I drain the rest of the bottle. “Tell me when we get to the one you don’t want to answer.”
He laughs, and I ask the first one, leaning in to be heard over the music. “Pascal Ganao. Is he on Alain-Bernard’s payroll?”
To my surprise, Marcel shakes his head. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you, with both of them Teke. But no, they don’t get along. Pascal thinks Alain-Bernard favors the Fang more than his own people, and he wants to keep the Bateke for himself.”
“Then who protects him?”
Marcel sits in silence for a minute, and I start to think that we’ve already reached the questions he won’t answer. “I shouldn’t tell you,” he says at last, “but an Onabe brought you here, and Aubame’s daughter is a good woman. He’s Nkangue’s man.”
The name means nothing to me, but it evidently does to Paul-Marie. “The district mayor,” he says. “His family have been chiefs here for a hundred years. One of them was boss of half the Ogooué basin before he stole too much from the people and the French replaced him with Lengangouet.”
“Is he a member of Alain-Bernard’s party?”
“He’s independent, but he really works for Elf. There’s an executive up in Paris – a cousin of his – who’s his patron.”
I’m suddenly sure who that cousin is, and I’m even more so when I ask Marcel for the mayor’s description. And that raises as many questions as it answers. Did Etomba order the murder done, and choose Ganao – no doubt a willing agent – to make it seem as if Alain-Bernard had arranged it through a Teke connection? Elf is surely guilty, but could the Big Man on trial in Paris be innocent?
I have another beer, join Marcel and Paul-Marie in dancing with the single women, and go to bed at eleven with those thoughts in my head. At two in the morning, I am rudely awakened.
There are three of them looming over me in the darkness, and they already have me by the arms. I kick out and protest, and the third one punches me in the gut; while I recover, they bundle me into a car and drive out of the village. I have enough presence of mind to wonder if we’re going to the migrant workers’ camp where Ganao has his base, but after a few minutes I realize we’re headed the other way, deep into the forest.
“There are many people who know I’m here,” I say.
“Shut up,” the driver answers, and the other’s grip tightens.
I can feel that we’re no longer on the road; the path we’re traveling now is uneven and riddled with potholes, and at times the car has to plow through undergrowth. Finally we reach a clearing, and three other men are already there. One of them, by Marcel’s description and his resemblance to Etomba, I know to be the mayor. The second is Ganao. And the third is wearing the mask of a Bwiti priest.
“I hear you’ve been asking questions,” Nkangue says.
I tell him again that many people know I’m here, and he spits on the ground. “I’m not going to kill you. But I have a few questions of my own, and I’m going to make sure you answer them.”
He motions to the priest, who says something in what has to be the Mitsogho speech. There is a fire, and he takes a cup of tea off; even from where I am, I can sense the smell of iboga.
That does nothing to calm my fear; if anything, the reverse. I haven’t been initiated in the Bwiti faith – no reputable priest will initiate a Westerner – but I know that the iboga trance is very dangerous. People who take the drug become dehydrated, and might remain under its influence for three days; it isn’t unknown for them to die of thirst in the meantime.
“Give me that, and you’ll get visions, not answers.”
“In visions are truth,” the priest says. I have no idea if that’s true – I’ve never heard that iboga could act as a truth serum – but the people gathered around me evidently believe it to be true, and right now that’s all that matters. And I wonder at the priest’s association with gang bosses and corrupt mayors for only a second, until I remember the clandestine trade with France and the resulting connection between some branches of Bwiti and organized crime. The Bwiti priests are as much captives of the Big Men as any other Gabonais.
“Open his mouth,” says Nkangue, and the two men who are holding me do so. “We’ll ask our questions, and then we’ll leave you alone. Nzambe” – God – “will say whether you live.”
The tea is forced down my throat, and I remember thinking that the setup was perfect; if I died, I’d simply be another tourist who tried to dose himself with iboga, and no blame would attach to anyone here. I’m momentarily amazed that I could still be so clinical, and then the drug hits me.
I don’t remember if they ask me anything, or if I answer. But I do remember the first of my visions. I was in a deep forest, bathed in green light, and tiny streams flowed under every bush and tree. There was a voice singing in the language that Paul-Marie had used to recite his clan lineage, and it was a lament, a cry for freedom. And then Etomba’s face appeared behind the forest, far larger than life, and the pure water of the streams turned to oil. “Drowning,” someone said, “drowning,” and Big Men multiplied and stamped the ground underfoot, but then ants swarmed over them, and they disappeared as suddenly as they had come.
There were other visions too. I don’t remember them, but they were true.
The next thing I can recall is Paul-Marie’s face looking down at mine. I feel a terrible weakness and a thirst greater than I’d thought possible. I see that Paul-Marie is holding a wet rag, and he must have squeezed water into my mouth while I was under; the adults do that to the initiates, to make sure they live. If he hadn’t done so, the forest might have been my burial ground.
“We followed the car’s tracks after we learned you were kidnapped,” he explains. “We got there at morning, and they’d already left.”
“I flushed them out,” I say, and I realize I’m no longer in the forest.
“We’re in another village,” he says, seeing my eyes dart around. “In an Onabe house.” Someone unseen, behind me, gives me a cup of water and I drink deeply. “And yes, you flushed them out – but you did more than that. While they were questioning you, I got this.”
He hands me a small sheaf of documents – emails from Nkangue to Ganao – and the hard drive they came from. “Ganao is short a laptop. Not everything is in there, but enough – Pascal hated Paul and Etienne, but Nkangue put him up to killing them, and it’s clear that the orders came from Elf. Someone will take you to Port-Gentil tomorrow; take the papers with you.”
“For the son to free himself?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “For the daughter to free us.”
VII. THE TRIAL (REPRISE)
Port-Gentil is Gabon’s most European city. Yes, Libreville has its sidewalk cafés and patisseries and colonial buildings, while nothing in Port-Gentil predates 1960 and the skyline resembles that of a New Jersey container terminal. But Port-Gentil has the people.
The only business in Port-Gentil is oil, and as I’ve already learned, the oil companies prefer to import their workers. It’s nearly as common to see French faces on the street as Gabonais, and the overheard conversations come in Parisian accents. The town has a white mayor, although most of the whites didn’t vote for him, and the waiters and retail clerks are as likely to be French oil workers’ sons and daughters as people who’ve come in from the villages.
My flight back to Libreville and then to Paris is tomorrow, and in the meantime I’ve discovered that, like migrant laborers, migrant Europeans can find safety in numbers. Elf surely knows by now that I’m alive, that I’ve scanned Paul-Marie’s documents to my office at Atlantic Magazine as well as to Alain-Bernard’s lawyers and Madeleine Aubame, and that I have the hard drive in my possession. But the kind of things that can be arranged on a dark forest track are impossible in the Port-Gentil Sofitel, where any attempt to snatch me will be immediately noticed by my fellow guests, the staff and the police.
I’m sitting in the hotel bar, drinking French wine and wondering whether I’ve been used. Did Paul-Marie lure me to
Moukouti as a decoy, to draw Ganao and Nkangue out so that he – and the union of which I now know he is part – could secure the incriminating documents? Might it even have been Madeleine who conceived of the idea? Maybe I’ve been as much a tool as Ganao – as much of one, in fact, as any of the drills on the oil rigs.
If so, knowing what I’ve learned about the people who really rule this département, I think I can forgive them.
The television above the bar is showing Canal Plus, and they’re talking about the trial, although it’s become much bigger than just one man’s corruption. Today’s testimony was about embezzlement and bribery, and the camera briefly lingers on Gabonais men in suits giving their evidence, but then it cuts back to the studio where the hosts are talking about the murders. How far will the investigation go now, and where will it lead?
The camera cuts again, this time to the street outside the courthouse. A juge des libertés at de la détention has canceled Alain-Bernard’s remand now that it appears he wasn’t involved in the killings, and he is expected to come out soon.
The door opens and Bongo fils walks out, every inch the patrician Big Man, accompanied by the flash of cameras and reporters calling for statements. Suddenly there is a blur on the screen, the sound of gunshots, and then the sound of screaming. Alain-Bernard is lying dead on the ground, close enough to the Canal Plus reporter that she has blood on her clothes. The camera wavers, and chaos and shouting erupts all around.
I sit as stunned as any of the reporters. The culprit seems obvious, but why would they do it now, when the papers have already been revealed and Madame Aubame is calling for hearings in the territorial assembly? What point in silencing Alain-Bernard when the damage has already been done?
The answer comes instantly: because there’s more damage yet to do. New investigations have been opened by juges d’instruction in both Paris and Gabon, and if Alain-Bernard had decided to cooperate, he could implicate any number of people. The Bongos have been working with Elf for fifty years, and they know where the bodies are buried – perhaps literally.
If that’s the reason, then I’m probably safe. I don’t know anything other than what has already been revealed. But if I were Pascal Ganao, I’d be back in Djambala by now, and I hope Madame Aubame is careful.
I’m finished with my wine, and I order a toutou, which is what they call palm wine here. The bartender looks surprised, but has some. It’s strong, and I sip it slowly, and imagine Etomba watching the courthouse scene from afar, preparing the way to become Gabon’s next Big Man.
But then I remember my vision, and think of the ants. The people of Gabon have cried out for decades, and their voices have grown powerful: the migrant workers’ union that Paul and Etienne died for and that Paul-Marie is carrying on, Madeleine Aubame’s call for the rule of law, and the judges who might finally upend the whole political-industrial complex rather than just one unlucky official.
Maybe this Big Man, too, will discover that he is small.
Afterword
Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The premise of this story – Gabon remaining a French department – is something Léon M'ba, the handpicked boss of Gabon during the 1950s and its president from 1960 to 1967, wanted to happen. In the history we know, Charles de Gaulle refused. In the alternate history that forms the background to the story, oil politics, and the threat that a politician too independent for Paris’ taste might win the election, led to M’ba’s proposal being accepted.
In 2015, though, we see a Gabon that isn’t that much different from the one we know. There’s light rail in Libreville, the Bongo family never converted to Islam, and there are a few more Frenchmen on the streets, but the country is otherwise mired in a corrupt relationship with French bureaucrats, oil executives and local bosses that would seem depressingly familiar to a Gabonais from our world. Why, after such a momentous change in history during the 1950s, would Gabon still look so similar fifty-eight years later?
The answer lies in convergence of relationships. Many in the French overseas territories have complained that they are still treated like colonies: represented in the French parliament but otherwise regarded as stepchildren. Ask Oscar Temaru in French Polynesia or the independence parties in New Caledonia – whose constitutional relationship to France is closest to Gabon’s in the story – and they’ll have many stories. And things often aren’t much different in the independent African countries that were once French colonies: France has often taken a hand in the politics, finances and military affairs of the nations that are collectively referred to as Françafrique. So, independent or not, the path of least resistance for Gabon leads to a quasi-colonial status in which Paris’ interests come first.
On the other hand, while the differences between our Gabon and this one are subtle, they are also significant. With no dictatorship under M’ba and Bongo, Jean-Hilaire Aubame – who in our history was driven to prison and exile – stayed on as an opposition politician, and the daughter he never head in our world speaks for the rule of law. The courts and the press, with help from brave men like Paul-Marie, can sometimes pierce the veil of corruption. Both independence and incorporation into France can resemble colonialism and both provide ways for the Gabonais to take charge of their destiny, but they are different ways.
And so the story ends with a mystery solved and a murderer identified, but with the questions underlying the murders still unanswered. Decolonization is a very long story, and in this Gabon, as in ours, it’s far from over.
I would like to acknowledge the community at alternatehistory.com, where this story was originally posted, and particularly those who commented on and helped to improve the story while it was in progress. I also wish to acknowledge the team at Sea Lion Press, and of course my wife Naomi, whose tolerance of my alternate history addiction is truly heroic.
About the author
Jonathan Edelstein is 44, married with cat, and living in New York City. In the course of his misspent life, he has been a freelance reporter, taught at a Hasidic day school, served as a United States Army reservist, pumped gas, stacked wood, driven a taxi and published 15 scholarly articles in law journals nobody reads. He currently practices law and hopes one day to get it right.
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