Entering the schoolyard, I spare a moment’s thought for that most steadfast witness, Jean Makaya, our ‘corridor supervisor’. He’s departed this world now, the new general supervisor tells me, as he insists on giving me the guided tour of what now seems to me like a labyrinth. We go into his little office just off the main corridor, leading to the schoolyard. He talks about his predecessor, referring to him now and then as ‘the late lamented’, with an air of profound respect. He shows me a press cutting pinned up on the wall, signed by one Pépin Boulou:
‘Do you remember Pépin Boulou?’
I hesitate for a moment, and pretend to be thinking. The general supervisor understands my awkwardness:
‘But of course you do! He often talks to me about you. You were in the same class, in Building A, the literary section, and you both got your bac in literature and philosophy in 1984, I looked it up in the archives when they told me you’d be dropping in today. Ah well, Pépin wasn’t lucky like you, he didn’t get to go to France, he teaches here now. Some people had to stay behind, after all, for the torch to be passed on! It’s a shame he’s on holiday, he’d have been thrilled to see you again…’
I go up to the wall where the article in praise of Dipanda has been posted. I just skim the last paragraph, thinking that in funeral eulogies and tributes of this kind it’s usually the last paragraph that really counts. I’m right, too, as it reads as follows:
1994 was the 40th anniversary of the Victor Augagneur Lycée. This event passed completely unnoticed. What did not pass unnoticed, however, was the retirement of Jean Makaya, alias ‘Dipanda’. A junior supervisor of legendary dynamism, he worked in this lycée from 1960 to 1994. Intransigent, quick to judge a face, hard working to a fault, he carried out his caretaking duties for thirty-four years, a loyal servant both of this lycée and the Congolese state in general. A veritable fossil in our school, the corridor supervisor, dubbed ‘Dipanda’, saw eleven directors come and go, and witnessed the graduation of most of the pupils, a familiar figure to all. Every single pupil could supply one or more colourful anecdotes about him. Born around 1939, his death passed almost unacknowledged in 1998; only four years after he took his retirement. On the 29th July 2002, on the initiative of the present director, Ferdinand Tsondabeka, a lively tribute was paid to him. Since then, Building A, traditionally reserved for the teaching of literature, has been named after him. As that august poet Victor Hugo wrote: ‘in the quiet of his tomb he heard the world speak of him’. At a single stroke, indifference and neglect were set right once and for all.
I try to think of a ‘colourful anecdote’ connected with Dipanda, but none comes immediately to mind. A few snatches maybe, but they are so diffuse that all I can really remember all these years later is a man devoted to his duties, apparently ageless, who loomed over us with a stick in his right hand, which he was happy to use if he thought a pupil was showing disrespect. I can still see him standing outside the gates, checking that our school uniform was clean, properly ironed, and that certain young rascals weren’t fooling about, turning up their collar, or rolling up their sleeves to expose their biceps, as was the habit of some young ‘louts’ from the rough neighbourhoods. At the beginning of each school year, Dipanda brought all the new pupils together in the schoolyard and lectured them for an hour on how lucky they were to be taking their place on the benches of this noble institution:
‘This lycée is a snapshot of the history of this town. Of the whole country, even, the whole of Africa!’
He would then reel off all the names of significant former pupils: prime ministers, army generals, directors of large companies. Not omitting to mention that it was in 1963 that the first female teacher in the Congo, Aimée Mambou Gnali, gave her first lessons:
‘Madame Gnali – what a woman! She arrived three years after I was made supervisor! I helped her a lot, young boys can be dreadful with women!’
Dipanda’s view was like that of many of those sentimentalists who looked upon the Lycée Victor Augagneur of the 1950s as the ‘Lycée Louis-le-Grand’ of the tropics. They would refer to the area around the school as the ‘Latin Quarter’ of the Congo, underlining the extent to which the institution stood for rigour and scrupulousness – in short, was a school where merit alone separated the wheat from the chaff.
We chose to distance ourselves from this rather over-insistent adoration, especially since it came mostly from those who in reality were nostalgic for the colonial school and viewed everything through the prism of the past. So, if a classroom fell into disrepair, you would hear them complaining in the corridors, out of earshot of the principal, Pierre Justin Makosso:
‘It’s all because the blacks are running the lycée now! If the whites were still here they’d have repaired the roof and repainted the walls!’
According to them, Victor Augagneur had been the best school in the world, before the modern era came along and changed everything for the worse. They claimed that the primary school certificate back then was equivalent to the baccalaureate in our day, and the baccalaureate under colonial rule had been easily equivalent to three years’ study at the Marien-Ngouabi University in Brazzaville. There was a general attitude of resignation, which encouraged the previously colonised to imagine that the Negro was essentially lazy, chaotic, careless, and that these shortcomings had undermined the Western way of doing things, which had been guiding our future nations in the right direction.
In their nostalgia they seemed to have forgotten that it was that great colonist Victor Augagneur who, after his promotion to the leadership of French Equatorial Africa, imposed the press-ganging of all able-bodied men living along the construction route of the Congo–Ocean railway line. Over twenty thousand people lost their lives in the gruesome construction of this line, and many more were left mutilated and maimed. One vestige of that peril is a landmark familiar to all Pontenegrins: the station in Pointe-Noire, dreamed up by French architect Jean Philippot, who also designed the station at Deauville, hence the apparent resemblance some have observed between the two buildings.
It would be no exaggeration to say that Victor Augagneur was one of the promoters of a modern form of slavery, which drove people from all over the Congo to leave their land and hide in the bush, to escape what amounted to certain death. Victor Augagneur employed all the means at his disposal to achieve his cherished goal; to make Pointe-Noire into the terminus of the Congo–Ocean network, and hub of the whole of the Middle Congo, of which it would become the capital – thus avoiding any dependence on the part of the French colonial administration on the transport network of the Belgian Congo, with its railway line connecting Matadi to Leopoldville.
In his own lifetime, Victor Augagneur was not privileged to see his name carved atop the main building of the Pontenegrin lycée. The lycée was inaugurated in 1954, two decades after his death. Initially it was called the ‘Classical and Modern Secondary School’. People noticed it didn’t have a real name, and an adjustment was made: ‘Classical and Modern Secondary School Victor Augagneur’. Some people found this a bit excessive. In the end they opted for the more straightforward version: ‘Lycée Victor Augagneur’.
However, the constant changing of titles wasn’t over yet, and Governor Victor Augagneur’s place in posterity was by no means yet secure in the coastal city. The Marxist-Leninist regime of the ‘Immortal’ Marien Ngouabi, who came to power in 1968, would upset things all over again. Indeed, during his reign, there was much talk of ‘independence of spirit’ and solidarity with communist brothers the world over, how the proletariat of all countries must unite for the final struggle. Above all, ‘mental colonisation’ must be wiped out, and the order went out for the systematic clean-up of anything which recalled, dimly or vividly, the domination of the white man, and above all of the new enemy, capitalism and its ideology of exploitation of man by his fellow man. The policy must start at the top, so under Marien Ngouabi the country would be called, not the Republic of Congo, but the ‘People’s Republic of Congo’.
Schools, roads, railway stations with colonial names were all gradually rebaptised with the names of Congolese heroes or promoters of communism. The secondary school where I had recently passed my school certificate, or ‘brevet’, was called the Trois Glorieuses secondary school in memory of the three days – 13, 14, 15 August 1963 – during which the Congolese trade unionists and their sympathisers ousted Fulbert Youlou, a polygamous priest of the Roman Catholic church, and first president of our country, who tried to impose a one-party state.
By the time I passed into the second year of lycée in 1981, the school had already changed its name and had been known as the Lycée Karl Marx since 1975. President Marien Ngouabi had been assassinated by his own supporters in 1977, but the politicians who succeeded him pursued exactly the same line of ‘scientific socialism’, mixed up with a little tropical capitalism. We looked to the Soviets to teach us mathematics, chemistry, physics and philosophy. Obviously we now swore by Lenin, Engels and Marx; all those other philosophers, like Plato, Kant and Hegel were too idealistic, according to our authorities, and were outlawed, to be mentioned only in contrast to the ‘true’ philosophers, those who had introduced and analysed ‘historical materialism’ and ‘dialectics’, notably the authors of the Communist Party Manifesto, whose portraits hung proudly in every classroom, on the main streets, at intersections, beside the official photo of the man who was president of the republic, head of the government and president of the central committee of the single party, the Congolese Workers’ Party, all rolled into one. The systematic linking of our head of state with Karl Marx and Engels led us to feel that all three were thinkers of equal stature, even if we only ever learned speeches by our president, rather than profound philosophical texts. For the average Congolese person, the president was as much of a philosopher as Marx or Engels. So you could study Marxist-Leninist thought in the speeches of the head of state, instead of wasting your energy reading a great tome like Das Kapital by Marx, or a short but nonetheless deep book like Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, by Engels. So the pupils mostly quoted the president, who himself had quoted Marx and Engels, and thus we learned what some secretly termed ‘the philosophy of poverty’.
One direct consequence of the influence of the Soviet Union on our education was the decline of two languages considered to be the languages of the capitalists, and therefore to be banned: English and Spanish. You have to wonder why we continued to use French, with the implication that this language hadn’t come from the capitalist world, and was actually a Congolese language.
The fact remains that Russian became the first foreign language, particularly since the USSR offered the Congolese bursaries by the bucketful, despite the shortage of candidates who, for the most part, secretly dreamed of going to study in France, rather than of joining the ranks of cut-price graduates returning from Moscow, who were then given jobs at the School of the Party, to spread Marxist-Leninist ideology. In an attempt to get the pupils to look to the Soviet Union, some teachers who were members of the Congolese Workers’ Party would sneer:
‘What the hell use is English going to be to you, since you’re never going to go to England?’
The supervisor isn’t surprised when I ask to meet my old philosophy teacher, who is by far the teacher who left the greatest impression on the ‘Stream A’ pupils in my generation at the lycée. Since we didn’t know his first name, we called him ‘Monsieur Nimbounou’, or behind his back by his nickname, ‘Nimble’. We’d pass him on the Avenue of Independence, standing at a bus shelter, with his briefcase, on to which he had stuck a picture of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. When asked what it symbolised, he would reply:
‘Throughout our lives we should be constantly challenged by the thoughts of the great writers. Rodin’s Thinker is an example of the man who is constantly engaged in thought, and having him with me imposes a spiritual discipline which even religion cannot offer the faithful…’
The supervisor tells me that Nimble doesn’t teach philosophy any more, that he is a Board Inspector now. And he’s over in a different part of the building where a teachers’ meeting is being held.
We cross the schoolyard and go over to the meeting room. Outside, the supervisor hesitates, asks me to wait for a moment, and goes in without knocking. Less than two minutes later he comes back out, followed by a man in a suit.
For a moment I don’t move, transfixed once more, I think, by the fascination this teacher exerted on us as pupils, when he arrived in class with his briefcase, and suddenly all the chatter ceased. He would enter slowly, place his things on a table and sit down on a chair by the window. He would open a book and begin the lesson, without a hint of a cough in the room. His teaching was seen as an invitation to independent thought, a far cry from the slogans of the Party. Setting aside Karl Marx and Engels, he would randomly invoke Descartes, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Plato, Kant and Nietzsche. Philosophy seemed to us like an extraordinary odyssey, spiced up with entertaining anecdotes, such as the one about Diogenes of Sinope who lived in a tub. Monsieur Nimbounou took a sly pleasure in explaining to us how this particular philosopher was a sworn opponent of conformism, barking like a dog, pissing and masturbating in public. And when he spoke of Epicurus and the cult of pleasure, we all smiled, and he did too, with that sly look of his, which he has to this day. He would stand up, looking very serious, and say:
‘Now Epicurus had the right idea, he defined pleasure as the absence of pain. I share his view myself, though it must be said that the perversity of human beings is such that sometimes pleasure, for some people, can only be achieved through pain. Which goes to show that at all times you must seek the antithesis of any given thesis, and from there proceed to a synthesis which reflects your independence of mind…’
Hypnotised by the breadth of his knowledge, we created a discussion group in the lycée. During these sessions, in which we also talked of poetry, we would imitate him by reading whole pages of some ‘capitalist’ philosophy which was taught nowhere except in our class. We were disappointed to discover that the study of historical materialism did not provide the same delight or enthusiasm as classical philosophy. But Monsieur Nimbounou could not entirely neglect the programme imposed by the Ministry of Education. So he would skim over the thought of Marx and Engels and quickly come back to what he considered true philosophy, that of the school of Antiquity.
We have been chatting for ten minutes or so, not far from the meeting room. Monsieur Nimbounou is talking about my books, some of which he has read:
‘My favourite of all is Memoirs of a Porcupine. Perhaps because, without realising it, you posed some philosophical questions in it. Can animals be philosophers? Isn’t philosophy exclusively a feature of human thought? That’s pretty well what I taught you back then…’
The supervisor agrees with a nod of the head, while, to change the subject, I tell Nimble that I thought he had retired.
He smiles:
‘Our country doesn’t yet have enough philosophers for me to be able to retire. And I’m afraid that until my dying day there will be some who go on believing it’s possible to live without philosophising…’
Just as I’m leaving him, I take an envelope from my pocket and hand it to him. He smiles again and pockets it. In the meeting room a voice can be heard saying:
‘What about us? Don’t we get anything?’
Nimble turns round, surprising some of his colleagues, who are watching through the slats in the blinds.
‘He wasn’t your pupil, that’s the difference,’ he says, in their direction.
He folds me in his arms and murmurs:
‘I have to go back into the meeting. I’m so glad you came… Don’t forget: some philosophers only interpreted the world; what we have to do now is transform it. That’s possibly the only thing I learned from Engels, for everything else you’re better off with the philosophy of Antiquity…’
He returns to the meeting room while we go back the way we came and the supervisor asks
me quietly:
‘What was in the envelope?’
‘Just some money, to buy a beer.’
‘He doesn’t drink…’
‘Well, he can buy himself a lemonade, at least…’
At the exit to the lycée the supervisor looks sad:
‘You will come back and visit us again one day, won’t you?’
‘Of course!’
‘But when? Twenty-eight years from now? We’ll all be dead, and maybe the school won’t even be called Victor-Augagneur any more! I’ll have gone to join our dear departed Dipanda, up above…’
I reply, without conviction:
‘I’ll try not to leave it another twenty-eight years…’
Jaws
Few Pontenegrins ever dare come as far as this part of the port. Placide Mouembe, my childhood friend, has driven me here, at my request. But he prefers to remain at a distance.
‘Don’t go any farther!’ he yells, increasingly anxious as I gradually advance towards the water.
In his car, all the way here, he kept telling me I must be careful. And he gave me strict orders:
‘We can go the whole length of the port and back, if you want, but please let’s not go to that cursed place where there are all those rocks. Strange things happen down there. I don’t want anything to happen to us…’
I decided he must be thinking of the times we used to roam down the beach in the hope of finding a wrap left behind by a mermaid, the famous Mami Watta. According to legend, whoever found it would become very rich. The Pontenegrins back then thought that the very wealthy people in our town must have happened upon the wrap of the woman with the fishtail and long golden hair. People from the rougher parts of town would be up at dawn to dash to the bit of the wharf where she was said to live. The most gullible among them would describe the features of this aquatic being with great attention to detail, as though they had actually seen her. She was blonde, or maybe she was black, or maybe a woman with porcelain skin. She was huge, surging out of a great gaping abyss far out to sea, and would come and lie down to rest a few centimetres from the wharf when the ships had gone out. Her piercing eyes lit up the whole of the Côte Sauvage as she stretched out on the sand to comb her hair. What time did you have to get up, if you wanted to see her? Some said around midnight, or even two in the morning. Others said around four. And even so, no one dared come here at these times.
The Lights of Pointe-Noire Page 15