here as usual!’

  He flared up at the cheek of my response:

  ‘As usual? Oh that’s great! Food costs money! Do you think we pick it up off the floor of the Grand Marché? Cricket’s piss, mamba blood, toad’s spit, elephant hair mixed with kaolin and sparrow’s turds, it all costs a fortune! I’ve made two trips to Cameroon to get them! And who paid my travel expenses? Shall I tell you what my masks say about you among themselves? They think you’re faking your illness to get out of paying! They tested you out when you spent the night here and they’re quite blunt about it: you’re the biggest imposter in this whole town, in the whole country, even! You can’t fool me! If you don’t proceed to check out right now I’ll be checking you out with a one-way ticket to the next world!’

  After a period of mature reflection, I returned to Ngampika’s the follo
wing day with some cricket’s piss, mamba blood, toad spit, elephant hair mixed with kaolin and sparrow turds. My neighbour, who knew about the healer’s change of mood, had helped me prepare a dish of porcupine and spinach. But when Ngampika saw the basket full of food, he roared:

  ‘Don’t you dare set foot in my house today! The wrath of the masks is upon you!’

  ‘Look, I’ve brought some food, we can eat together, your wife can join us.’

  The old lady must have been listening to us in secret. She rose up behind him and yelled in her quavering voice:

  ‘Profiteer! My husband cured you of malnutrition, you must pay us! Repay us for the food you ate! It was me that prepared it, I’m not your slave!’

  She vanished as quickly as she’d appeared, and Ngampika took up her words:

  ‘You heard what she said didn’t you? You’re healed, you have to pay us!’

  ‘I’m not healed, and I won’t pay! Did I ever ask your wife to bring me food to eat?’

  ‘Then get out of here and go and see some other sucker, or go back and see Dr Lucien Kilahou, Ngampika is an honourable man, and does not wish to deal with a huckster like you!’

  ‘I’m a huckster?’

  ‘Yes, you are! A huckster and a scrounger!’

  ‘And you’re a criminal! You’ve never actually cured anyone! Your wife is a sorceress, she made my illness worse with her food!’

  ‘Are you talking about my wife? You better watch out, weirdo! Ten curses be upon you! You’ll see what happens to you, this is just the start of your problems!’

  I left with my food, because Ngampika threatened to send dangerous animals after me in my sleep. I’d be surrounded by creatures with animal heads and human bodies. And the animal men, he predicted, would fire their poison darts into my brains. I don’t know where he got these ideas from…

  I had disappointed my neighbour, who had bust his guts for the sake of my health. His little lecture seemed almost to suggest he was giving up on me:

  ‘Little Pepper, it can’t always be you who’s right, and the others – Dr Kilahou, Ngampika – who are wrong.’

  Basically he was right, and it was up to me now to take the situation in both hands.

  In any case, I had nothing left to lose.

  The Moroccan

  I‘D HAD A GREEN OUTFIT made up by a tailor in the Three Hundreds, who was used to this kind of commission. I wore long, pointed shoes that I’d picked up from the West Africans in the Grand Marché, in the medieval style. My hood, which was also green, was topped with a peacock feather which I’d plucked from the great bird that strutted up and down strangely outside my shack, as though he’d been sent by evil spirits or ill-intentioned people, to discover what was happening in my head.

  No, I didn’t ride on horseback, and I didn’t have a bow like Robin Hood. I’d walked at a fairly rapid pace for half an hour along the banks of the Tchinouka, with a knife in my left hand, muttering over and over to myself that Moses was forty, the age I was then, when, appalled by the day-to-day wretchedness of his people, he killed an Egyptian foreman who was attacking an Israelite…

  As the sun’s rays glanced off the blade of my knife, I had the feeling my memory was coming back at last, and that this weapon would help me recover my identity, and free me from the chains of ill fortune I’d inherited from the father I was never going to meet.

  The very fact of having a knife in my hands certainly proved I was a Bembé, who are skilled in handling a knife, just as Robin Hood was with his bow…

  Was I strong enough to become the Robin Hood of Pointe-Noire, or would I remain forever, in the minds of my bandit contemporaries, the boy whose most remarkable feat was first to have sprinkled pepper powder in the food of the twins, Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala, and then become their sidekick? It was not enough to win me my place in posterity. I reckoned I was worth more, I just had to prove it…

  I had bought the knife in the late morning from the boutique of a Moroccan, Ahmed XVI, near the Kassai roundabout. Despite the confusion clouding my mind, for the first time I experienced the pleasure of memories resurfacing, even if they were still somewhat sporadic. Something was happening inside me, and I even remembered it was the Moroccan tradesman who had helped me choose a knife, standing behind me like a shadow at five past midday, for fear I’d leave the bazaar empty-handed.

  ‘Come on comrade, why hesitate? You’re a good guy, we’ll agree a price, we’re like family! Sure you don’t want a shot gun? I’ve got two that could wipe out an elephant…’

  ‘No, I want a knife.’

  ‘Well you won’t be disappointed with that one! I, Ahmed XVI, son of Ahmed XV, grandson of Ahmed XIV, great-grandson of Ahmed XIII and so on and so forth, will make you a bargain, because you’re an African brother, we’ve got the same blood, and thanks to your country I can feed my family, and send a bit of money to my brothers and cousins who still live back in my native village, in the south-west of Morocco, in Merzouga. Back there, as children, we learned to play among the dunes, to play hide and seek in the Sahelian desert and scrounge a few coins from the tourists doing their camel treks or bivouacking just a kilometre from our village!’

  He was all set to tell me his life story. To stem the flow, I stroked the blade of the knife, and then the handle.

  His shopkeeper’s eyes gleamed:

  ‘It’s yours comrade! This knife is yours! I swear on my mother’s life I’ll earn nothing from it, but what matters is to serve a brother in need. It’s made of stainless steel, it’s actually a Victorinox, a highly regarded Swiss brand… Look at the blade, it can slice through air! And look at the handle. What a beauty! You have a good eye, my fellow African!’

  Deep down I couldn’t give a damn about his sales patter, for which he was known as one of the shiftiest shopkeepers in Pointe-Noire, so some people wouldn’t even set foot in his shop, because even if you said you had no money, he’d reply:

  ‘Who mentioned money? Does Ahmed XVI run this business for personal profit?’

  He would give you the goods on credit, confident that you’d be back in his shop again one day.

  Gossip had it that the Moroccan had brought his sorcery with him from North Africa and that outside his boutique was a mirror which, when you looked in it, cast a spell on you and got you to buy any old rubbish. And the mirror had to be ‘fed’. Put plainly, the Moroccan sacrificed a client every six months to make the mirror work, resulting in two traffic accidents a year outside his shop, which stood on a major crossroads where vehicles came from all four corners of the town and got caught in endless traffic jams. Although the shopkeeper was held to be to blame for the accidents, no one dared hold him to account, since they were scared he’d retaliate and send the head of anyone speaking ill of him all the way back to Morocco. In Pointe-Noire, when someone said your head would get ‘sent to Morocco’ it meant you were going to die. The Pontenegrins were actually referring to the food tins marked Made in Morocco, in which the sardines were always headless. What did the Moroccans do with these heads? No one would ever know, and Ahmed played on the people’s fear to frighten his detractors:

  ‘If you keep bothering me and spreading lies about me, I’ll send your heads to Morocco!’

  I didn’t want to have my head sent to Morocco either, so I didn’t bother arguing with Ahmed XVI. I just wanted to get out of his shop with a knife, stainless steel or not.

  ‘Does this knife cut well?’ I asked him.

  He gave me a long, hard look:

  ‘Brother, that depends what kind of meat you want to cut! I can assure you, you won’t be disappointed with its twenty-five centimetre stainless steel blade…’

  I tossed two ten thousand CFA franc notes onto his counter.

  The shopkeeper looked annoyed:

  ‘No, my fellow African! Why are you giving me that now? Go and use your knife, and if you’re satisfied with it, come and pay me… Can I just ask, why are you dressed like that, all in green with a feather on your head?’


  I was already out of his shop, heading for the Tchinouka…

  The river Tchinouka divides Pointe-Noire in two, diving into the darkest recesses of the town, dallying for several kilometres in the Rex and Saint-Francois districts, looping round the Mongo-Kamba cemetery, as though out of respect for the sleep of the dead, before vomiting into the sea all the impurities the Pontenegrins throw into its belly.

  The river is known to be more dangerous than the Atlantic Ocean. In times of heavy rain its temper rises, and it swallows up solidly built houses, overturns the huge lorries of the Pointe-Noire transport company and renders most of the major highways impassable, so that people stay in their houses for a week, or longer.

  I have lost count of how many times I walked up and down the right bank before finding at last the little bridge that leads to the Vongou district, the place where I believed I would at last become happy like other men again, but knowing also that I must commit the final act, driving out the spirits that were lodged in my body, corrupting my memory, the spirits I must cast once and for all into the depths of the Tchinouka, to be swept out into the Atlantic, where Nzinga, great ancestor, would destroy them for ever…

  The people I passed in the street first stepped out of my way, then turned on their heels and ran when they saw I had a knife and that my dress was out of keeping with the present day.

  I was proud to see that I could terrify people with a simple object everyone has in their home, as Dr Lucien Kilahou would have said. Some of them threw themselves into the river when I slashed at the air with my knife to frighten them even more.

  As the day began to fade, I plunged on ahead with my eyes fixed on a large, brightly lit building. I adjusted my peacock feather, which each gust of wind almost blew off my hood. Tight in my hand I gripped the knife, which soon was to restore my lost dignity. I was only a few hundred metres from the sumptuous dwelling, with a wall twice as thick as my waist, guarded by two men standing straight as electric pylons.