The Lights of Pointe-Noire

by Alain Mabanckou

  The young man’s work was not limited to what he did up in his box. You’d hear him hurtling down the stairs and dashing outside to receive the reels delivered from the Duo and the Roy, on the other side of town, in a little Renault 4L van. In fact we had to wait till the two other places had finished at least two reels of fifteen to twenty minutes each. This meant that for long films – like The Savage Princess, which lasted over two and a half hours – the courier had his work cut out, as did the projectionist, who got booed by the spectators if there was a delay and the showing got cut off in the middle of some thrilling piece of action because the van had broken down, or the other cinemas had had a hitch. Cool as a cucumber, the operator would simply show us an advert for Cadum soap, over and over again…

  Outside the cinema a number of vendors spread their merchandise on the ground: comics featuring Tex Willer, Rodeo, Ombrax, Blek le Roc, Zembla, as well as the novels of Gérard de Villiers and San-Antonio. Sometimes you would come across an anthology of poems by Rimbaud, Baudelaire or the complete works of some author, published by Pléiade, bearing the stamp of the French Cultural Centre. Not something easy to sell, since in the ‘bookshop on the ground’ the most popular title was African Blood (volume 1, The African; and volume 2, A Woman in Love), by Guy des Cars. We were captivated by the two protagonists of African Blood, who were bound in a mixed marriage: a French woman, Yolande Hervieu – with her rich, racist ex-colonial parents – and the orphan from l’Oubangui-Chari, Jacques Yero, born into a poor family, adopted by whites who sent him to France to study in the 1950s, a time when the Negro was still struggling to prove to the world that he was a man like any other. The two protagonists would meet in the amphitheatre of the law faculty in Paris. We would hold our breath reading the passage where the white girl decides to introduce her black husband-to-be to her parents. We would be touched by the courage of the Frenchwoman, who would follow her husband to Africa, aginst the wishes of her parents, who were naturally opposed to their union. Throughout the first volume of African Blood, it was our own story we were reading, for the life of the couple on the black continent coincided with the independence of several francophone countries, and with l’Oubangui-Chari becoming the Central African Republic. The second volume showed us a couple in which the man had risen to a position of political power, arousing jealousy among blacks, as well as those whites who still liked to foster the view that their own race was superior. Later, when I arrived in France, I realised that Guy des Cars was an underrated author, so much so that his works were referred to as ‘station bookshop novels’, and the author sometimes nicknamed ‘Guy des Gares’. But this in no way diminished my admiration for a man who, without a doubt, had inspired a whole generation of Pontenegrins, not to say French-speaking Africans, with a taste for reading.

  The ‘bookshops on the ground’, which were often to be found outside the Roy and the Duo, were dependent on the cinema clientele and therefore did not survive the demise of the cinemas. Times change; outside the Cinema Rex, traders have set up a makeshift telephone booth, offering calls for fifty CFA francs, selling mobiles and top-up cards. Others sell petrol in used pastis bottles they’ve collected in the centre of town. If the faithful of the New Jerusalem respect the spirit of the Bible, perhaps one day they will lay into these street traders, as Christ challenged the merchants in the Temple of Jerusalem.

  It’s early afternoon and I’m standing outside the building that delivered our dreams, bringing fictional heroes from all over the world to our neighbourhood. The Cinema Rex looks tiny to me now, though at the time it seemed vast, immeasurably so. Is that because I have since been to bigger cinemas in Europe and Los Angeles, or in India, where the cinemagoers actually become actors themselves?

  I look at our old cinema, and can scarcely conceal my disappointment. A banner announces that a festival of Christian music will take place in the building. Two members of the congregation of the New Jerusalem, one tall, one small, are standing at the entrance, and give me a challenging look, as though they have guessed I’m planning on coming in. I approach the entrance and the taller one steps aside. Perhaps he thinks I have an appointment with the pastor. In the doorway I turn round and wave to my cousin Gilbert and my girlfriend, who are outside the Paysanat restaurant opposite. They cross the Avenue of Independence to join me.

  At the sight of my girlfriend’s camera, the little one frowns and rushes up to her:

  ‘What’s that, madame? This is a place of worship, no filming or photographs allowed!’

  At once Gilbert comes to her rescue:

  ‘My cousin’s from Europe, he’s a writer, he’s writing a book about his childhood memories and…’

  ‘Out of the question! Anyway, non-believers aren’t allowed in here, writer or not!’

  ‘Non-believer? You don’t even know him, and you call him a non-believer?’

  ‘I can tell by looking at him! If he was one of God’s children he wouldn’t turn up here with a video camera!’

  ‘It isn’t a video camera, it’s just a camera…’

  ‘Same thing!’

  At a loss for arguments, my cousin decides to cut to the chase:

  ‘Bollocks to your religion! Why do you film your Sunday masses, then, to get on TV, if God doesn’t like images?’

  The tall one intervenes:

  ‘That’s enough, now beat it!’

  Furious, Gilbert pushes the little one aside and comes through to join me in the auditorium. My girlfriend does the same, while the two congregation members stand there like pillars of salt, shocked by our cheek. They come on through as well, and stick to us like glue. The tall one complains loudly while my girlfriend takes pictures:

  ‘Stop filming in the house of God!’

  A young man dressed up to the nines appears at the back of the worship area.

  The little one growls like a cooped-up dog:

  ‘Pastor, we couldn’t stop them! We told them they mustn’t enter the house of the Lord, but they came in anyway!’

  In a calmer tone, the pastor asks us:

  ‘Do you have the owner’s permission to take photos in here?’

  ‘Who is the owner?’ my girlfriend asks.

  ‘He lives just at the back, I don’t think he’s going to be too happy about what you’re doing, you’re violating private property. You’d better come with me and explain yourself. He will make you destroy the pictures you’ve already taken. It’s not the first time this has happened!’

  We exit in single file, the pastor at the front, and walk round to the back of the building. We find ourselves outside a plot where a man with a shaven head in a pair of bermuda shorts and vest is sitting in front of one of three doors in a long building up for rental.

  The man notices us, opens his eyes wide in amazement when he sees me, and gives a great yell, leaving the pastor stunned:

  ‘It’s the American! I can’t believe my eyes! You came to see old Koblavi!’

  The pastor murmurs something in his ear, but Koblavi pushes him aside:

  ‘No! No! No! He belongs here! He can photograph whatever he likes! You know the little street opposite the cinema, rue du Louboulou, that was his uncle who made that!’

  The pastor stands with his arms drooping, his head on one side, and offers his apologies. Retracing his steps, he stops three times, to bow. Koblavi points to a chair at his side:

  ‘Please, take a seat, little brother! Gilbert and madame, you go and film the cinema while I have a chat with my American…’

  As soon as Gilbert and my girlfriend are gone, Koblavi assumes a pained expression:

  ‘I’ve seen you so often on the TV, talking about your books. I’m sorry, I’m ashamed, I’ve never read them… One day in an interview you even mentioned the Cinema Rex, I can’t tell you what pleasure it gave me to hear that!…’

  He looks up at the sky:

  ‘The Lord has forsaken this town, and in doing so He also turned His back on the Cinema Rex… Sometimes I go into the auditorium, I cl
ose all the doors, and I sit down in the middle, just to remember the old days, when it was packed full. I can hear the noise, the shouting, I can still see the dreams of those young people floating up above their heads, forgetting their everyday troubles, just for an hour or two…’

  ‘There are video recorders now, DVD machines, they can still have their dreams and…’

  ‘That’s all garbage, Mr American! How could that replace the atmosphere we had at the Cinema Rex? All these new things, it’s the age of individualism! We’ve forgotten the true meaning of cinema, little brother! A film you watch at home doesn’t affect you like a film you watch with a crowd at the cinema!’

  He brushes away a couple of flies buzzing round his head and continues:

  ‘You’ve come from America, let me recommend you watch Becky Sharp! Now that’s real cinema, you take my word! And it’s not just because I like Miriam Hopkins, though I have seen her before, in Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde! She’s quite marvellous!’

  He stands up, goes into the house, comes back a minute later with a photo of the American actress and hands it to me:

  ‘Look at her, wasn’t she beautiful? I insisted we show every film she’d ever been in at the Cinema Rex! Of course, people would rather watch shoot-outs and native Indians and Louis Funès fooling about, and all those idiot actors in the martial arts films. What can you learn from a martial arts film?’

  He practically snatches the photo out of my hands and blows on it.

  ‘I’m not having any dust on my idol’s picture!’

  He goes to put the photo back inside, and comes back with a bottle of beer and two glasses. I tell him about America, since he asks me. His eyes shine, he’s almost like a child who’s thrilled with a present:

  ‘So you’ve actually seen Miriam Hopkins’ two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?’

  ‘No, sadly, I haven’t… I don’t know that actress. I wasn’t paying attention when I saw Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde…’

  His face stiffens, as though I had just committed sacrilege. With eyes half closed, he murmurs:

  ‘That’s my dream, to go to Hollywood. I can’t believe you live in the city of cinema and you’ve never found time to go and see Miriam Hopkins’ two stars…’

  Resigned now, he launches into a diatribe against the political authorities who failed to help him, obliging him to rent the Cinema Rex out to a religious congregation:

  ‘Those politicians, they killed the cinema! And it’s the same everywhere, little brother! Even in Brazzaville there are no cinemas left! How will young people ever get to know Miriam Hopkins? The cinema was something magical; wherever there was a picture house, the neighbourhood took its name. We’ve got the Rex district and the Duo district and the Roy district, but those politicians understand nothing about that kind of impact!’

  Out of pure modesty, Koblavi avoids mentioning his historic and prestigious family name, the name of his Ghanaian grandparents, who, in the late 1940s, dominated the fishing trade in Pointe-Noire. But the thing their descendant is apparently most proud of is the cinema, whose demise he continues to bewail. He’s almost apologising for having done a deal with these servants of God who sell tickets to paradise to their flock, unaware that many children in Pointe-Noire will never taste the atmosphere of those darkened movie houses, the succession of adverts and the opening credits of the film, followed by the applause of the audience. Noticing the little chain with a cross on around his neck, I say nothing critical about religion. But he touches it and tells me:

  ‘Ah no, I don’t belong to the New Jerusalem, I’m still a Catholic in the strict sense of the word…’

  And finally he talks about my mother, whom he knew, about Uncle Albert, who was a friend of his father. As though speaking his last words, he murmurs very softly:

  ‘I know my origins are Ghanaian, by my parents, but I’ve always felt Pontenegrin. D’you hear my accent? No one’s more Pontenegrin than I am in this town! I’ve never been made to feel an outsider here, by anyone. This is where I live, this is where they’ll bury me…’

  Gilbert and my girlfriend are back now. They’ve spent over half an hour taking photos of the old Cinema Rex, and as they show them to Koblavi his features, sunk in nostalgia till now, light up with a smile. He even allows himself to be photographed, with his broadest smile:

  ‘You should never look sad in a photograph, you don’t know who might look at it in ten years’ time, or twenty, or thirty, or forty, or fifty!’

  He comes with us as far as the exit to his plot, and watches as we walk away.

  We pass by the cinema again, where the two worshippers are still standing guard like a pair of Cerberuses. This time they don’t dare look us straight in the eye. There’s even a shadow behind them: the pastor, who watches us closely as we cross the Avenue of Independence…

  Wild nights

  Most districts in Pointe-Noire still have the same names, based on the activity of the inhabitants, or on their ethnic or geographical origins. The ‘popo’ villages, for example, all along the Côte Sauvage, were created by fishermen from Ghana and Togo, and by the popos from Benin, who came here in the late 1940s, like the Koblavi family. They had a monopoly on traditional sea fishing, using a technique, and material – the famous fourteen-metre popo pirogue, or dugout canoe – which the natives, coastal people of Vili origin, in their comparatively basic boats, which measured no more than five or six metres, could not compete with. The Senegalese, Malians and Mauritians, all of them great traders, made up the ‘Grand Marché’ district, where they put up the only mosque in a city which is otherwise mostly Christian or even animist. The boutiques selling imported pagnes, and the general food and white goods shops, were all kept by West Africans from these countries, who, as their own retirement drew near, passed the business on to their own compatriots, so that the Pontenegrins began to think they never died, especially as many of them shared the same surnames.

  Was it a herding instinct which led those originating from certain departments in the west of the coutnry – the Niari and the Lékoumou – to come together again in districts such as ‘Cocotier-du-Niari’ and ‘Pont-de-la-Lékoumou’, while those from the south of the country, notably from the Bouenza department, and above all from the Mouyondzi region, settled in ‘Pont de la Bouenza’ district and ‘Mouyondzi’? In this way the economic capital was in line with the rest of the country, where ethnicity was more important than nationhood. How could it have been otherwise when even at the pinnacle of the state, power was distributed according to this pattern? The southerners had felt frustrated for decades by the northerners’ stranglehold on political power. Of course, from time to time the latter shuffled the pack and assigned the portfolio for hydrocarbons to a minister from the south. The population didn’t fall for it: the minister was merely a stooge, whose only legitimacy came from the fact that he was from the southern region where petrol was to be found. This did not suffice to quash the southerners’ dissatisfaction. They were supposed to feel they had cornered the main source of wealth in the Congo, whereas in fact everyone knew the minister had no control whatsoever over the contracts, which all went to northerners.

  Then there is the popular neighbourhood which the Pontenegrins all call ‘the Three-Hundreds’, a name to be found on none of the various street signs. Is this a kind of delicacy or an attempt to wipe out the true story behind it? Tell someone you’re from the Three Hundreds and their jaw will drop. You might as well live in a different town altogether, or on the raft of the Medusa. To avoid saying it, some people instead call it ‘the Rex district’, the name by which it is more officially known, thanks to the renown of the former cinema of the Koblavi family, but which hardly reflects the little kingdom of prostitution dominated by itinerant girls from the former Zaire in the 1970s. These working girls were attracted by the superiority of the CFA franc at that time to the ‘zaire’, which was created on a whim as part of the policy of authenticity instigated by Mobutu Sese Seko. Sese Seko forbade his people
to take Western names, and outlawed suits and ties in favour of the ‘abacost’.*

  The girls weren’t the only ones who crossed the River Congo, boarding the train at the station in Brazzaville to come and conquer Pointe-Noire, where the harbour activity guaranteed a stable economy. Builders, carpenters and rickshaw drivers arrived too, from ‘the opposite country’. Since we speak the same language and have the same culture, the migrants felt quite at home, they melted into the crowd and would have gone unnoticed, had they not been prepared to do jobs which the Congolese turned down on the grounds that they were ‘intellectuals’. The Zaireans who pitched up with us lived by the rule of ‘article 15’: ‘Live as best you can’ – a phrase dreamed up by a populace abandoned to their fate by the fourteen articles of the Zairean Constitution, cleverly stitched together by the kleptocrat Mobutu to keep himself in power for life.

  The Three-Hundreds, situated behind the Rex cinema, was the area where the girls peddled their charms. This is still the case today. Housing made of wood or metal sheeting often stands side by side with unfinished – but inhabited – brick buildings. Should you lose your way in the winding streets of this sector, you will find yourself walking on condoms, which litter the ground. It’s as though the girls desert their ill-lit alcoves after dark to come and work ‘outside’, as though, when it comes down to it, all cats really are grey.