I laugh, but only to please him. I went and whistled three times outside their house today, so we could go down to the river together. I want to show him something, not listen to what this woman I don’t even like’s been saying, when she’s already been rude to Maman Pauline because her business is doing too well. So I let Lounès get to the end of his impression of her. I laugh again when he adds that Jérémie’s mother was wearing a red pagne tight across her behind and lifted her pagne high up her thighs. She asked the crowd if anyone wanted to give her a seeing to till she was too tired to move. Some of the men whistled and shouted, ‘Me! Me! I’ll give you a seeing to!’
Lounès noticed I wasn’t laughing as much now.
‘You wanted to tell me something, Michel…’
At this I get my piece of paper out of my pocket and hold it out to him.
‘Can you give that to Caroline?’
He takes the piece of paper and starts reading what I’ve written. My heart’s all shaken up. I close my eyes for a few minutes. When I open them again I see his face, it’s like a mask. He says nothing. He starts reading again. Can’t he read my writing?
‘Michel, this isn’t a poem! It’s fine, but it’s not a poem. In a poem the end of every line has to sound the same. Listen, I’ll recite you a real poem, you’ll see, at the end of every line you hear the same sounds:’
My baby, sleeping close to me, all pink and fresh,
So like a tiny drowsy Jesus in his crèche;
Your sleep so free of care, so calm, so full of love
You do not hear the bird who sings far from the light.
But I breathed in the heavy sweetness of the night
And the sombre mysteries of the world above.
I take back my piece of paper and put it back in my pocket. I haven’t read the poem he’s just recited in class. He says it’s by Victor Hugo, for his daughter. When he says that it makes me think of the photo of Victor Hugo on the wall at my uncle’s house.
We don’t mention my poem, though I want to know if he thinks it’s good or bad. We listen to the grass singing in the wind and it makes us sleepy.
Lounès stands up and says he has to go to karate club. It’s just started, over in Savon, run by someone called Maître John.
‘I have to be there on the dot of five o’clock.’
‘Who’s this Maître John?’
‘He’s this really strong man, he flies through the air, like in the Bruce Lee films. He’s a black belt, sixth degree. As soon as I learn how to fly like that, I’ll teach you.’
He can see I’m still feeling sad, so before we say goodbye, he touches my right shoulder and says, ‘I really want to help you, but Caroline’s gone to stay at my mother’s sister’s house, over in the Fouks quartier. I don’t know when she’s coming back. Anyway, it’ll give you time to get your poem right.’
The American, Roger Guy Folly announces that the president of Uganda – called Idi Amin Dada – has just fled his own country because his neighbours in Tanzania have marched into the capital, called Kampala. The Tanzanians were angry because the Ugandan military had invaded Tanzania, supposedly to get rid of the Ugandans who were making trouble for Idi Amin Dada.
When I hear Papa Roger say that name, ‘Idi Amin Dada’, I howl with laughter. He looks at me very sternly, like I’ve committed a sin. ‘Careful, Michel, it’s no laughing matter! This is a serious business. Are you aware this president has killed over three hundred thousand people? And not just Ugandans, he’s been killing foreigners too, for the past eight years he’s been in power. He doesn’t just kill, kill and kill again, he eats people too, he cuts their heads off, and their private parts too, like meat at the Grand Marché.’
That does make me stop laughing at the name of the Ugandan president, even though I still think it’s funny to be called ‘Dada’, like the dog that lives near us, with a wiggly tail and one eye that waters all the time.
My father turned down the radio so he could explain to us that Idi Amin Dada was a monster, worse than a dragon, and ate people with spicy pepper and salt. I’m amazed to hear that in fact he couldn’t read very well, when he was almost two metres high. Why didn’t he take the time to go to school like everyone else? Ok, you’re going to say Maman Pauline can’t really read or write either, but she’s never killed anyone and she speaks French well, you can still speak a language even if you don’t know how to read or write it. Otherwise, how come we manage to speak all our languages – like lingala, munukutuba, bembé, lari, mbochi or vili – without learning to read or write? It’s not my mother’s fault she didn’t go to school when she was little, like I do. Maman Pauline told me that when she was little, people were so stupid they said school wasn’t good for women, it would make them argue with their husbands about everything, and make them refuse to obey when their husbands ordered them about. If a woman goes to school, they’d say, she’s finished, she’ll end up talking French like those big cheeses over in France, saying NO every five minutes, like white women, who manage to shout at their husbands without getting wallopped. Even if Maman Pauline never went to school, she’s still more intelligent than Idi Amin Dada, who killed over three hundred thousand people and ate some of them with salt and spicy pepper. Why didn’t they catch him, instead of letting him escape and hide away in a Muslim country? My father reels off the names of the countries in question: Libya (capital, Tripoli), Saudi Arabia (capital, Riyad). Saudi Arabia gave the criminal a quiet little house with people to prepare his food, when there are people who’ve never killed over three hundred thousand people dying of hunger on this continent. Is that normal? Do you have to go out and kill over three hundred thousand people to get free housing in a Muslim country or what? And they give him pocket money every month, like he’s some good pupil who’s done well at school, when he never even went to one.
Yes, Idi Amin really is a monster, worse than a dragon. I don’t want to hear any more about him, though Papa Roger’s determined to make us listen. Since Maman Pauline’s listening carefully, even though politics isn’t really her thing, I can’t really leave the table, it would look rude, people would think that boy Michel isn’t interested in what’s going on in a country that’s part of our continent.
Papa Roger explains again that Idi Amin Dada was a military man who came to power by a coup d’état. Well that doesn’t surprise me one bit, what self-respecting country’s going to say to someone who can’t read and write, ‘You can’t read, you can’t write, but don’t worry, you can still go and speak on our behalf to the whole of the rest of the world’? And how is this illiterate going to manage to sign the papers that real presidents who’ve been to school sign when they all get together? How will he know when he’s actually signing his permission for the capitalist countries to steal the wealth of the Ugandans, for example? The worst thing is, Papa Roger says Idi Amin Dada was also the president of the Organisation for African Unity, the OAU, which is like being the head of all the African countries. The African presidents made him that, and not just for a joke either. It suited the Europeans very well that Idi Amin Dada couldn’t read or write. In this case that meant the English – it wasn’t just the French that colonised our continent. They had to leave a few countries for other Europeans too, otherwise a war would break out among the Whites. And the English said: ‘It’s a good thing Idi Amin Dada can’t read or write, it means we’ll be able to control him at a distance even if colonisation is meant to be over in his country.’
This makes Papa Roger really angry. ‘The man’s a dictator, but even the United States and Israel supported his coup d’état to become president! And after the coup d’état he stuffed the army with his own people and threw out people from other ethnic groups, and had them killed, the monster. He was so crazy, he woke up one morning looking sad and solemn, saying “I had a dream, sent straight from heaven”! It’s not like he’s a black American, like Martin Luther King! Why should his dream be special?’
Everyone has dreams, I think to myself.
The problem is, according to my father, Idi Amin Dada had a really big dream: God asked him to drive out all the Asians from his country, even though they were the ones who ran the shops, so that the Ugandans could eat three times a day. Could God really be that wicked, to make someone dream a dream like that? Idi Amin Dada did drive out the Asians, saying, ‘We’re going to run our country ourselves now, we’ll manage our own shops and businesses. We’re sick of you eating the Ugandans’ bread. If you haven’t left Uganda, my ancestors’ land, in three months from now, be warned. Now get out, leave everything, just take your toothbrush, pants and sandals.’
So the poor Asian people ran round madly like headless chickens, even though they’d been in Uganda for a long long time. They’d forgotten they were Asian, and the people in Asia had forgotten they had brothers who’d become Ugandan blacks. The poor Ugandan Asians went and hid in a neighbouring country, where nobody knew them.
Idi Amin Dada got more and more crazy by the day, he killed off entire villages, and if you didn’t agree with him he’d cut your head off, or your genitals. His supporters – the Americans and Israelis – started saying to themselves, ‘We’d better get out of this country, the president’s sick, he’s really crazy, we’d better stop selling him arms or one day he’s going to turn them on us. And all the English people who’d stayed in Uganda after independence thought: ‘We’ll get out now too, it looks like things are going to end badly around here, we’ve never seen anything like it on the Black continent, when this guy’s finished eating all the black flesh around here he’s going to start putting us Whites in his pot.’ And Idi Amin, who didn’t care, replied: ‘Yeah, that’s right, you feeble old ex-colonisersyou, get out of my country, I’m telling you now, I’m going to make friends with the Russians and the Libyans, they like a good deal too, and they’ll sell me lots of lovely weapons so I can go on massacring the Ugandans and the neighbouring countries that make trouble for me.’
And to really annoy the Israelis, who used to be his friends and were now his sworn enemies, Idi Amin Dada started chatting up the people in a country called Palestine. He invited the Palestinians to Uganda and said to them, ‘You can come here if you like, the Israelis are always against you Palestinians, but I, Idi Amin Dada, will give you a huge place where you can have your office, it’s a really good building, in fact it’ll be in the same building as the Israeli embassy! Which is good, because then you can take your revenge on them, and I’ll support you, all the way.’
Papa Roger explained that the Israelis are Jewish, and the Palestinians are mostly Arabs, and these two peoples have been fighting for many many years. Maman Pauline asks why, and my father replies, ‘It’s too long to explain all that now, I get confused myself, it’s all to do with politics and religion and one people killing another and lots of countries don’t recognise that Palestine’s a country, just like us.’
And I think to myself: ‘If it’s not a country just like us, then what is it? Does nobody live there? Are there no children like me, going to school? Are there no roads, no cars to hoot when there’s a traffic jam? Do they not have houses, or a flag, or music, or schools or a president?’ Well, at least Papa Roger agrees that Palestine is a country, like it or not, and that the Palestinians’ president’s name is Yasser Arafat, it’s a sort of nickname.
I’m just thinking how Yasser Arafat is a nice name, it sounds nice, when my father adds that there is a serious problem with this Palestinian guy.
‘I’m disappointed in Yasser Arafat: he agreed to be the witness at the wedding of Idi Amin Dada, killer of over three hundred thousand people, when he married a fifth wife.’
When I hear that, I start to hate his name too.
My head’s going to burst, it’s letting in things more complicated than the ones they teach Lounès at Trois-Glorieuses Secondary School. I can hear my brain beginning to boil as Papa Roger starts telling us the story of a plane that landed in the capital of Uganda, with gangsters in it, who supported the Palestinians. The Palestinian supporters had diverted the plane and were threatening to kill the poor passengers if some Palestinians in prison somewhere or other weren’t released. Idi Amin Dada was delighted to act as referee in this affair, so the whole world would think he was a good guy, with lots of white globules. He calmed everyone down, made long speeches, went to see the passengers trapped in the plane. But because the Israelis get angry about anything to do with the Palestinians, they sent their famous special forces, the scary ones, zooming into Uganda, and they set the hostages free. Papa Roger says that when the Israelis carry out an operation like that, they are very efficient and always succeed, because they train people for special missions like that, and sometimes the agents are actually women, whereas in our army they think women can’t be soldiers.
Before they left Uganda with the people they’d freed, the Israelis took the opportunity to bomb the Ugandans’ war planes. This made Idi Amin Dada very angry and he killed all the Ugandans working at the airport because he thought it was because of their stupidity that the Israelis had been able to land in his country, free the hostages and bomb the war planes. If he had no war planes, how was he going to defend his own country or attack neighbouring countries like Tanzania? He was so angry he even drove all the foreigners out of his country, and killed even more Ugandans. And because he thought no one was prepared to recognise he was the most powerful man in the world, he decided: ‘I’ll make myself a Field Marshal, I want lots of war medals pinned to my front, from my neck to the zipper of my trousers, and I want the whole world to know that I am the warrior who banished the English, so you must call me The King of Scotland, period. I want all foreigners who come to do business in my country to crawl on their hands and knees before me, like animals. Especially the English.’
Uncle René’s coming to see us today because it’s Saint Michel’s Day. I don’t actually know who this Saint Michel is, and I always wonder why my uncle chose to call me Michel. If Michel’s a saint, it must be a story in the Bible somewhere, that’s where you find all the saints and other people connected to God. On the other hand, when I look on the calendar it says Saint Michel’s Day is the twenty-ninth September, which is the day and month I was born. So Uncle René must have looked at the calendar before he said to my mother, ‘Let’s keep it simple, I’ll look at the calendar and just give him the name of the saint’s day he was born on.’
So this year on the twenty-ninth September, as usual, my uncle brought me a plastic lorry, a little spade and a little rake, so I can play at farming. He says if ever there’s a real revolution in our country, it will come from the farming community, from the peasants, the people who love the land. That’s who the communists are fighting for, not for the people sitting in offices exploiting their fellow men. You need to get children into good habits so they’ll love farming, which man has been doing since the world began.
We listen to my uncle talking about farming and telling us what Karl Marx and Engels think about it. Afterwards, he looks over at Maman Pauline. ‘Engels was right and I agree with him: until now philosophers have only interpreted the world, now it must be changed…’
I repeat what he’s just said to myself, inside my head, because I like the sound of it and my uncle says it shaking his fist like he wants to get into a fight with the enemies of Revolution. He can tell my mother and I don’t understand what he’s saying, so he leaves the house, goes out to his car and comes back two minutes later with a little book which he hands to me, even though my mother was the one he was quoting communists at.
‘Here, have this, Michel. Everything I’ve been telling you is in this book. There’s more in this book than in the bible, these are scientific truths, not just opium for fooling the masses.’
I take the book, and read the title, which begins with a difficult word to pronounce: Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. The guy who wrote it is called Friedrich Engels. Yes, I’ve seen his photo, at my uncle’s house. Now I know that Engels’ first name is Fri
edrich. Uncle René has always said ‘Engels’, never ‘Friedrich Engels’.
There’s isn’t a picture of Friedrich Engels on the back of this book. I would have liked to compare it with the one at my uncle’s house. Perhaps when someone’s famous they stop putting their photo on the back of the books they write, and if they do put someone’s photo on the back of the book it’s to get them known, because no one has heard of them yet. Is Engels more famous than our President? I think he must be, and that’s why on the book our President wrote there’s a big photo of him, smiling.
I open the book by Engels just to see if there are any photos in it. There aren’t, there are only words, in really small type, as if they didn’t want us children to be able to read what it says.
‘Michel, don’t read it! You’re still too young to understand. Even my comrades on the People’s Neighbourhood Committee find it hard. Engels was a true visionary! The world has to change, and the change can only come about through farming; the peasants must own their means of production, we must put an end to capitalist profit, and set up a true proletariat dictatorship! And how can this be done? I’ll tell you: we must re-read history, as Marx tells us, in the light of historical materialism or more correctly, new materialism, because in fact, though the popular masses – supposedly the beneficiaries of Marxist thought – don’t like to hear it, Marx never talked about historical materialism, but about new materialism! It’s a crucial distinction, and I might even say, a fundamental one. Do you follow?’
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