“Not bandits,” I said. “Mobutu.”
African politics is frequently intertwined with the cult of personality. Perhaps because the land is vast, the men who pretend to rule it must proclaim their own vastness, each in a highly individual way… ways that are rarely beneficial to those whom they have been “elected” to serve. For instance, not far from Abidjan lies the village of Yamoussoukro, the birthplace of Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the late president of the Ivory Coast. Upon his elevation to the office, the president initiated a building program designed to turn Yamoussoukro into a new capital, one that would rival Brasilia. He had long held an admiration for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and so nothing would do but that he erect a copy of the church half again as large as the original close to the village; and to provide better access to this newly historic area, he ordered the construction of a six-lane highway. The need for six-lane highways in West Africa is slight, if not nonexistent. The first time I drove along the highway, at what ordinarily would be considered rush hour, I encountered only one other person, an old man in a shabby brown suit riding a bicycle. That this building program nearly bankrupted the country was of secondary importance to President Houphouet-Boigny and his supporters; of primary importance was that in their minds this spanking new, empty, purposeless city and its various accessories established to the world the greatness of the man and suggested that he was not someone to be trifled with.
Mobutu Sese Seko favored more of a minimalist approach to achieving this same effect. It suited him to create a fearsome ring of security about himself and throughout Kinshasa, and to permit the remainder of the Congo (which he renamed Zaire) to fall into ruin. Beyond Kinshasa, the jungle overran the outlying highways, and the infrastructure crumbled, leaving a poverty-stricken populace without any resources other than the sweat of their brows. Did not this cruel policy express a godlike indifference to suffering? Was not a reign of more than thirty years funded by this unvarying indifference evidence of the man’s invulnerability and power? Might not such a man use his dying strength to visit some final and lasting pain upon his people by means of a curse? And might not the people, disposed to belief in his godhood by thirty years of oppression, be so psychologically in thrall to him that by dint of national will they had managed to make the curse manifest, or—put more basically—they had caused it to come true?
This last was one of the questions I put to Buma the next afternoon. I was not in the best of shape. I felt cracked, things broken inside my head, the shape of my faith in logical process gone lopsided, and my hands trembled from fatigue and alcohol. Nothing I saw that day helped to right me. At the jail, the desk officer’s newspaper told of a village twenty miles downriver destroyed by fire—lightning or tribal violence, no one could say, for there were no survivors—and a small headline below the fold reported that fish were dying by the thousands in a lake fed by the Kilombo. The cause was unknown.
“As long as you ask these questions,” Buma said, “you will never know the answers.” He was, as before, sitting sideways to me, gazing at the whitewashed wall, maintaining his customary reptilian poise. “Yet if you learn not to ask them, someday the knowledge will come.”
“Yeah, uh-huh,” I said. “If you sit perfectly still, the world will move through you, and everything is everything else. I’ve heard the same crap from slicker hustlers than you.”
“You’re angry because your dream was interrupted.” He turned his head to me, his seamed face calm, that thin smile in evidence. “Don’t worry. You’ll finish it tonight. Then you will understand.”
I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking how he knew about my interrupted dream; but I couldn’t stop myself.
“Because it is my dream,” he said. “Because I gave it to you.” He refitted his gaze to the wall, and I imagined he was seeing through the whitewash to the bloodstained surface beneath, the dark Mobutu skin that stretched across the entire country—it could be covered up, but never truly obscured.
I didn’t know what more to ask—most of the questions crowding my brain were those I needed to ask of myself. Questions relating to my behavior with Rawley, my overall stability. I had never before walked in my sleep, and though I had no knowledge concerning the causes of somnambulism, I assumed they must be pathological.
In spite of my confusion, my self-absorption, I managed to frame a question for Buma. Not a particularly intelligent question, but it would serve to occupy him while I thought of a better one.
“Who are you?” I asked him. “Who do you think you are?”
“Do you see, Michael? It is always best to be direct. All your previous questions have begged the issue. But this… this is to the point.”
“Then why don’t you answer it?”
“Sometimes I think I am a man.” His smile widened. “But then I remember that I am not.”
“This non-responsive style of yours,” I said, “it’s the classic tactic of the charlatan. The cryptic answer, the knowing nod. All it suggests is that you have nothing salient to tell me. It’s obvious that you’re a clever man, that you’re using what you’ve deduced about me from our conversations to try and persuade me of your supernatural abilities. But I’m not buying it.”
Buma let out a hissing breath, a sign—I thought—of exasperation. “Your assumption seems to be that by answering you I will be helping myself, and you further assume that I am not answering you. In the first place, I do not need your help. In the second, I have given you a dream, and I have confessed to murder. If you wait and listen and watch, you will learn the rest. You must have patience, Michael.”
The word “patience” startled me. “What do you mean by that?” I asked.
His eyes swung toward me. “Have you ever watched crocodiles hunt? How they wait and wait, how they persevere? Time and again they will attack and fail, yet they remain persevering. Because they have patience. If I were the king of the crocodiles, I would be the king of patience. Patience is much more than a simple virtue, Michael. Surely you know that?”
He was doing exactly what I had said—probing, making rudimentary deductions, then using my reactions against me. But though I thought I understood him, this talk of patience led me to suspect that he had some connection with my Patience, or that he knew about her. A hundred wild suppositions contended in my brain, along with fantasies about crocodile kings with thin, false smiles and women who sat sideways and cut their eyes toward you rather than turning their heads; but I refused to give in to them.
“What…” I began, and then forgot the question I’d intended to ask. I searched for another and asked, for no particular reason, simply because it was the only thing that occurred, “The river… Is there something wrong with the river?”
Buma got to his feet. He stepped to the wall, knocked against it with the sides of his iron cuffs, dislodging a roughly triangular section of flaking whitewash, revealing a large dark patch beneath. “Do you see this?” he asked. “This is what is wrong with the river. With all things. No matter how pure the surface, beneath it lies insanity and dread. Some will tell you it is Mobutu who is to blame. Others will say something different. They are each right in their own way. Mobutu. Poison. Bacteria. Curses. These are merely names for the incurable cancer spreading from the heart of the world, the terror from which life itself springs. We are all fleeing it. We try to swim away, we travel far from home, we tell ourselves it is a dream, we imprison ourselves in palaces, we speak to God on the mountaintop. We can never escape it, however, because we are part of it. Yet we must try, because that is our nature.” He sat back down, making a dull rattle with his chains. “Crocodiles understand this more clearly than do men. They are simple creatures, and simple answers do not elude them.”