Mongongo na ngai eyokani ti na libanda ééé
Soki ba ko yoka, ba yoka na bango
Est-ce que vie na ngai mpe eza na maboko na bango?
Bango bakoka kosala ngai nini?
Po ngai mowei ya bolingo oyo
Nazalaka na problèmes na ba vivants te, non, assurer ngai, WW Bob Masua.5
For a moment Isookanga felt a little sorry for himself. Would his love of high technology condemn him to a night of uncertainty? In order not to sink into counterproductive homesickness, he closed his eyes, invoked the mysterious Bob Masua to reassure him, and then wisely forced himself to put the charming singer’s words into perspective, thereby shaking off a feeling of abandonment.
As the Mercedes was leaving the property in the morning, its roaring motor awakened Isookanga with a start. He went into the hall, took a quick shower, put on his Superdry JPN jeans, pulled on his T-shirt and his chain with the rhinestone pendant, and slipped on his blue flip-flops. Taking a dim view of the day to come, the young man warily went out into the courtyard.
The guard was sitting on the bench, dunking a thick slice of bread in the tea he was drinking. After soaking it thoroughly, he noisily stuffed it down. Fully focused on his chewing, he would occasionally pick up a peanut from a sheet of newspaper next to his cup and flip the nut straight into his open mouth. Staring off into space, he said, “Vanda!”6
Isookanga sat down. The guard came back to earth. “Do you drink tea?”
He picked up a teapot from behind the bench, served Isookanga, and handed him a slice of bread.
When Isookanga had swallowed half of it, Lady Iselenge showed up. “Your uncle has gone to work but asked me to tell you this, in case you really are the son of his big brother: he never gave my husband the responsibility of taking you in here with us in Kinshasa. And you look like a Pygmy! A normal Mongo isn’t small like you. Who can prove to us that you actually are Bwale Iselenge? You village people—as everyone knows—only come to the capital city to cash in on our money. A Pygmy can claim not to be one, just to line his pockets.”
Mother Iselenge leaned forward and said, “Look me in the eye and tell me you’re not a Motshwa.”
Isookanga didn’t answer.
“You see? I’m sure you’re an impostor. Bwale Iselenge couldn’t possibly be your size!” She stretched her arm out in a horizontal line. “There’s the door, I’m not keeping you here. I’ve already put your things on the veranda; all you have to do is get them.”
When Isookanga left the place, he let his instinct guide him. Without knowing it, he was heading for Camp Lufungula. Wandering off, the canvas bag with the computer on his shoulder, he followed the flow of people and came to Avenue Kato. Near the Great Market, he turned in to overcrowded streets with stores displaying items imported directly from Dubai and China. Especially textiles. Famous-label clothes were abundantly represented among these—Gucci, Vuitton, Adidas, Emporio Armani, they were all there. Isookanga understood better now why they were called luxury labels: everyone was scrambling for them. The Chinese had gotten the point: overpopulated as they were, they had to find something to keep them busy. On the other hand, people on every continent wanted name brands so they could show off. Why not cater to them? Two billion arms could supply whomever they wanted, within whatever time they wanted, at the lowest possible cost. Nobody on earth could do better than that. This way everyone could get out while the going was good, and social stability was preserved with universal elegance.
Isookanga made his way through the crowd, which grew steadily denser as the day went on. When he felt a little hungry he bought some manioc bread, sat down on a step, took a piece of smoked bowayo out of his bag,7 and calmly started to have his snack. Then he bought some cold water in a small plastic packet sold by some young peddlers: “Maï yango, oyo! Eau pire! Eau pire!”8 Guided by enticing smells when the sun was well past its peak, he came to a fence concealing a malewa, a clandestine restaurant, where he ordered chicken with rice and beans. After quenching his thirst with a Fanta, sipping it one drop at a time, as it had been very long since the last one, he paid and continued to drift through the market, wondering where he might be able to sleep that night.
Toward the end of the afternoon the market women started to pack up their goods and return to the outlying districts where they lived. The needy were gathering abandoned products that were unfit for sale. Isookanga noticed many children among them, undoubtedly street urchins. The sun began to set and then it was night. The Great Market consisted of a dozen or so pavilions whose hexagonal roofs were shaped like gigantic flowers on cement stems. Isookanga walked through a labyrinth of deserted tables and, a little to the side, found a corner where he could sleep. He took out the blanket he’d brought, wrapped himself up, and tried to fall asleep as shadows glided through the night and cries rang out in the darkness. A moment later Isookanga was dozing off.
“Yo, ozosala nini awa?”9
A violent blow to his ribs woke him up. He sat back up with a blank look. About ten kids, between the ages of six to fourteen or fifteen, were glaring at him belligerently. When Isookanga got to his feet, their eyes opened wide. The Ekonda was smaller than some of them but had the face of an adult. Judging by their expressions, it was obvious that there weren’t many Pygmies in Kin’.
“Yo nani?10 Where do you come from?”
Isookanga told them his name, but that wasn’t enough; the youngsters grew more and more threatening. Then all at the same time they began to talk.
“You, what are you doing here?”
“Excuse me but …”
“Be quiet!”
Isookanga got hold of himself. He came from the forest, that was a fact. He wasn’t very big, but before anything else, he was Ekonda and would show these little guttersnipes what he was made of. To start with he put on a phony smile. “Ba masta, likambo nini, ko?11 We’re not going to fight.”
When the first blow rang out, Isookanga was ready, bent his knees dodging it, and got into the libanda wrestling position.12
“Ba masta, to luka compromise.”13
“What’s going on here?”
A girl of about sixteen made her way through, authoritatively, shoving the assembled boys aside with her elbows. “You, who are you?” she asked Isookanga.
“Auntie, I was just passing by, I wasn’t hurting anyone, I was sleeping and then they came. I see that you understand the situation, Auntie; explain it to my brothers here.”
It had been a long time since anyone had addressed Shasha with words like these. She sized him up and told herself he was a strange fellow. He looked like an adult but had the body of a child. That pleased her. He shouldn’t be like all the other men she knew. She could tell his smile was phony, but it was far less ugly than many of the ones she’d seen in her life.
“Leave him alone. I’ll deal with it. You there, take your things and follow me.”
Isookanga didn’t need to be told twice. He picked up his bundle, the blanket, and followed the girl to a corner outside the buildings that served as the market’s management office.
Shasha occupied a niche of two-by-two meters. Bodies lay around on cardboard, wrapped in pagnes and blankets.
“What’s your name?”
“Isookanga.”
“I’m Shasha. They call me La Jactance, the Haughty One. You should never have come here. The Great Market at night is Okinawa world, the Arab world.14 I have the feeling you’re from the village. You don’t know the city, do you? You don’t know where to go? If you’re looking for security or to steal money, my man, you didn’t really come to the right place. We’re just shégués here.15 Tozanga mama, tozanga papa. On a rien à perdre.16 Can you understand that?”
“I just arrived in Kin’, that’s true. I went to stay with relatives but we didn’t get along. I had to leave. I was sleeping at their place, just temporarily.”
“What did you come here for?”
“I came to experience the world of high technology and globa
lization, Auntie.”
“And that’s it?”
Shasha didn’t really understand, but everyone has his own reasons. “Go over there, at the end.”
She unrolled a foam mattress for herself that was at best two centimeters thick and, wrapping herself in a pagne, vanished without any further ado.
“Sleep well,” she added as she twisted around to find the right position.
Isookanga slept with one eye open at first, for shadows kept drifting by. Something fishy was going on in the alleyways, intermittently bathed in the headlights of the infrequent cars still on the road. This whole section of the city had had its electricity cut off.17 Exchanges were being made in the secrecy of darkness. Murmurs and sighs had a sexual undertone. Unscrupulously, some offered their body for money, others did the same but paid for it instead. At night the marketplace became the stage for sordid haggling around a single, very coveted commodity, but negotiable solely in shrouded terms.
Slowly exhaustion engulfed Isookanga. After a while he no longer tried to decode the movements of the silhouettes he could distinguish in the distance. This night he would be able to sleep. In any case, he knew nothing about the particular wildlife wandering around here, and it certainly wasn’t—he could smell its scent—the same kind he had only recently rubbed shoulders with in the forests of the lower Tshuapa region. He would take time later to find out more about it. Would the now established globalization drive people to veiled behavior even in everyday life, to a ghostlike secrecy? Like in dummy companies? Like accounts in the Cayman Islands? Isookanga wasn’t sure of it yet, but what mattered for now was that he was finally in downtown Kinshasa, the capital.
“Sala noki!”18
With a touch of hysteria in her voice, the adolescent girl—not yet known as La Jactance—had uttered the words as she kept walking at a high speed. The little boy behind her got up from his fall, not worrying about the tears that blurred his sight, and started running after his sister so he could catch up with her. She was carrying a younger child in her arms. They had to keep moving.
She had gone to the fields earlier with her little brothers to gather peanuts for the manioc their mother was getting ready to cook. It was past noon and the deep blue sky seemed to be suspended from the heavens. The air was quivering with the scorching heat. Besides the murmur of a warm breeze through the leaves there wasn’t a sound. Green shades of fields and tree groves flocked toward the valley, then up the crest of the next hill again, and on toward infinity.
After an hour of gleaning, laughing, and chasing birds of many colors, the children had gone home. As they arrived at the edge of the small group of clay and straw-walled dwellings surrounded by banana trees, they realized the scenery had radically changed while they were gone. The ground was littered with bodies lying hither and yon. One might have thought they were piles of rags, were it not for the shreds of blood-oozing viscera poking out. Here and there sticky pools had turned the soil brown, marked by deep jabs in certain spots where someone had left traces of resistance to the slaughter. Kitchen utensils, stools, hearths were strewn everywhere as if a storm had passed through. The entire village had been massacred. The girl had heard nothing. The killers had used bladed or blunt weapons so as not to be heard, or quite simply to vary their method. They had slit throats and used clubs and bludgeons to crush skulls from which a grayish jelly mixed with blood escaped; fecal matter trailed the area as well. The girl rushed forward. The two boys stood back, clutching each other.
In front of their house the pot with manioc leaves had been spilled on the ground amid the still smoking embers. The father lay curled up, his hands covering his face. His forearms were slashed and his head hacked open by a machete. A scarlet stain appeared between clumps of his hair, as when you open a pomegranate with your fingers. A little farther down she recognized her mother by the pagne they’d thrown across her chest. From the center of her wide-spread thighs something emerged obscenely, something the girl recognized as a thick piece of wood. Unrelentingly staring at the sky with now glassy eyes, her mother seemed to be waiting for a sign.
The adolescent chose not to keep looking. Besides, all the bodies had become formless piles already merging with the earth. Walking backward, she rejoined her brothers, her hands covering her mouth to keep from howling the unspeakable that had suddenly immobilized the land.
“Come.”
Leading her brothers on a blind trail, she chose a path that disappeared into the shrubbery. Those who had committed what she’d just seen were certainly not far away. She, who would soon be called Shasha, figured she’d need to put some distance between herself, her brothers, and the area that had witnessed such a paroxysm of savagery. That’s how they left their region near Butembo that day, with bare hands and their heads burning.
Since their birth, North and South Kivu were the theater of the most horrendous atrocities on a large scale. The Whites called it a low-intensity war. On several occasions, they’d been forced to leave the village with their parents because of clashes that were accompanied by the persistent echo of machine gun and mortar fire. This time there had been no sign of what had happened, but the armed groups that performed ethnic cleansing were roaming through the region and forcing families to leave their land or to submit to the worst abominations: they destroyed women’s vaginas, they sliced off men’s genitalia and stuffed them into their victims’ mouths before finishing them off.
That is how the children started off on their journey toward the west, toward Kisangani, toward the river, looking for a kinder haven. They walked all day without stopping, the older of the boys almost running to keep up with his sister while she carried the smaller one in her arms like a precious possession. To rest every now and then the girl put the boy down and, without complaining, he would toddle along as best he could. They avoided the roads, hoping to escape the horror that hung permanently over this part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In the evening, when the sun draped the horizon in a purple veil, they collapsed in a thicket and, like logs, didn’t move again until the next morning. They were still numb with fatigue when they woke up, but they had to keep going.
“I’m hungry.”
The littlest one had just uttered the very words the girl didn’t want to hear. She gave him the peanuts they had gathered the evening before.
“We’ll eat more later. We’ve got a long way to go. Come on!”
And they continued their trek. Often the girl would raise her head to the trees in the hope of spying some fruit or anything else appetizing, but it seemed that nature herself had disowned them. Later, their throats dry, they came upon a spring where they could quench their thirst, but since they had no container, they couldn’t bring any of it with them. They nibbled on the remaining peanuts and filled their bellies with some more water.
The road kept going. The unevenness of the terrain almost twisted their ankles with every step. The branches they didn’t manage to avoid ripped their clothes as effortlessly as a knife blade. From time to time, they found old hunters’ tracks they would follow in the hope they would come to a village or find some people. They wandered on until the evening, then began to drag their feet because their empty stomachs made them dizzy. The girl and the older boy did their best to control the lightheadedness that overpowered them more and more frequently, tried not to think about their thigh muscles, now hard as stone.
Then the sky opened up and sent waterfalls crashing down. The rain fell in buckets, diluting the dust that covered them. They found shelter in the hollow of an enormous tree trunk and snuggled close together. The rain continued to come down violently. Its racket covered up everything around until dawn.
“Wake up, we’re leaving.”
The older of the two boys opened his eyes. He was shivering.
“What’s wrong with you?”
His teeth were chattering so much that he could barely speak.
His sister touched his forehead. “My God, you’re burning up!” Malar
ia? This really wasn’t the moment.
“Come here.” And she covered Trésor’s shoulders with one of the pagnes she was wearing.19
The third day their trek was even more unbearable. The boy tried to hide how weak he felt, but there was nothing he could do—he really wasn’t well. His steps were so unsure that his big sister had to carry him. The little one followed, trying desperately to stay in step.
“Ya’ Charlene!”20
The little one had fallen and chafed his knee. The girl tried to quiet his crying, telling him that it was all gone, everything was fine, but it seemed she would have to carry him as well. She lifted him up into her arms while she tied the older one to her back with a pagne. She was walking much more slowly now with her two burdens, yet still managed to cover a few kilometers, taking a short break every now and then. She quickly ran out of steam from the effort, but still she held her own. The older boy was shivering with fever, violent spasms contracting his muscles. He was hurting all over and couldn’t keep from moaning. They had to stop before dusk, because he had started to vomit a transparent, gooey liquid speckled with green particles from the raw leaves they’d eaten the night before.
Watching the fever’s progression, the girl didn’t really sleep that night. To check his temperature, she put the palm of her hand or her lips against the sick child’s skin. Finally, she dozed off, after a long series of retching the boy had to grapple with that left him weaker than ever.
The next day they walked as they had the day before, the sister carrying her two brothers. She was completely drained. They were going through an area with fewer trees; the sun had started heating the air hours ago, and the girl’s clothes were drenched with sweat. She was more and more worried because, tied to her back with the pagne, Trésor was mumbling incomprehensible words with ever greater regularity. She was hoping the illness hadn’t affected his brain, one of the risks with malaria. They had to make frequent stops. The boy’s eyes suddenly rolled back so that only the whites were visible. Toward the end of the afternoon neither she nor the two little ones were in any shape to continue. The girl piled up some branches and they sank down into them.
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