The negro grandsons of v.., p.1
The Negro Grandsons of Vercingetorix, page 1
GLOBAL AFRICAN VOICES
Dominic Thomas, editor
I WAS AN ELEPHANT SALESMAN: ADVENTURES BETWEEN DAKAR, PARIS, AND MILAN
Pap Khouma, Edited by Oreste Pivetta
Translated by Rebecca Hopkins
Introduction by Graziella Parati
LITTLE MOTHER
Cristina Ali Farah
Translated by Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi and Victoria Offredi Poletto
Introduction by Alessandra Di Maio
LIFE AND A HALF
Sony Labou Tansi
Translated by Alison Dundy
Introduction by Dominic Thomas
TRANSIT
Abdourahman A. Waberi
Translated by David Ball and Nicole Ball
CRUEL CITY
Mongo Beti
Translated by Pim Higginson
BLUE WHITE RED
Alain Mabanckou
Translated by Alison Dundy
THE PAST AHEAD
Gilbert Gatore
Translated by Marjolijn de Jager
QUEEN OF FLOWERS AND PEARLS
Gabriella Ghermandi
Translated by Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi and Victoria Offredi Poletto
THE SHAMEFUL STATE
Sony Labou Tansi
Translated by Dominic Thomas
Foreword by Alain Mabanckou
KAVEENA
Boubacar Boris Diop
Translated by Bhakti Shringarpure and Sara C. Hanaburgh
MURAMBI, THE BOOK OF BONES
Boubacar Boris Diop
Translated by Fiona Mc Laughlin
THE HEART OF THE LEOPARD CHILDREN
Wilfried N’Sondé
Translated by Karen Lindo
HARVEST OF SKULLS
Abdourahman A. Waberi
Translated by Dominic Thomas
JAZZ AND PALM WINE
Emmanuel Dongala
Translated by Dominic Thomas
THE SILENCE OF THE SPIRITS
Wilfried N’Sondé
Translated by Karen Lindo
CONGO INC.: BISMARCK’S TESTAMENT
In Koli Jean Bofane
Translated by Marjolijn de Jager
THE TEARS OF THE BLACK MAN
Alain Mabanckou
Translated by Dominic Thomas
CONCRETE FLOWERS
Wilfried N’Sondé
Translated by Karen Lindo
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Original publication in French
© 2002 by Le serpent à plumes
English translation © 2019 by Bill Johnston
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04388-7 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04385-6 (ebook)
123452322212019
To my mother Pauline Kengué
To Henri Lopes
For Khadi Hane
CONTENTS
NOTE FROM THE FRENCH PUBLISHER
FOREWORD TO THE NOTEBOOK
PART ONE · FAREWELL TO CHRISTIANE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
PART TWO · FROM OWETO IN THE NORTH TO BATALÉBÉ IN THE SOUTH
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
PART THREE · THE OKONONGO AFFAIR AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
LAST PAGES · DEPARTURE FOR POINTE-ROUGE
I
II
III
NOTE FROM THE FRENCH PUBLISHER
We recently received a notebook entitled The Negro Grandsons of Vercingetorix. Our editorial board made the decision to publish it. The text is signed by a certain Hortense Iloki.
According to Léopold Mpassi-Mpassi, who submitted the manuscript to us and who resides in France, at present the author is supposedly somewhere in the forests of southern Vietongo.
A separate sheet of paper, serving as a preface to the account, indicates that Hortense Iloki wished the reader to know something about her country from the beginning, before learning the facts that she relates. We include this note by way of introduction:
A former French colony in central Africa, the Republic of Vietongo numbers more than 2.6 million inhabitants and covers an area of 342,000 square kilometers. Its people, the Vietongolese, are mostly concentrated in large urban areas, including Mapapouville, the political capital, and Pointe-Rouge, the financial capital. The literacy rate is one of the highest in French-speaking Africa. Mapapouville was previously the capital of French Equatorial Africa (FEA) and of Free France under General de Gaulle.
The country is inhabited by several different ethnic groups; political power is held by the Northerners, a minority population. The economy is reliant on oil, which brings in about 90 percent of state revenue. This wealth, however, has not resulted in viable economic development.
Since 1958 Vietongo’s mosaic of ethnicities has been a source of friction orchestrated by political figures.
The current head of state is General Edou. He previously ruled for thirteen years, then was defeated by His Excellency Lebou Kabouya in the first democratic elections held in our country. It was the first time someone from the South had led Vietongo. General Edou went into exile in Europe during the five years of his southern rival’s term of office. He returned to power after driving out His Excellency Lebou Kabouya . . .
By the time people read this notebook, I may no longer be of this world.
My name is Hortense Iloki, and I am a northerner. I ought not to have had any reason to worry, really, since on that day my people, meaning those of my ethnic group, had come to power. But things are not so simple as that.
I had married Kimbembé, a southerner who was a native of the same region as Vercingetorix and His Excellency Lebou Kabouya, two characters the reader will meet very soon. The facts I relate here concern what without any doubt has been the darkest period of our country’s history. I’ve also included details from my own life and those of the people around me. But does my life not resemble the lives of all Vietongolese?
FOREWORD TO THE NOTEBOOK
I have to exercise patience in order to speak objectively of what has been happening to us.
Ever since I was a young teenager in the North of the country, I’ve always written regularly in composition books. I can’t explain this constant penchant for confession. Today I’m motivated more by the fear that the truth will one day be obliterated. I’ve lost count of how many pages I’ve amassed, and especially of the number of times I’ve reread them. By now I know them by heart, to the point that I sometimes recite them unawares, like an old tune from who knows where that I carry within myself, humming it all day long . . .
Since the course of events has led us to think something is likely to happen to us soon, I’ve decided to retrace in this notebook all that I had previously noted here and there without any concern for chronology. I may also be doing it because I’m convinced that my memory won’t be able much longer to hold on to the facts, which grow more tangled with every day, or else that time, slowly donning its dark veil, will end up weaving a shroud of oblivion over these far-off events that today have disrupted our lives and those of the inhabitants of Vietongo, who for the most part are widely dispersed in the remote forests of the back country.
How long ago it was—that time when my youthful notebooks, which by the way I no longer have, described nothing more than my first romantic problems or the frustrations of a middle school student going through the onset of puberty. Depending on my mood, in one place I would draw hearts colored in pink and elsewhere others pierced by sharp arrows. In those days I was hard on those in my circle, describing them in every exaggerated detail. The least trifle was set down, including comments in the margin, often with caricatures of people who annoyed me. Like other girls my age, I cultivated the idea that my parents and the little society of adults in our district were getting in the way of my independence. The notebooks were my refuge, a safe place where I could reveal myself without embarrassment.
I remember I also wrote poems. Many years later I found this poetry laughable and of no interest, and I didn’t even dare look back at my confessional pages in the light of day. It was obvious I didn’t have a poetic bone in my body. What I had taken for poe try was in reality nothing more than a series of lamentations and alarmingly mawkish declarations of love. Anger, jealousy, and resentment prevailed over any notion of creativity.
I don’t regret that experience. It helped me learn that everything I felt, saw, or heard ought to be noted down somewhere. I felt so frail, so vulnerable, that for me it was the only way to face up to reality, to converse with invisible characters who took the time to listen to me, put themselves in my place, understand my state of mind before offering me advice.
Kimbembé, my husband, the man we’ve left, used to make fun of my writings, especially during the first years we knew each other in the North of the country, my native region . . .
I’m sometimes angry with myself about it.
Then remorse comes flooding in. A wave, a swell that’s hard to hold back. I yield to a surge of guilt that passes through my soul like an electric shock and paralyzes my left hand, the same one that acts as my go-between in recalling and writing down the facts.
All at once, frozen in place, I don’t write another word more, my memory unsettled through and through, my thoughts piecemeal and disordered. At moments like that I close my eyes and try to empty my burning head. Voices that are distant yet so very familiar murmur scarcely audible words. I revisit the past one more time: the time when things began, the moment they got worse, the way the Vietongolese were so stunned. Angry faces, changed over time, loom like apocalyptic shades: Christiane Kengué, Gaston Okemba, Kimbembé, General Edou, His Excellency Lebou Kabouya, Vercingetorix, his Negro Grandsons, the Anacondas, the Romans, and many other characters . . .
PART ONE
FAREWELL TO CHRISTIANE
I
Mam’Soko and Her Cane
Mam’Soko, the owner of the house we’re staying in here, often comes by. She lives over there, opposite us. She passes round the back, through the bamboo, by Crayfish Creek. With amazing energy for her age, and despite the sickness that’s eating her away, she uses her cane to clear twigs and dead leaves out of her path. She talks to herself, mumbles forgotten songs, spits on the ground, and utters insults in a dialect we do not understand. We’re not the ones she abuses in this way, as we initially thought.
Some days Mam’Soko strolls about in her orchard. She picks up fruit that has fallen in the night. Mangoes, papayas, soursops, figs. She gathers them up, sits beneath a tree, and eats them. The juice trickles from her mouth. She licks her fingers, chases away the flies. When she’s eaten her fill, she leans back against the tree and dozes, lulled by the singing of the cicadas. She snores, traveling little by little toward other skies. She doesn’t leave the orchard till it’s very late and the sun, transformed into a tiny rust-red disk, is taking shelter behind the hills, shining only weakly. At that point Mam’Soko climbs back up toward her house. Stooping, she holds her wrap dress with one hand as she walks. She lingers in front of an old mango tree in the middle of the orchard. Here she indulges in an act of love: she touches the bark of the tree tenderly. The tree exults, responds to her caress, shakes its leaves. Mam’Soko draws close to the trunk, sniffs at it as if to recall the time she planted it. It was one of the first trees in the orchard. How could she remember the year when she’d buried a nut in the ground? Between her and the tree, time has become irrelevant. The tree is there; that’s all there is to it. Mam’Soko recognizes that, like her, the tree has also grown old. Intertwined wrinkles compete over its trunk. Its roots rise up out of the earth and perish in the sun. Its leaves are covered with a whitish coating. For sure this is gray hair.
She leaves her tree regretfully and heads toward the henhouse. She peers through the wire netting at the empty cubicles, the half-pecked scraps of root vegetables, the caked droppings, the eggshells. How many chickens and roosters are still alive in there? She’s given up counting. Her poultry runs free in the village. “Old roosters see the dawn above the trees,” say the elders.
As for her livestock, Mam’Soko has no idea where they are. There’s nothing to indicate that the sheep and goats grazing in her orchard or behind her house belong to her. Only a few creatures have remained loyal to her. When they see her coming through the door, they go up to her, surround her, then follow her in single file to the orchard. This is the only way the old lady has of telling her animals from those of the other villagers. Mam’Soko talks to them. She asks them not to stray too far from her land . . .
Chronic Rheumatism
When she’s done walking in the orchard, Mam’Soko goes back into her house. Ever since we’ve been here, she leaves the door half open. She doesn’t want to go to bed right away. She’s delaying that moment. She’s mindful of the fact that lying down means delivering yourself to death. So she doesn’t do so just yet. She takes a handful of tobacco leaves, folds them over and over, cuts them into little pieces, and chews them, sitting on her pallet. She closes her eyes, feels toughened, strengthened. Now she’s capable of resisting, confronting the shadows of night that have fallen on the village. Her slack muscles suddenly tense up. Her nostrils flutter. Her heart strains, like a motor spinning in the mud. She’s prepared her food as she’s chewed the tobacco leaves. She feels stronger than the night and able to face up to it. Above all she mustn’t light the hurricane lamp. She takes some ash from her hearth and puts it in a terra-cotta bowl. She adds water from Crayfish Creek. She stirs the mixture till it becomes a thick paste. She puts this medication on her joints. Once that’s done she can sleep peacefully. This is how she combats chronic rheumatism, the illness that has twisted her fingers and toes. An illness that has dwelled in her for twenty years.
When the attacks come, she thinks about the end. She tells herself she won’t make it through. That she ought to submit, place her knees on the ground, and resign herself to fate. She senses the ache beginning in her feet, tightening her stomach, and rising as far as her chest. She rears up on her pallet, holds her breath. She drinks a tumbler of lukewarm water. And she waits. Anything could come: the end, or remission. But she waits. And the pain passes, like a dark cloud displaced by the appearance of the sun. Now she can breathe again. She studies her fingers and toes. She takes some tobacco leaves, chews them greedily.
At the end of every attack, she tries to reset her toes and fingers. She gives them a less curled-up shape. She kneads them, strokes them, massages them, blows on them. Ash. Water. She spreads it on her fingers, her toes, her ankles, knees, elbows. The mixture brings a feeling of well-being . . .
The Nighttime Visitor
Sometimes Mam’Soko bursts out laughing as she lists names that are unknown to us. And she doesn’t stop. She comes into our house, sits down right on the ground. She rolls tobacco leaves, which she places between the stumps of her teeth. She has a special way of softening the leaves before chewing them. First she smells them, as a way of whetting her desire. Then she opens them out and rubs them between her palms. Finally she cuts them up with a penknife and savors them for a long time, like a ruminant.
Mam’Soko calls us by names other than our own. She is conjuring up the life of a man who, she says, is still alive, even though he was buried several decades ago near Crayfish Creek. And we learn that the man, whose name was Massengo, was her husband. That he was also the chief of this village. That he should be spoken of in the present tense. Mam’Soko swears he isn’t dead. That we can see him every evening at her place when they eat together, in the shadows.
Her husband could not have been buried in a cemetery, the old woman tells us. He loathed those places. You can’t relax in a cemetery. There’s too much noise. The noise of the crows. The noise of the vultures. The noise of the widows and the orphans. The noise of the gravediggers. The noise of the domestic animals grazing nearby. No, her husband was much more likely to be somewhere restful. Where time stops. Where there’s only one day. Where the meadows remain green. Where the seasons come to quench their thirst. That’s where her husband rests. But, contradicting herself somewhat, no doubt because she no longer distinguishes the real world from the other one, later on she tells us the circumstances of Massengo’s death.
We always listen to her without interrupting. We nod. We’ve grown used to her presence, her comings and goings. It comforts us to see her walking. We like her expression, on the mornings when she comes to tell us what she and her late husband have been saying to one another. Apparently she’s told him about our being there. According to her, they spent one whole night talking about it, and her husband would be delighted to make our acquaintance.
