It’s only logical: when the balance of payments turns out to be problematic, it becomes imperative that, via charges and gains, accounts be balanced first by getting the people dealt with. Where the Lithuanian was concerned, Shasha wasn’t doing anything different. It’s a regular practice in a liberalized universe. And the megalopolis is the place par excellence where people’s concepts and madness are telescoped with extreme violence, generating energies as dense as those of black holes. The new century is a consumer of these, and the Democratic Republic of Congo is there to obtain them.
Besides, “Mabele elisi,”19 the funeral lament sung by the Bamongo confirms it. In an environment polluted by the deadly waves of uranium, cobalt, columbite-tantalite, what can one expect from any individual who has passed through the centrifuge and is developing in the context of a next-generation nuclear reactor? Permanent radiation doesn’t bring innocence back; it leads to rage. And too bad for the sensitive souls if the place of concentration and fission is Kinshasa, laboratory of the future and, incidentally, capital city of the nebula, Congo Inc.
1. African Command: the U.S. Army’s command in Africa.
2. Pili-pili is a standard African (very) hot sauce.—Tr.’s note
3. “God” in Kinyarwanda.
4. Militias, perpetrators of the genocide in Rwanda.
5. Operation Turquoise was led by the French according to Resolution 929 adopted on June 22, 1994, by the UN Security Council.
6. The term propagated in the fall of 1996 to legitimize the Congolese nationality of the Tutsis settled in Congo and demand that nationality through warfare. It was created by connecting the Kinyarwanda prefix “banya” (“who comes from”) to Mulenge, the name of a Congolese village.
7. National Congress for the Defense of the People.—Tr.’s note
8. See the epigraph to this book.
9. The singular form of “Banyamulenge.”
10. Armed forces of the DRC.
11. “Thief!”
12. “Look what he’s done to me!”
13. “He just raped me!”
14. “Sister, what’s happening?”
15. “What’s going on?”
16. “Water doesn’t move without a reason.” A proverb meaning that an event may conceal a hidden cause.
17. “There where you didn’t make it, clouds fell down.” A proverb meaning you have illusions about what you see from a distance. You think that over there it’s heaven on earth—in other words, “the grass is always greener.”
18. “He was looking for it, he’s found it.”
19. “The earth is rich (with our dead).”
EPILOGUE
A non-stop China Airlines flight from Dubai dropped Zhang Xia off in Chongqing. After they officially served him notice of his guilt at the airport, a police squad took him away, bent over, hands tied in back, to the Public Safety Headquarters in the center of town. After a forty-eight-hour interrogation he came into a courtroom, dazed, where they sentenced him to a six-year prison term, two of them suspended, for corruption of functionaries and embezzlement of corporate assets, perpetrated by an organized gang—the most serious counts of indictment. Liu Kaï, moved to the rank of mere accomplice, was given two years, one of them suspended. Zhang Xia planned to appeal, but his court-appointed lawyer asked him to produce proof of not having been in China at the time that his signature was appended to all kinds of documents. It was the only way by which to introduce a new file.
That was basically what Isookanga thought he understood as he decoded the email Gong Xiyan had just sent him in a French she’d found on a translation site. She mentioned an article, a photo in a newspaper, a revolution, street children. Isookanga was sitting on the bridge of a barge sailing toward Mbandaka. They had already passed Maluku, and the network signal was beginning to fade. The young man turned on his computer, wanting to take advantage of it before the batteries were completely dead. He had to open the message in simplified HTML format, because the reception was that poor. On his hard disk, Isookanga saved an article scanned from the daily newspaper Le Potentiel, in which they described the shégués riots and showed a photo of Zhang Xia and himself taken from far away. He tried to send the file in JPEG format but without success—too large. Zhang Xia’s appeal proceedings were set for two weeks later.
The boat was taking its time, and for lack of a nearby telecommunications antenna it was impossible for Isookanga to access the Internet and even send any links. He was watching the stream of water, gladly letting his mind wander while a strip vanished from the battery’s warning light. For Raging Trade it was all over; it didn’t have enough network left, not enough energy to make anything get off the ground at all, certainly not any stealth bombers hidden a thousand miles from anywhere in places to which no one had any access except by passing through ever more complex levels. He would think it over once he was in the village. Zhang Xia had advised him to read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The situation could be remedied at that moment, and in a strong position he could propose agreements to Kannibal Dawa. That risked turning out, painfully and with difficulty, the diktats of American Diggers, and its satellites still weighed too heavily on the territory of Gondavanaland. Run nigga, run nigga / Run, mothafucker run, Old Snoop Dogg kept singing, unruffled. Isookanga wasn’t that serene anymore, of course, but the fateful rhythms comforted him with the thought that the gangsta was not only a relevant spokesman but also an exceptional visionary, because nothing in the near or distant future could have actually contradicted the lyrics of the famous song “Vato.”
The sun had completed its course, and the banks consisted of nothing more than the silhouettes of foliage. A little orange and red remained between the shadows bordering the river. While finishing its path the sun had refrained from revealing that several time zones away, one of its rays hit Wang Lideng’s glasses as he sat frowning in the armchair in the living room. A lightning flash struck, and that was enough, once again, to startle the sensitive soul of Gong Xiyan, sitting with her knees brushing against those of the chief of police in the modest apartment on the edge of Chongqing, in Szechuan Province.
Uncle Lomama was wrapped in a blanket to protect himself from the mosquitoes. Like his nephew, he was busy thinking about the Ekanga village, nestled in the depth of the forest. Both of them were thinking of it, but in different ways. The old man was remembering the drama of Nkoi Mobali and reflecting on a way to stop the pollution the antenna produced by covering it with a thick coating of mud. Termites knew how to do that. The old man planned to prepare them as soon as he was back in the village. He knew intuitively that the ministers and officials he’d been able to see wouldn’t be of any use to him.
As for the young man Isookanga, he had nothing in his head but the vast dark green surfaces that, unobtrusively, contained gold-bearing layers beneath thick vegetation but looked like nothing special. Kabotama Mongo, elengi, o!1 he thought to himself inwardly. With the disk that contained the map of minerals, Isookanga was truly going to occupy his place as chief—as soon as his uncle would let him take over, obviously. It turned out that going to the city had been useful: it had allowed him to find out that he wouldn’t merely reign over kambala and pangolin but over more down-to-earth values as well,2 the kind that were easily attributed to any monarch with a bit of glamor. Why not to him—Isookanga Lolango Djokisa, young Ekonda and an internationalist besides?
1. “What a pleasure to be born a Mongo!” a saying.
2. Kambala is a type of African buffalo.—Tr.’s note
In Koli Jean Bofane was born in 1954 in the northern region of what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo, and currently resides in Belgium. His first important publication was the novel Mathématiques Congolaises, published in France by Actes Sud in 2008 and the recipient of the Grand Prix littéraire de l’Afrique noire and the Jean Muno Prize from the Société Civile des Auteurs Multimédia (SCAM). Congo Inc.: Le testament de Bismarck, published in 2014, was awarded numerous prizes, including the Grand
Prix du Roman Métis in 2014, and in 2015 the Prix des Cinq continents de la Francophonie, Prix Coup de coeur Transfuge/Meet, Prix littéraire des bibliothèques de la Ville de Bruxelles, and the Prix de l’Algue d’or (prix du public).
Marjolijn de Jager is a trilingual (Dutch, English, French), award-winning translator of works by, among others, Werewere Liking, Tahar Djaout, Ken Bugul, and Assia Djebar. She also translated Gilbert Gatoré’s The Past Ahead (2012) for Indiana University Press’s Global African Voices series.
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