The Lights of Pointe-Noire (15 page)

He knows if he carries on like this I will get up and leave. He tones it down:

‘I apologise, my dear writer, I do tend to fly off the handle, but that's all because of the war… What do I care, in the end, if you're from the north or the south? What I really wanted to tell you was, I eventually came out of the bush because the war was finished and the northerners were back in power. The country seemed calm again. We started to live again. We went to bars, to the sea, wherever. Bit by bit we forgot what had happened to us. Five years later, we finally had some elections, and the northern president, the one with support from the French and the Angolans, got licked! We jumped for joy. He practically got hounded out of the country and he went off to live in exile, in France. Now our leader's a southerner. And since he was angry with the French for supporting the northerner, he let the Americans exploit our oil. And the French didn't like that, because after all, they're our colonisers! So every day the French went to visit the ex-president from the north in his residence in Paris. They promised him they'd make sure he got back into power. But we couldn't see how a northerner could become president of our country again. Our country was crawling with Americans. They tried to teach us to speak English, but that didn't work because the French passed on their terrible accent to us during colonial rule. We told the Americans they could do what they liked with our oil, we weren't going to learn their weird English, where you talk through your nose, like you've got flu. They didn't care, they signed contracts with the president from the south, and he signed away, and didn't realise he was actually selling them all the oil we already had, and any we might find in the future.'

Five people in military uniform come in and sit at the back. The stranger looks at them for a few seconds. He lowers his voice, knowing that if he talks loudly now we'll both end up in prison.

‘Five years later we had new elections. The president from the south said he would stand a second time. But the ex-president from the north quickly came back from France to stand in the election too, with the support of the French. Unfortunately the elections never took place. The southern president claimed that the conditions for proceeding to the vote had not been met, and overran his mandate. The ex-president from the north said elections must be held. And that's how we got into a second civil war, which the president from the south lost, and that's how the northerners come to be back in power…'

I finished eating a while ago, and my head is buzzing with stories of civil war and my host's hate-filled abuse of his sworn enemies: the northerners. It's hard to get a word in, the stranger is so sure he knows everything, all conversation has to revolve entirely round him. My bottle of beer is still full.

‘Aren't you drinking your beer?'

‘I won't, thanks.'

He calls for the waitress and hands her the bottle.

‘Keep it cold, I'll drink it myself tomorrow!'

He looks at his watch and exclaims:

‘Time flies! I'm sorry, I have to go to a mass at La Source du Salut in the Fouks district. Do you want to come with me? That's where I pick girls up, at mass! You pretend to pray, and you go game-hunting while no one's looking! Come with me!'

‘No thanks, I have to go and rest, I've got a busy day tomorrow, at my old lycée…'

He asks for the bill, and the waitress quickly brings it over. He fumbles in the inside pockets of his jacket, then of his trousers:

‘Shit! My wallet! Someone's stolen my wallet! It's those northerners, they stole it!'

‘But they came nowhere near us…'

‘I know these northerners, they can rob you long distance! Listen, brother, can you pay today, and I'll buy you lunch later in the week?'

The waitress and the boss are standing behind the bar, and they snigger when they see me take out the money and place it on the table.

I leave the restaurant while the stranger, following behind, whispers:

‘Come by tomorrow, I'll be here. Did you see those two prostitutes earlier? I'll book them for both of us. You can have the one with the lighter skin, I don't mind taking the dark one, it's OK. I'll pay, don't worry…'

Dead poets society

T
owards the end of the morning I'm standing outside the lycée where I spent three years of secondary school from 1981 to 1984. Of the visits I had lined up during this stay, this one was underlined in red in my notebook, along with my mother's house and the Cinema Rex. Probably because in my mind there was an indissoluble link between these three places. I went to my mother's house several times, for the sake of my roots and members of my family. I wanted to see the Cinema Rex – or what remained of it – for the collective fantasy we experienced there, the roar of the crowd, which still resonates in me.

I pass through the gates to the lycée, hoping to relive the moment when my spirit ventured far from our native land, in search of universal knowledge, through world history, the geography of far-flung countries, the convoluted grammar of mathematics, the phenomena of the natural sciences and the exploration of the imagination via literature.

My heart feels weighed down by a surge of inconsolable apprehension, exactly the feeling I had all those years ago when I turned my back on
collège
, on short trousers and plastic sandals, and first set foot in this place, dressed in a beige shirt and trousers, the school uniform of the day, with proper town shoes which my mother had polished the night before, before explaining how I should walk to avoid wearing them out too soon, since they had to last the whole of this school year and, perhaps, into the next.

I remember how I felt, in this lycée, as though I had been parachuted into a different world, like a nervous little fledgling, lost among other species of flying creatures whose wings are already properly formed. I generally took shelter under the shade of the coconut trees in the quadrangle, while waiting for the bell to ring for the end of break.

In class, for the first few weeks, convinced that I wasn't as good as my classmates, I would go and sit at the back of the room, until one day the teacher of chemistry – a subject I dreaded – told me to go and sit in the front row because, he said, being tall, I could help him by holding up the test tubes to show the others when we were doing practical work. I had just turned sixteen and, unlike some other pupils of my age, who were starting to gang up on their parents, my own adolescent crisis expressed itself in a voice which whispered that lycée would prise me away from my family, because it was at lycée that they started to pick out the pupils who would leave one day, to go far from their country, never to return. This feeling was heightened by the presence of the Atlantic Ocean just behind the school campus, and the wind blowing in the coconut trees in the quadrangle. The constant presence of the sea, of Polish seamen with their crude tattoos, the Beninese fishermen, excited by a good catch, and the albatrosses startled by the height of the waves and the ships at anchor in the port with their worn-out sails gradually drew me away from the town. Deep down I dreamed of leaving, though I didn't know where, or how, or when. I wanted to be a loner in a crowd, invisible, when in fact I stood head and shoulders above my classmates, so that I got teased for having been kept behind a year, when in fact I was one of the youngest.

Sometimes, to get away from the gibes, I would go down to the seashore for an hour, before lessons, and wander along the shore, barefoot. After walking for a few minutes, I'd turn round and go back, trying to place my feet in the footprints I had left on the way. I knew that the pupils who came by later would panic at the idea that a sea monster, half man, half beast, was wandering about, with feet that had toes at front and back, to shake off anyone minded to track him. They would all run off screaming at the tops of their voices, while I sat there in my corner, stifling hysterical laughter…

Written over the highest building in the school campus is an inscription that surprises me:
Lycée Victor-Augagneur
. Even though my memories are muddled with the emotion of being back here twenty-eight years on, I'm still sure it wasn't called that back when I was here. So the town's very first lycée has reverted to the name it had in the 1950s, in honour of Jean-Victor Augagneur, a doctor by training, mayor and elected member for Lyon, then governor of Madagascar, who went on to occupy various ministerial posts in the Third French Republic, before being appointed governor general of French Equatorial Africa (FEA) in 1919. The name of this man, clearly visible on the main building, looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. How many passers-by notice it, and bother to ask themselves who this individual might have been? For many, the building has been here all their lives, maybe even with these capital letters cemented up high on its façade. I allow myself to wonder what lies behind the ‘exhumation' of this French colonel whose name is presumably virtually unknown in his own country, whatever positions he may have held. Admittedly the city of Lyon paid him homage in the 1930s by calling a road not far from the general hospital, in the 3rd arrondissement, after him, but that wouldn't account for his name being as widely known as someone like Jules Ferry, that iconic figure in the creation of mandatory, secular state education, as well as an ardent defender of French colonisation.

Here he stands, and here he'll stay, Victor Augagneur, rescued from purgatory without fanfare or drum roll, by the people of Pointe-Noire. Here, as elsewhere in this country, the political authorities seem to believe that we can only reclaim our past – and thereby our dignity as a nation which has been independent since 15 August 1960 – by reinstating things from the past. Regardless of what their symbolic weight might be. Victor Augagneur has thus been added to the list of well-known French people who have survived the nationalist policy of our country. In Brazzaville we have, among others, la Case de Gaulle, and various streets named in honour of French soldiers and politicians: Jean Bart, François Joseph Amédée Lamy, Henri Moll, Félix Éboué, Jules Grévy, etc. The ‘Marchand' stadium is dedicated to Jean-Baptiste Marchand, former officer of the Senegalese riflemen, head of the exploratory expedition known as ‘Mission Congo-Nile', the aim of which was to reach the Nile ahead of the British and set up a new protectorate in the south of Egypt. The expedition failed when confronted with the overwhelming strength of the British army. And lastly, in Pointe-Noire, the Adolphe-Sicé hospital, where my cousin Bienvenüe is right now, owes its name to a military doctor, Marie Eugène Adolphe Sicé, a descendant of a governor of the colonies, and who, after having served in the colonial infantry, went to French Equatorial Africa, where, from 1927, he was director of the Pasteur Institute in Brazzaville.

Entering the schoolyard, I spare a moment's thought for that most steadfast witness, Jean Makaya, our ‘corridor supervisor'. He's departed this world now, the new general supervisor tells me, as he insists on giving me the guided tour of what now seems to me like a labyrinth. We go into his little office just off the main corridor, leading to the schoolyard. He talks about his predecessor, referring to him now and then as ‘the late lamented', with an air of profound respect. He shows me a press cutting pinned up on the wall, signed by one Pépin Boulou:

‘Do you remember Pépin Boulou?'

I hesitate for a moment, and pretend to be thinking. The general supervisor understands my awkwardness:

‘But of course you do! He often talks to me about you. You were in the same class, in Building A, the literary section, and you both got your bac in literature and philosophy in 1984, I looked it up in the archives when they told me you'd be dropping in today. Ah well, Pépin wasn't lucky like you, he didn't get to go to France, he teaches here now. Some people had to stay behind, after all, for the torch to be passed on! It's a shame he's on holiday, he'd have been thrilled to see you again…'

I go up to the wall where the article in praise of Dipanda has been posted. I just skim the last paragraph, thinking that in funeral eulogies and tributes of this kind it's usually the last paragraph that really counts. I'm right, too, as it reads as follows:

1994 was the 40th anniversary of the Victor Augagneur Lycée. This event passed completely unnoticed. What did not pass unnoticed, however, was the retirement of Jean Makaya, alias ‘Dipanda'. A junior supervisor of legendary dynamism, he worked in this lycée from 1960 to 1994. Intransigent, quick to judge a face, hard working to a fault, he carried out his caretaking duties for thirty-four years, a loyal servant both of this lycée and the Congolese state in general. A veritable fossil in our school, the corridor supervisor, dubbed ‘Dipanda', saw eleven directors come and go, and witnessed the graduation of most of the pupils, a familiar figure to all. Every single pupil could supply one or more colourful anecdotes about him. Born around 1939, his death passed almost unacknowledged in 1998; only four years after he took his retirement. On the 29th July 2002, on the initiative of the present director, Ferdinand Tsondabeka, a lively tribute was paid to him. Since then, Building A, traditionally reserved for the teaching of literature, has been named after him. As that august poet Victor Hugo wrote: ‘in the quiet of his tomb he heard the world speak of him'. At a single stroke, indifference and neglect were set right once and for all.

I try to think of a ‘colourful anecdote' connected with Dipanda, but none comes immediately to mind. A few snatches maybe, but they are so diffuse that all I can really remember all these years later is a man devoted to his duties, apparently ageless, who loomed over us with a stick in his right hand, which he was happy to use if he thought a pupil was showing disrespect. I can still see him standing outside the gates, checking that our school uniform was clean, properly ironed, and that certain young rascals weren't fooling about, turning up their collar, or rolling up their sleeves to expose their biceps, as was the habit of some young ‘louts' from the rough neighbourhoods. At the beginning of each school year, Dipanda brought all the new pupils together in the schoolyard and lectured them for an hour on how lucky they were to be taking their place on the benches of this noble institution:

‘This lycée is a snapshot of the history of this town. Of the whole country, even, the whole of Africa!'

He would then reel off all the names of significant former pupils: prime ministers, army generals, directors of large companies. Not omitting to mention that it was in 1963 that the first female teacher in the Congo, Aimée Mambou Gnali, gave her first lessons:

‘Madame Gnali – what a woman! She arrived three years after I was made supervisor! I helped her a lot, young boys can be dreadful with women!'

Dipanda's view was like that of many of those sentimentalists who looked upon the Lycée Victor Augagneur of the 1950s as the ‘Lycée Louis-le-Grand' of the tropics. They would refer to the area around the school as the ‘Latin Quarter' of the Congo, underlining the extent to which the institution stood for rigour and scrupulousness – in short, was a school where merit alone separated the wheat from the chaff.

We chose to distance ourselves from this rather over-insistent adoration, especially since it came mostly from those who in reality were nostalgic for the colonial school and viewed everything through the prism of the past. So, if a classroom fell into disrepair, you would hear them complaining in the corridors, out of earshot of the principal, Pierre Justin Makosso:

‘It's all because the blacks are running the lycée now! If the whites were still here they'd have repaired the roof and repainted the walls!'

According to them, Victor Augagneur had been the best school in the world, before the modern era came along and changed everything for the worse. They claimed that the primary school certificate back then was equivalent to the baccalaureate in our day, and the baccalaureate under colonial rule had been easily equivalent to three years' study at the Marien-Ngouabi University in Brazzaville. There was a general attitude of resignation, which encouraged the previously colonised to imagine that the Negro was essentially lazy, chaotic, careless, and that these shortcomings had undermined the Western way of doing things, which had been guiding our future nations in the right direction.

In their nostalgia they seemed to have forgotten that it was that great colonist Victor Augagneur who, after his promotion to the leadership of French Equatorial Africa, imposed the press-ganging of all able-bodied men living along the construction route of the Congo–Ocean railway line. Over twenty thousand people lost their lives in the gruesome construction of this line, and many more were left mutilated and maimed. One vestige of that peril is a landmark familiar to all Pontenegrins: the station in Pointe-Noire, dreamed up by French architect Jean Philippot, who also designed the station at Deauville, hence the apparent resemblance some have observed between the two buildings.

It would be no exaggeration to say that Victor Augagneur was one of the promoters of a modern form of slavery, which drove people from all over the Congo to leave their land and hide in the bush, to escape what amounted to certain death. Victor Augagneur employed all the means at his disposal to achieve his cherished goal; to make Pointe-Noire into the terminus of the Congo–Ocean network, and hub of the whole of the Middle Congo, of which it would become the capital – thus avoiding any dependence on the part of the French colonial administration on the transport network of the Belgian Congo, with its railway line connecting Matadi to Leopoldville.

In his own lifetime, Victor Augagneur was not privileged to see his name carved atop the main building of the Pontenegrin lycée. The lycée was inaugurated in 1954, two decades after his death. Initially it was called the ‘Classical and Modern Secondary School'. People noticed it didn't have a real name, and an adjustment was made: ‘Classical and Modern Secondary School Victor Augagneur'. Some people found this a bit excessive. In the end they opted for the more straightforward version: ‘Lycée Victor Augagneur'.