A Bolobe nganga came to throw bones to read the couple’s future. He prophesied good fortune and gave Kalima charms that she asked Kwame to wear. He refused. “This is not just for you,” she explained to him. “It is for our child.” She spoke with certainty now that she was pregnant. She had already begun to act like a mother. She repeatedly badgered him to wear the charms. Because the matter was important to her, he hung them around his waist on a thong.
ONE AFTERNOOON after teaching his classes at Bomboko Congo, Kwame was having tea with the Badekas. Without his planning to ask it, a question spilled out of his mouth. “If I wanted to marry Kalima,” he asked, “would that be possible?” The inquiry was greeted with silence. The Badekas glanced at one another. “How would I go about it?” Kwame persisted.
“Why would you marry Kalima?” asked Théa.
“Why does a man usually marry a woman?” Kwame replied.
“There are many reasons to marry,” Théa noted.
“But already she lives with you,” said Badeka. “She keeps you warm at night. She prepares your food—or sees that it is prepared the way you like it.”
“And she is giving you a child,” Théa said. She nodded her head as if she understood and said, “Ah! You want the child.”
Kwame laughed, a little frustratedly. “I want to know about marrying her. Is it possible? What has to be done?”
Again the Badekas glanced at one another. Badeka asked, “Would you take her to America when you leave here?”
“She doesn’t want to go to America.”
“But you will go back to America, won’t you?”
“Maybe if we are married … When the time comes, she will agree.”
“And if not?” asked Théa. “Would you want to take the child?”
All these questions! Kwame did not know how to answer.
“You would want the child, of course.”
“I don’t know,” Kwame said. “I keep thinking about marrying her, that’s all. I thought I should know something about
“It would not be right to marry such a woman and take her to America,” Badeka said, “and then abandon her.”
“Whether you take the child or not,” his wife added.
“Why would I abandon her? I want to be with her.”
“But would you want that in America?” Théa asked.
“You are all rich in America,” said Badeka. “Everyone has his own car and a computer and fine clothes and everyone lives in a large house. But black people are despised there. Everyone has a gun and people kill each other in the streets, especially black people.”
“Let’s start again,” Kwame said. “Tell me about marriage among your people.”
The Badekas made no objection to a theoretical discussion. They enumerated four types of marriage-like relationships between a man and a woman. The first and most complicated was full and legal marriage, a union not just between a man and a woman, but between two families, two lineages, but never between a couple with genealogical links. Full marriage involved the exchange of gifts and commitments. The man and his family amassed bridewealth and transferred it to the father of the woman, preferably over a period of years. During that period the bond between the two families deepened. If the marriage did not work, if the woman failed to produce offspring, or for whatever reason returned to her family, the bridewealth—or at least part of it—was returned to the man and his group.
Anciently bridewealth had consisted of goats or bars of metal, not the Europeans’ currency for that suggested that the woman was merely bought. But more recently money was given as bridewealth. Even today successful men in the Equateur, men with surplus wealth, took second or even third wives for they did not have to buy cars and fine houses and splendid clothes as successful men did in cities like Kinshasa. But a man with several wives was expected to treat them equally and impartially, providing each woman with her own living quarters, her own gardens, sometimes even her own kitchen. Among the Mongo people the offspring of these legal marriages belonged to the husband’s lineage.
Two other kinds of union existed, only rarely now, but with some frequency in ancient times. In one case a man purchased a woman in a cash transaction, the money paid fully at one time. The woman worked for the man and served as his sexual partner. She was not quite a slave—for slavery had long been abolished—but neither was she accorded the respect due a legal wife. In the second case, a temporary situation, the woman served as security for a debt. She offered herself voluntarily as a gesture of assistance to her father or brother. When her relative had accumulated sufficient funds he bought her back. In both of these cases offspring from the union belonged to the child’s father and his lineage.
In a fourth kind of union, now widespread, Kwame was told, a man kept a woman as his mistress, his concubine. No marriage agreement was entered into. No linkage was affected between two families, two lineages. Offspring of such a relationship belonged to the woman’s lineage.
“I take it which lineage claims the children is very important,” Kwame said.
Théa nodded. “This last kind of relationship is the one you have with Kalima,” concluded her husband. “Assuming you do not marry, the child belongs to her lineage.”
“We call that ‘living together’ in America,” Kwame said. “Two people share their lives, but they choose not to marry.” He laughed. “I can tell you that the woman I lived with before coming here would attack you for insulting her if you suggested she was my concubine.”
“Maybe you were her concubine,” teased Théa.
“We were equals,” said Kwame. “Nobody’s a concubine in America.”
“But this is Africa. You are not equals here,” Théa pointed out. “Kalima is dependent on you. She lives in your house. You give her money every week.”
“You know a great deal about us,” Kwame said.
“It is because you are fascinating,” Théa said, teasing. “And Kalima tells us these things. Although we could see that she was pregnant well before she told us.”
Kwame returned to his original question: “If I wanted to marry her—”
“Don’t marry her,” Badeka interrupted. “Europeans have a concept that is strange to us: amour. This amour, it comes and it goes. Americans, I understand, have a notion that is even worse, ‘amour romantique,’ ‘romantic love.’”
“Is that what you feel for Kalima?” Théa asked.
“She seems part of my life,” Kwame said. “I don’t want to think of her not being part of it. And if trouble comes to the Equateur,” he added, “I want to have made arrangements that will provide for her.”
“Her people will provide for her,” Théa observed. “That’s what African families do.”
For a time they talked of other things: situations at the school, the hardships of the refugees in the jungle, the possibility that the fight between Mobutu’s loyalists and the Kabilistes might spill into the Equateur.
After he announced that he should be leaving, Kwame asked Badeka, “If I were to approach Kalima’s people, would you serve as my family? Could you attest for me—”
“Don’t think of marrying her,” Badeka said.
“You married Théa,” Kwame said. “She’s Senegalese. Is that so different?”
“The Senegalese are Africans,” Théa reminded him. “And we married in Europe. We returned to Africa already married.”
“Go home to America with happy memories of this woman,” Badeka advised. “I have seen American movies. A man feels temporary pain at the loss of a woman for whom he feels ‘romantic love.’ But soon another woman enters his life. Let that happen to you.”
“And let Kalima keep the child,” said Théa.
“It’s not about the child,” Kwame said.
“It’s always about the child,” said Badeka.
Kwame returned home, irritated that the Badekas could not understand his point of view. The child was not the main consideration; the relationship was. But perhaps the child would always b
e the main consideration for an African. Kalima was not at the house. These days she seemed to spend more time at le snack than with him. She would be even less involved with him once the baby came. Well, at least he had checked out the possibility of their marrying. Clearly it was not a good idea. There would be other women; there always had been. He put the idea out of his head.
EVERY EVENING while the servant made dinner—Buta from Bolobe was being trained by Kalima to cook at le snack—Kwame listened on Odejimi’s shortwave radio to news of Africa from London and Brussels. He learned that Mobutu had returned from France. Commentators speculated that this consummate political manipulator might yet engineer a peaceful solution to the conflict in Zaire. Even so, American troops landed in the old French Congo. Stationed in Brazzaville across Pool Malebo from Kinshasa, they stood ready to evacuate Americans in danger in Kinshasa.
Meanwhile there was concern about the fate of tens of thousands of Hutu refugees who seemed to have disappeared in the jungles southeast of Kisangani. Were they massacred by Kabiliste rebels? If so, what happened to the bodies? Some 80,000 bodies could not simply disappear. But helicopter overflights showed no evidence of either the refugees or their bodies.
Lubumbashi, the country’s second city, the Elisabethville of the colonials, fell to the rebels; it was in Shaba Province, the heartland of the Copper Belt. A few days earlier Mbuji Mayi had fallen as well; it was the capital of the diamond mining area of Kasai. The Kabilistes were marching toward Kinshasa. Nothing could stop their advance. Some commentators warned of a bloodbath ensuing there. Others speculated that if Mobutu could not broker a settlement, he would take refuge at his palace in Gbadolite in the far north on the Ubangi River where he and his ethnic followers might try to make a stand in the Equateur. Perhaps they would negotiate for the region to become a separate republic, bounded by the Congo and Ubangi Rivers and their tributaries in the east. Or perhaps they would fight.
Speculation of fighting in the Equateur deeply disturbed Kwame. He tried not to let Kalima know how worried he was. They made love every night—with an intensity and pleasure he had never experienced before. Kalima gave herself to him completely. He responded with tenderness and patience. Nothing was hurried or urgent as it had sometimes been when they were first together. They moved in harmony with one another. In being joined together they seemed to become one.
After lovemaking Kwame would fall asleep, his hand resting lightly against Kalima. Later, still touching her, he would wake and stare at the darkness. How much longer, he would wonder, could they do this? Would there be fighting in Mbandaka? If there were, would she take refuge in Bolobe? Would he be ordered to evacuate Mbandaka while she was gone? Would he be with her when the baby was born? Or far away in another country never to see her again?
One night he slipped from the bed and walked naked through the house. He went out onto the terrace where a breeze blew so strongly that mosquitoes did not bother him. He let the air wash over him. Nakedness felt natural now. He drank in the warm night air; it carried the scent of the river. He stared into a darkness so black to his eyes that at first, he could hardly see the house he had just left. Then he made out stars and heard the whispering of the river as it passed.
He felt himself a tiny speck of humanity against the immensity of the night: its darkness, its solitude and silence. But even a speck of humanity had to consider its destiny. His woman was asleep upstairs carrying his child. Should he marry her? Could he abandon her? Abandon them? If he had to leave, would she come with him? If she would not, could he stay? And do what?
How could he stop whatever it was that was hurtling toward them? Could it be stopped? Not by pouring libations to a statue every week. Not by wearing charms tied to a thong. Was there nothing he could do? Was it his fate—their fate—simply to be overwhelmed?
The present course of his life seemed to offer three career possibilities: academia; US government service; and remaining, without a career, in Mbandaka with Kalima.
The academic possibility would involve jockeying for position and tenure, trying to maneuver into ever-better situations at ever-better universities. It would require churning out sham-intellectual articles about Third World literature for navel-gazing audiences of less than twenty souls. It would demand couching these “explorations” in polysyllabic obfuscatory jargon, the lingo of the priesthood of on-the-make academics. It would mean concocting arcane insights so esoteric that they bewildered—and thus impressed—colleagues so fearful of confessing puzzlement and confoundment that they would not acknowledge what any nonacademic could immediately see: that the “exploration” was all piffle, poppycock, twaddle, humbug, malarkey—in short, bullshit.
The academic life would mean playing political games, currying favor with the right people, seeking graduate students and grants for research. It would involve years of classes full of students who had little interest in the subject matter—although a few would, indeed, feel passionate about it. Academic life in the States would inevitably mean sometimes skirting, sometimes engaging, but never escaping the matter of race.
Kwame thought about Livie. Had she loved him? He was no longer sure what love in America meant or involved. He knew that what he and Livie felt for each other was based partly on race. That she enjoyed being different by living with a black man. Doing that made her special. A black man’s regard oddly credentialed her. For his own part Kwame felt a higher level of self-acceptance because she was white. Her being white and pursuing him gave him a better sense of himself.
But he had also known that any marriage to Livie would end in divorce. In the long haul Livie would want comfort. She disapproved of divorce the way she disapproved of abortion: it was disagreeable, but it had to be done. One just didn’t talk about it. He knew that at some time she would turn into her parents: having—or at least espousing—all the right liberal passions, but not experiencing any inconvenience in supporting them. She would want to be comfortable, which meant rich. Which Kwame would never be. He could not help thinking that her ultimate comfort would be achieved by marrying a wealthy white man, probably the man she had asked his permission to live with. Later she would startle her children by revealing that, yes, she had once lived with a black man; she had loved him desperately (that, of course, would be part of the myth), but she had finally realized that at least for now life was better with her own kind.
Of course, returning to academic life would mean renewed contact with women students who indulged fantasies about their professors. Or, in the case of Livie, acted them out. If students knew that he had had a serious affair with a Mongo woman—or that he had married her or had a child with her—that would make him even more intriguing. More desirable. Irresistible even. He would fill his classes. He did not look forward to any of that.
Standing in the night, he realized that he did not want to return to consumer society. Where people judged you on the basis of what you wore and owned and drove, not on what you’d achieved, given where you’d started. Nor did he want to return to a society where sex was a mere commodity of pleasure, where that commodity became an engine driving the entire society. The sex he now had was uncomplicated, heterosexual contact, deeply enriched by emotion and mutual respect and—admit it, he said to himself—with love. Kalima and he did not spend much time during the day thinking about it.
As for a USIS career, race would always be a factor there as well. Advancement would be facilitated by a mentor; he would need to find one of those. It would still be parsed out in terms of racial categories and slots. Sometimes this would help him, sometimes hurt. But he would never be free of it. And overseas he would be expected to defend American policy regardless of what it did to small countries that needed help in achieving not client status, but true independent nationhood. Too many American politicians and policy makers wore blinders; they could not see the other guy’s point of view. Or look at America from a non-American perspective. The American obsession with American interests had led Zaire into its present cond
ition of deprivation and crisis.
Kwame had genuine, perhaps idealistic, desires to help Africans achieve a better life. Did American policy have any real interest in that? If he agreed to play the game in order to achieve what he could—which would require all he could muster in terms of “protective coloration”—would he ever find a companion to share his life with him? Kalima had made him realize he wanted a family.
And what about Kalima? Would she ever feel American romantic love for him? They had mutual respect. Was that enough? Could it work? Anyway, he thought, if he tried a life with Kalima and it didn’t work, he could always return home. He would deal then with the ambivalence he felt toward returning to America. “For an African American, you are very American,” Odejimi had teased him. Now he felt that for an African American he was becoming increasingly African.
AS THE days passed, Kwame noticed people in Mbandaka and its outlying areas who did not look as if they belonged in the town. He was not certain what distinguished them as different. Perhaps he was simply antsy about the country’s deterioration. But some of these newcomers appeared to be refugees. Were they Mobutu loyalists from Kisangani? Or Mongos returning to their home territory? It was not possible that they were Hutu refugees who had walked through hundreds of miles of jungle to come here.
But where were the Hutu refugees? Each evening radio broadcasts from Europe reported these refugees’ plight. One evening commentators talked of insurgents cutting off access by aid workers to refugee camps southeast of Kisangani. The next night the early broadcast reported 55,000 refugees missing. The late broadcast confirmed that aid workers had reached the camps, but found them empty. Where were the refugees? Where were these people headed?
The next day a report announced that the American government had sent its ambassador to the United Nations to mediate a settlement of the conflict in Zaire. The rebels’ Laurent Kabila had agreed to mediation; assent was awaited from President Mobutu. Meanwhile the rebels were asked to account for 80,000 missing refugees.
The Uttermost Parts of the Earth Page 23