Congo Inc

by In Koli Jean Bofane

  Waldemar Mirnas stared at the former rebel for a moment, then put his blue beret back on. He stood up, leaned on the table, a little weary, still holding his belly.

  “Maybe, but nobody can accuse me of any violation The Hague will find reprehensible. You’ve heard of the International Court of Justice, haven’t you, Bizimungu?”

  With those words the officer disappeared, handing dollars to the waiter who was coming over to settle the bill and bring the former rebel his beer.

  “I’ll be in touch soon,” the latter added before the blue beret vanished.

  While waiting for his chicken and sipping his beer, Kiro Bizimungu started to think. “He’s fighting back,” he told himself, “that’s to be expected; he’s worried. But why?” Kiro couldn’t find any reason. Until now, he, his men, and all the others had created havoc in the country, and what had happened? Nothing. How long had they been slaughtering? Who had ever tried to stop them? Everybody needed their services.

  Having been at this all these years, Kiro knew how valuable and useful their work was. The multinationals had no choice. The minerals they needed so badly were in Kivu, nowhere else; he and his men controlled the region so that sooner or later they were forced to reckon with Commander Kiro Bizimungu. And it wasn’t because he wore a necktie these days that they had to act as if he didn’t exist. Thanks to his intermediaries, Commander Kobra Zulu was aware of Waldemar Mirnas’s new assignment. They had done business together. In exchange for gold ore or diamonds, the Blue Berets delivered armaments, ammunition, and a little information. It was an exchange of friendly services and that was it, no harm in that at all.

  Except that one of the deliveries had gone wrong. According to what he’d been told, the Uruguayan soldiers who were in charge hadn’t provided the complete order of merchandise, and during the discussion shots were fired and it had turned into a massacre. It was not what Bizimungu had wanted. Nevertheless, his men had behaved logically. No problem where the ammunition crates were concerned, but of the twelve RPG-7 launchers that were ordered, four were missing. Not to speak of the rockets that were part of it. If the promised weapons weren’t there, then where were they? Sold to whom? Certainly not to friends. They didn’t do anything for free over there. The incident had happened, too bad, but that was no reason for the earth to stop spinning.

  Right then a delicious aroma preceded the waiter who arrived with the food, and Bizimungu decided to think about other, more pleasant things. The case of Waldemar Mirnas would be studied later. The chicken moambe had nothing to do with it, and Kiro decided to give it his full attention.

  As promised, Isookanga went to pick up Aude Martin that evening on the Avenue de la Libération. Expecting to be going out, he insisted on dressing elegantly. He was wearing his Superdry JPN jeans and a Jimmy Choo T-shirt that said, This is not a Jimmy Choo & it’s not available by H&M. His NY pendant sparkled on his chest, and on his forehead he was sporting his Dolce & Gabbana glasses like a headband.

  They walked through the streets of Lingwala and found themselves in a tiny bar where the décor didn’t matter, since in the darkness you couldn’t see the walls. Demands were made only on one’s hearing and one’s nerves in this sort of place. You didn’t really go there to converse, but still the young researcher made an effort to be heard despite the guitars, bass, and drums of the music by Wenge Musica and Werrason, the King of the Forest. Spilling over from the dance floor, men and women surrendered themselves to violent movements of the pelvis, thrust forward in a rhythm that pulsed like the blood flow of someone in a manic frenzy. Isookanga and Aude were sitting on a bench, each waiting for the beer they’d ordered. They clinked glasses and emptied them in one gulp because of the stifling heat, then right away ordered another.

  “I wonder what the Congolese would do without their music,” Aude Martin said. “It’s all you have, but what a treasure!”

  “Eboka, Motute! Eboka, Motute!”5 Werrason chanted.

  And the dancers on the floor went even wilder. The guitar nearly seared their flesh in its attempt to influence basic metabolism and the cerebral hemisphere in control of willpower. Everyone on the dance floor, hips unencumbered by any psychological deterrent, succumbed to the music, faces impassive or, conversely, eyes closed and completely transported.

  “It’s my last night here.” Aude Martin shouted to be heard. “I’ll never forget this stay in Kinshasa. Thanks especially to you I’ve been able to learn about the complexity of this continent.”

  “What did you say?” Isookanga asked, unable to hear because of Werra’s band.

  They ordered another round. A tall, strapping man, dark as the night, held out his hand to Aude Martin and pulled her firmly to the dance floor. His pelvis thumped against hers boldly, powerfully, but controlled. She moved as sinuously as a cobra, her arms above her head, her eyes closed, ecstatic. The electricity she felt around her initially made her anxious, but the muscular bodies surrounding her didn’t provide her with the alternative of shying away from their unyielding presence. The redolence of the armpit odors around her were beginning to go to her head. The women dancing showed her what to do, rubbing their rumps and pubic areas against the hard male organs, ostensibly unimpressed; you would have thought it was an Alain Mabanckou novel.

  Aude let go and felt blazing flesh on every side, muscles taut, fluids shifting, obdurate looks, breath on the nape of her neck. At one point, in a spin, she couldn’t take it anymore and dropped down on the bench, not even knowing who had dragged her onto the dance floor. She emptied her glass and put it back on the little table with a clang, pushing a long lock of hair out of her eyes.

  “My God, I’ve never felt such ferocity. All these men! Even when they dance it’s as if there’s renewed suffering inside them. You sense that some kind of rage could erupt at any moment. How do you live in this powder keg?”

  Isookanga felt something like a boa awakening inside his Superdry JPN jeans. What was she talking about now? The prejudices Aude Martin bombarded him with nonstop were beginning to get on Isookanga’s nerves. What suffering was she talking about, that little white girl? All she had to do was ask the UN or the IMF.6 All she had to do was reread the terms of the structural adjustment programs. Had she come to Congo to do an audit or what?

  Fortunately, at that moment Wenge Musica Maison Mère changed moods and the lament of “Nicky D” was heard in the monumental baffles around the club. Everyone’s heart melted at the beauty of the melody and Isookanga’s was no exception. He ignored the concepts of social anthropology and, opting for peaceful coexistence, pulled Aude Martin onto the dance floor. He held her at a distance, leading her at arm’s length so the difference in their height wouldn’t be too noticeable but, most of all, because the boa that had raised its head just before was starting to move as if it wanted to force its way through.

  Yo obendi nzoto pe distance, Nicky D

  Ndima yo otikela ngai souvenir po na bosana te ke

  nazalaka na chérie na ngai Nicky D

  Awa, yo nde, bolingo ya sincère

  Oh, oh, oh, ngai na yo likambo te

  Na lingaki na bima na yo dimanche, na Inzia, na sambwi

  Souci na ngai suka te.7

  All very well and good, but evidently Wenge Music and the King of the Forest, its leader, would never change. Without a warning they heard “Eboka, Motute!” blast again, and this time the basses were even louder. Hips went wild again. It kept going for a very long time. Beating relentlessly.

  Following Batwa choreography, Isookanga, his feet firmly planted on the floor, was making micro-movements, but a phenomenal energy was unfolding. His open hands wide around the young white woman didn’t touch her but were mysteriously transmitting a current through her entire body. He moved his right shoulder forward. Legs lithe, fists tightened, he flattened the ground with imperceptible stomping motions, throwing his pelvis forward every other beat, performing a hyper-classic shadow-fuck. He moved his left shoulder forward and, without stopping, repeated what he�
�d been doing. Eyes closed, face turned to the play of light, his Dolce & Gabbana glasses on his forehead throwing lightning flashes all around like magic spells, goading the young woman’s libido.

  The music, sweat, and alcohol had taken hold of Aude Martin. She no longer knew which way to turn. She felt her panties were at risk and thought she’d been bewitched; something ancestral would prevent her from freeing herself from this fateful charm. She’d heard about that. They said it was like a gris-gris that would cause the downfall of women from colonizing countries when they showed themselves to be foolhardy and frivolous.

  “Let’s get away from here,” she whispered to Isookanga, suddenly worried. “I want to go home.”

  Before the piece was finished Aude insisted that the young Ekonda bring her back to her apartment. She was afraid, she said.

  In the taxi they didn’t speak. She was holding on to his arm, pretending to be asleep, but Isookanga noticed a trouble-filled tension between them. All evening she had been making stereotypical comments on Africa and Congo, and because of it the python nesting in his Calvin Klein underwear—feeling threatened—was now hatching a muted rage. Isookanga tried to quiet it down mentally. He had always avoided women. On the rare occasions that he had undressed in front of one of these creatures, he could mislead them before the act, but once they got going it was always “Hey, mosutu, ééh! Nalingi lisu’u te!”8 It was the kind of shriek that horrified Isookanga. And all because of his mother’s negligence. Now he was facing insults from the whole feminine sex in Équateur Province. “She’s just like all the others; she’s not going to get any!” Isookanga swore to himself vindictively.

  The taxi arrived; in a rush to get back to her sanctuary, Aude Martin tossed a wad of banknotes to the driver as she opened the door. She produced a stream of words that Isookanga didn’t hear, as his resentment and the alcohol they’d imbibed prevented him from noticing anything that was going on outside his underwear with the initials C. K. Aude Martin had to struggle for a moment with the lock, but then they were in the bedroom, on the edge of a bed that occupied almost the entire space.

  “When are you Africans finally going to grab your chance, once and for all?”

  Isookanga heard it as if through a sort of fog.

  “When you think of what this continent has to endure, how does a Pygmy handle it? With the energy you all have, why always such resignation?”

  Phrases that went too far. Indignant, Isookanga turned his back on her. He reckoned he’d leave her then and there, but she clutched onto his Jimmy Choo T-shirt and clung to him.

  “I want only one thing: to share this suffering,” she said. It was like a cry from the heart. “I beg you, don’t leave me!”

  The most obtuse python in creation—the one with just one eye—had been ruminating his loathing of the Africanist’s condescension for a while now. At this last cry, a forceful torsion made itself known inside the Calvin Kleins. They fell onto the bed. Isookanga lost complete control as his Ekonda hunter’s spirit took over.

  With astonishing speed, he unbuttoned his Superdry jeans and with a tight fist grasped the boa right below its head in an attempt to control it, but it was shaking like a paddle working against the current. Isookanga was familiar with the phenomenon, having read about it on a health blog. He knew that the testosterone being secreted in a high dosage because of this madwoman’s words was now acting up inside him, triggering feelings of rage, certainly, but at the same time activating an irrepressible erection, magnified by a need for resolute conquest. The explosive mixture was the reason why his body went directly counter to his own will, even though he in no way wanted to satisfy the woman’s appeals nor go against his abhorrence of showing his shameful sex. The boa’s head was looking for a victim and Isookanga felt trapped, the full weight of his body thrown onto Aude Martin.

  He forcefully grabbed the young woman’s legs and pushed them up on his shoulders. She had already removed any obstacle by swiftly taking her jeans off one leg. Before Isookanga knew what he was doing, without even needing to look, he had pushed back the edge of her panties and felt his sex plunge down into a bush of moist hair and then, without transition, into a bottomless well, a delight to die for. The moorings almost broke loose, were it not for the raucous cry the young woman let out from the depth of her chest, which tormented Isookanga’s nerves even more. He began to hammer away at her with his pelvis, banging aggressively against the bottom of a well that seemed unfathomable to him.

  The Pygmy was unaware of the extreme sensitivity of the woman’s mucous membranes. Propped up on his knees, he didn’t know that each thrust he executed was—for her—like the whipping his ancestors had suffered at the time of slavery; that each assault between her thighs was as merciless as the hand-severing axe, as the stump Leopold II and his descendants had inflicted; that each penetration of his organ provoked a turmoil worthy of a riot for independence; that the grunts coming from his mouth were reminders of those uttered by the Belgian Gerard Soete9 during the dissection with a saw of Patrice Lumumba’s body; that each jolt inside her sensitive belly resounded like the salvos fired off by vicious neocolonialists, like the diktats of the International Monetary Fund, like the resolutions of the UN, like a reprint of Tintin au Congo,10 like the speech by an ill-informed French president in Dakar, like the propaganda of racist sentiments on Twitter.

  Living through this nightmare, Aude no longer resisted. Ripped apart, she felt like the victim of dagger blows tearing through her; she felt like those raped women of Kivu, abandoned by everyone, despised, tortured, mutilated, persecuted, exiled, taken hostage, reduced to slavery, defiled, defiled again, but still struggling. Then there was a never-ending explosion inside her that might have matched the fire deployed during the wars of Independence, of Katanga, of the Rebellion of 1964, of Shaba I, of Shaba II, of Liberation, and of the one they call Unjust that is still going on, and on, and on, and on, and on. Her cry—which, incidentally, Isookanga no longer heard—echoed in her innermost consciousness, exploding into an enormous spray of white light, of indescribable purity, which decomposed into innumerable sparks, resembling what might be redemption when seen in myriads of flakes shaped like stars, sparkling unto death.

  “Likambo nini awa? Yo! Ozosala ye nini?”11

  Knocking on the door intensified and several people could be heard, fighting to speak.

  “Who is it?” Isookanga shouted, rolling over on his side, his pants halfway down his calves.

  “Open up!” was the authoritarian response.

  Aude Martin still had one of her jeans legs on, but her panties lay at the foot of the bed, torn to shreds, fragrant, pure as a dove on the altar of the holocaust.

  “My God! My God!” she kept repeating, pulling the shirttails of her blouse over her heavy breasts, which were the color of milk with wide, dark brown areolas.

  Before she could say anything else, the door flew open as if a hurricane had hit it. In her agitation, the young woman had forgotten to lock it.

  “Yo! Ozo nyokola ye pona nini?”12

  “Nasali nini?”13 Isookanga asked, now standing and trying to button his pants.

  Her orgasm brusquely interrupted, Aude was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Sitting on the bed she was crying her eyes out, her shoulders shaking with sobs.

  “What have you done to her, you? Basalaka mwasi, boye te!”14

  The neighbors were there, awakened by the uproar that Isookanga, colonialization, and its aftermath had incited. They wanted to be sure the young white woman wasn’t being assaulted by the kuluna gang running rampant in the district. Their fears seemed justified, as she appeared to be in real danger. And besides, the guy looked suspicious. Starting with his size.

  “Don’t worry, Mademoiselle; this individual won’t harm you again,” one of them said.

  Isookanga tried to defend himself, but it was useless. He was like a dictator about to be overthrown: half a dozen men and women were pushing him to the exit, shouting all kinds of things
.

  Still in shock because of the dirty-headed python, Aude Martin was too traumatized to say more than a few words. “He castigated me,” she finally managed to divulge.

  They covered her half-naked body with a pagne.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” she sobbed in lieu of a denial.

  The researcher didn’t understand the aggression perpetrated on her body. As if a transfer had occurred. “He raped me.”

  Surrounding her with soothing words and caring arms, her protectors tried as best they could to console her. The emotion had been horribly violent, her approach had taken a beating, but had she adequately paid to settle the debt her ancestors had incurred so long ago with these people? she wondered with a delicious sense of guilt.

  Holding his breath, Old Lomama stopped as he pushed a branch aside. At eye level with him, a soft green mamba snake was moving its minuscule head back and forth, flicking a menacing tongue. The old man remained motionless until the reptile, its body tense, slithered down to a lower branch and silently vanished into the undergrowth. The forest had swallowed up the Ekonda chief at dawn; he sometimes made his way on the ground, sometimes over the natural bridges and pathways formed by branches and lianas. He was wearing nothing but his breeches of crushed bark. He carried his bow across his back, a quiver wedged under his right arm. Other than the song of birds there was no sound. Taking flight every now and then, one of them would break the stillness with a rustling in the trees that stood upright in all their majesty and strength, searching for light at all costs, firmly rooted for centuries to a land that had been generous enough to make its omnipotence available to them so they could fulfill their quest.

  Old Lomama was looking for game. He’d been following the tracks of a wild boar since the late morning, and from what he observed, he knew it was a large male. Old Lomama liked feeling the shiver of pursuit, confronting his expertise in the natural world. He could have been content to hunt a monkey on the edge of the forest, but feeding himself wasn’t the only thing: it was much more satisfying to know that his neurons were functioning well inside a body capable of slinking into the foliage. But his search was taking far more time than he had anticipated. To some extent Old Lomama expected it, but not to this point. He had left to check on what for now was only an intuition. It seemed to him that game was becoming scarcer or had changed location, withdrawing farther into the forest.