The second the teacher asks a question, Adriano has the answer, as if he’d dreamed it in the night, like that criminal Idi Amin Dada, who dreamed of what he would do to the Asians. And every time our teacher says to Adriano, ‘Don’t you answer, give the others a chance to answer and show their intelligence for a few minutes of their lives at least.’ Adriano doesn’t like that, he wants to answer all the questions. But why should we bother coming to class if there’s an Angolan who knows all the answers, even about things to do with our country, like rivers and lakes? Adriano doesn’t like it when someone else behind him gets it right. But when no one knows the answer – which is usually the case – the teacher has to say to him, ‘Adriano, now you can answer.’ When he’s told us the answer, everyone has to stand up and clap for five minutes or more. His face goes all red like a tomato, and the teacher gives him a present: a box full of chalks, a notebook and a textbook containing all the speeches of the President of the Republic.
Those of us in the middle of the class, the average ones, dream that one day we might move up to the front row beside Adriano, but it’s not easy. If you get a better mark than someone in a higher row, you go and sit in his place, and he moves back to your row. Occasionally I’ve got as far as the third row, but the next day I always got moved back because the person whose place I’d taken had gone and worked really hard all day Sunday, so he can get his place back among the top ten. It’s only the front row that never changes, because Adriano, Willy-Dibas and Jérémie are so clever, they confer with each other so no one else can come up to their level. If the three of them are cross with you they pass a little piece of paper to someone in the class who doesn’t like you. They write down the answers to the question on this piece of paper, and the classmate, who you don’t like either, just copies them down. When you get into class the next morning, the classmate in question has changed places, now he’s just behind Adriano, Willy-Dibas and Jérémie. And you’re hopping mad.
I try really hard not to get moved to the back row, to stay in the middle of the class. In my row no one bothers you, and no one sees you either, because the teacher usually only notices the front and back rows.
Us boys wear khaki shirts and blue shorts, and the girls wear orange shirts and blue skirts. Every morning, to be allowed into class, you have to recite the first four articles of the law of the National Pioneers Movement, the MNP. I know them by heart now. Sometimes I dream that I’m reciting them in a stadium that’s even fuller than the Revolution Stadium. Every evening before I go to bed, and every morning before I get up, I recite them. I close my eyes, I imagine I’m someone about to serve his country, that thanks to me capitalism won’t reign victorious in our country, and I murmur the four articles, like a prayer:
Article 1: the pioneer is a conscientious and effective junior militant. In all things he obeys the orders of the Congolese Workers’ Party.
Article 2: The pioneer follows the example of the immortal Marien Ngouabi, founder of the Congolese Workers’ Party.
Article 3: The pioneer is thrifty, disciplined and hardworking, and completes his tasks.
Article 4: The pioneer both respects and transforms nature.
There’s a boy in our class called Bouzoba who is not very bright. When I say he’s not very bright, I’m being nice because Bouzoba is the stupidest boy in the whole class, so he sits in the back row, in a corner, where he can get on with being stupid without being seen. It was him that invented the famous ‘mirror game’ which is the craze at the moment in the playground. During break, he goes around with a little mirror in his pocket and when the girls are playing he comes up behind one of the girls who’s standing up and puts his little mirror on the ground between the girl’s legs to see the colour of her pants. Then he comes and tells us that the girl standing over there is wearing red pants and the one beside her has green pants with a hole in. And when the girls walk past us, we say, ‘Marguerite, you’ve got red pants on! Célestine, you’ve got green pants with a hole in!’ The poor girls start whimpering and go and tell the teacher that we’ve seen Marguerite’s red pants and Célestine’s green pants with a hole in. The teacher also goes to tell the head teacher that some of the children have seen Marguerite’s red pants and Célestine’s green pants with a hole in. And the head teacher comes personally to beat the boys in our class, because no one dares tell on Bouzoba, because he’s strong and muscular and he’ll beat us up in the playground and make us pay a month’s fine: we have to give him our pocket money every day, and scratch his backside when he’s got an itch.
The head teacher’s very crafty and he really wants to know who made up the mirror game. First of all he gives us all a good hiding, and then he goes up onto the platform and says, ‘Who can tell me what colour Célestine’s pants are?’
The class sits in silence – you can hear the flies buzzing. The head teacher repeats his question with a broad smile, as though promising not to belt anyone who can tell him the colour of Célestine’s pants. This is when that idiot Bouzoba puts his hand up at the back of the class and yells, ‘Sir, sir, Célestine’s pants are green!’
‘Really? And how do you now that?’
‘I saw it with my pocket mirror!’
He gets out his pocket mirror, waves it in the air. Then he adds, ‘I’m not lying, sir, look, here’s my mirror!’
The head teacher grabs Bouzoba by the ears and drags him into his office to beat him even more, and make him tidy the books and clean the windows as a punishment.
Our desks are too small, so we’re all squeezed up together. You can easily read or copy what the person next to you is writing if you haven’t done your homework. Everyone does it. I’ve stopped looking at what the others do, because every time I end up copying their mistakes. When someone’s writing quickly, as though he knows what he’s doing, you don’t imagine he’s making a mistake. So you copy off him, without thinking, because if he was writing rubbish he wouldn’t be writing that quickly, he must be really clever, like Adriano, Willy-Dibas or Jérémie.
The teacher says, ‘Anyone who finishes quickly can go home before the others.’
I know it’s a trap to catch out the idiots. I’m not going to fall for it, I work at my own pace. Besides, it’s better to write slowly, even if you’re the last to leave. At least the next morning, when the teacher does the corrections, he won’t beat you. He’ll remember you weren’t in a rush to get home to eat and sleep, like some capitalist’s child. He’ll think you love school so much you didn’t want to go home. So he won’t hit you hard.
It’s chaos in Teheran at the moment. The Iranian students have taken hostages in the American embassy, even though America’s the world’s number one country. Papa Roger reminds us that it’s usually the Americans who help out when there’s a world war against the Germans. The Americans always head off to Europe, to some place called Normandy, where there’s a beach. They get out their sophisticated weapons and they go on shooting till there are no Germans left trying to occupy France and massacre the Jews. I wonder how the Iranian students dare go and provoke a country like America by imprisoning fifty or sixty Americans in the basement of the embassy. Can the Ayatollah Khomeyni be stronger than the Americans’ president?
Roger Guy Folly explains that the Iranian students won’t release the hostages unless the Americans hand over the Shah of Iran, who’s in hospital in their country. And the Americans are at their wits’ end, and agree to have talks with the students. And since they really want to talk in order to save their fellow countrymen, Yasser Arafat’s going to arbitrate between them. Papa Roger points out that he has already told us about Yasser Arafat, who was the witness at Idi Amin Dada’s wedding, when he got married for the fifth time. Yasser Arafat is the president of Palestine, a country which people refuse to recognise as a proper country like ours. He must be very pleased to be arbitrating in the American hostage affair. If I was him, I would say to the Americans: ‘If you want to negotiate, ok, but I’m happy to help you get the Iranians to f
ree your fifty or sixty countrymen that they’ve shut up in the basement of the embassy. But I have an important request: first everyone must accept that the country of Palestine does exist, I want it to be accepted right now, straight away, or else I will tell the Iranian students to go on holding your citizens hostage in the cellar!’
Yesterday afternoon this guy was bothering the wife of Yeza, the joiner who lives over the way, and things went badly wrong. The nuisance guy, the one they call ‘the Lady Whistler’, because he’s always chatting up married women, you’d think there was a shortage of single women in this town, though according to the people who know about these things, there are more women than men in our country, which is why men often marry three or four different women.
The Lady Whistler didn’t know Yeza was in his workshop, busy making a coffin. He makes them in advance so he doesn’t run out if there are ever several deaths in one day. Besides, there are also people who order a coffin as soon as their relative goes into hospital, because it works out more expensive afterwards. If you argue over the price of a coffin when someone’s already dead, the joiner will look you up and down and say, ‘Well go and make the coffin yourself, then, if you don’t like my price.’
As soon as Yeza’s wife heard whistling outside, she quickly went out and followed the Lady Whistler down to the end of the Avenue of Independence. At that moment I saw Yeza come out of his workshop with a hammer in his hand and I said to myself, ‘Oh-oh, now the Lady Whistler’s going to end up in that coffin the joiner’s making.’
I followed the crowd that was walking behind the joiner and already shouting ‘Ali bomba yé! Ali bomba yé! Ali bomba yé!’ Round here, if someone shouts like that it means there’s a fight brewing. It’s a way of working up the crowd and urging the people quarreling not to change their minds. Papa Roger thinks that the first people to shout Ali bomba yé! were the people of Zaire, the year Mohammed Ali and George Foreman came to fight on our continent, as if there was no room left back home in America. They were both black Americans, and apparently they came to Zaire to fight so as to be near to their black ancestors. The man who did the publicity for the fight was called Don King, another black American with such a big shock of hair on his head, a bird could have mistaken it for a tree and come and settle there to make its nest and lay its eggs. According to Papa Roger, this Don King guy had been paid millions and millions by the dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko to organise the fight, but the black American didn’t realise that the reason the President of Zaire had put up all this money was to get publicity for himself so the whole world would think he was a good man, when in fact he was bad, and frightened his own people, and stole money from the State and hid it in European bank accounts, and was one of the people who assassinated Patrice Lumumba, who had done everything to try to free the Belgian Congo.
Every time my father talks to me about that boxing match, I move out of the way a bit because he always tries to copy Ali’s hard right-hand punch that knocked Foreman out. If you’re too close to my father his punch may land on your jaw. He says that to start with the Zairians were all for Foreman: his skin was darker than Mohammed Ali’s, therefore he was the real African. Ali was too light-skinned, like our classmate Adriano; the Zairians were suspicious of someone with skin like that claiming to be black. But when Foreman arrived at the airport in Kinshasa with his great big dog with its tongue hanging out and its ears sticking up like the antennae at Radio Congo, everyone was afraid. The Zairians said, ‘That dog has the same face as the dogs of those Belgians who ordered us about during colonisation! How can a black man have a dog from the same family as the dogs of the colonisers? How can he bring a dog here that reminds us of the dogs that were trained to pick up the scent of a Black, and find him in the bush, at dead of night, when he was trying to escape from being hassled by the Whites?’ The people of Zaire said to themselves: ‘This Foreman guy isn’t a real Black like us, he wants to become like the Whites, Ali must get the knock out to avenge our parents and our grandparents who were bitten by the Belgians’ dogs. Besides, look how straightforward Ali is, off jogging with the little kids along the river, and in the streets of Kinshasa while that traitor Foreman stays in the gym punching away at a bag full of sand like a madman. Ali is a man of the people. Ali’s like us. We have to help him win, even if Foreman’s never been beaten in his life. The fetishes are on our side. Our ancestors are on our side. We’ll ask the fetishes and our ancestors to support Ali. And our fetishes will fight the fight for Ali, and our ancestors will make sure Foreman gets tired quickly, so he can’t see where Ali’s punches are coming from.’
On the day of the fight, at the 20th May Stadium, Ali was dancing round the ring, with his amazing footwork. Our ancestors helped him keep supple. Foreman was tired of jab, jab, jabbing away. Ali set to work, listening to the ancestors, following the advice of the fetishes. Instead of hitting with his left, though he’s a left hander, he hit with his right. And in the eighth round – bam! – he let his punch fly. Foreman didn’t see it coming, his legs went from under him, he fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes. By the time he got up again the fight was over. Ali had won. And it started to rain. That meant our ancestors were pleased, that they were celebrating Mohammed Ali’s victory.
So when I heard the crowd following the joiner shouting ‘Ali bomba yé! Ali bomba yé ! Ali bomba yé!’ I started shouting too, like everyone else. But I didn’t know who was going to be Ali and who would be Foreman in this fight. Meanwhile the wife of the joiner had disappeared.
The Lady Whistler saw Yeza coming with his hammer. He tried to run but the crowd quickly caught him.
Someone said to him, ‘You can’t run away like that, you’ve got to fight! You’re not going to cheat us of our fight! Come on, fight!’
He replied, ‘Oh no, I’m not fighting unless my opponent puts his hammer down.’
The crowd turned to Yeza.
‘Put your hammer down! Put your hammer down! Put your hammer down! Put your hammer down, if you’re a real man, if you’ve got any balls!’
And since the joiner was not prepared to put his hammer down, a big man, as strong as a hundred-year-old baobab took it off him. They made a circle round the two men. The man who was as tall and strong as a hundred-year-old baobab said to the two combatants, ‘Yeza the joiner can be Foreman because he’s got more muscle. The Lady Whistler can be Ali because he’s better looking.’
That really annoyed Yeza, who wanted to be Ali because Ali always wins.
‘Who says the Lady Whistler’s better looking than me?’
The Lady Whistler sniggered, and everyone sniggered with him, which Yeza did not appreciate.
‘Why are you all laughing with him? Are you on his side or what? Can’t you see he just goes round making trouble in other people’s lives? Well I’ll show you I’m Mohammed Ali, not him!’
With one leap, the joiner fell upon the Lady Whistler, who, like a cat, flipped him over and got on top. The two men were biting the dust. I couldn’t make out who was on top now, and who was underneath. Fists were flying everywhere. When Yeza was doing well, a hand from the crowd would push him, and he’d suddenly be underneath again. The fight which had started in the middle of the Avenue of Independence was now right down the far end and everyone was jostling the two men. No one could separate them.
After they’d been fighting for over ten minutes, I saw people start to run away, jumping over the fences between lots. Police sirens could be heard. I said to myself: ‘When the police arrive they always thump the witnesses before they work out who’s fighting.’ So I ran off like everyone else. I came to a stop in front of our lot and from there I saw Yeza going back into his house with his shirt all torn and blood on his face, looking as though he’d fought a pack of lions and an army of pygmy chimps all in the same day. He went straight into his workshop with his hammer in his hand. He banged away so hard at the coffin, I felt like he was hammering on my chest.
Deep inside I was thinking, ‘What’s going
to happen when his wife gets home?’
What is it that Mabélé’s got that I haven’t, that makes Caroline love him, not me? I wouldn’t mind fighting it out with him, to get him to leave her alone. I can imagine how it would go: I’d be Ali and he’d be Foreman. I’d fly like a butterfly, and sting like a bee, Mabélé couldn’t even land a punch on me, you can’t hit what you can’t see. I’d be too fast for him, I’d rise up into the air, and there goes his fist – missed! Mabélé would stay with his feet planted flat on the ground like a builder’s trowel. And by then Lounès will have taught me the katas of Maître John and I’ll have lift-off, like in the films of Bruce Lee.
The first time I saw Mabélé at the Tata-Luboko football ground I said to myself: ‘Call that a boy? Is Caroline blind or what? Can’t she see I’m better looking than him? Can’t she see Mabélé’s knees are like misshapen yams growing in the Mayombe forest? Can’t she see that when he’s standing up he looks like a turkey with his neck wobbling about the whole time?’
True, I haven’t got any muscles yet, but that will come, and then I’ll be even better looking than I am now. What’s she looking for, anyway? Doesn’t she realise if she has her two children with Mabélé their children will be as ugly as their father? Ok, maybe their children will be clever but they’ll still be ugly, there’s no way round it.
Caroline must love Mabélé for some other reason. He must be able to sweet talk her, like a grown up. Grown up people know how to talk to women and make them laugh and show their teeth and their tongue, because whatever it is they’re hearing interests them. I’m not very interesting when I talk. To be interesting you have to have things to say, things that women like to hear. But what kind of things? Mabélé’s just a cheat, he goes and finds things in books by Marcel Pagnol and comes and bewitches Caroline by whispering them in her ear. There’s no point trying to charm Caroline with Arthur’s poems. I think, for example, I should try and get her attention by hiding a guinea fowl feather in my pocket, then when I see her, I could tickle her in the ear with the end of the feather. I’m sure that would make her laugh, and then she’d think I was more interesting than Mabélé.
Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty Page 12