Then there is the popular neighbourhood which the Pontenegrins all call ‘the Three-Hundreds’, a name to be found on none of the various street signs. Is this a kind of delicacy or an attempt to wipe out the true story behind it? Tell someone you’re from the Three Hundreds and their jaw will drop. You might as well live in a different town altogether, or on the raft of the Medusa. To avoid saying it, some people instead call it ‘the Rex district’, the name by which it is more officially known, thanks to the renown of the former cinema of the Koblavi family, but which hardly reflects the little kingdom of prostitution dominated by itinerant girls from the former Zaire in the 1970s. These working girls were attracted by the superiority of the CFA franc at that time to the ‘zaire’, which was created on a whim as part of the policy of authenticity instigated by Mobutu Sese Seko. Sese Seko forbade his people to take Western names, and outlawed suits and ties in favour of the ‘abacost’.*
The girls weren’t the only ones who crossed the River Congo, boarding the train at the station in Brazzaville to come and conquer Pointe-Noire, where the harbour activity guaranteed a stable economy. Builders, carpenters and rickshaw drivers arrived too, from ‘the opposite country’. Since we speak the same language and have the same culture, the migrants felt quite at home, they melted into the crowd and would have gone unnoticed, had they not been prepared to do jobs which the Congolese turned down on the grounds that they were ‘intellectuals’. The Zaireans who pitched up with us lived by the rule of ‘article 15’: ‘Live as best you can’ — a phrase dreamed up by a populace abandoned to their fate by the fourteen articles of the Zairean Constitution, cleverly stitched together by the kleptocrat Mobutu to keep himself in power for life.
The Three-Hundreds, situated behind the Rex cinema, was the area where the girls peddled their charms. This is still the case today. Housing made of wood or metal sheeting often stands side by side with unfinished — but inhabited — brick buildings. Should you lose your way in the winding streets of this sector, you will find yourself walking on condoms, which litter the ground. It’s as though the girls desert their ill-lit alcoves after dark to come and work ‘outside’, as though, when it comes down to it, all cats really are grey.
The name ‘Three-Hundreds’, according to some, refers to the war waged between the Zairean prostitutes and those from our town, who, way back when, had fixed the price of a trick at five hundred CFA cents. The Zaireans changed the rules by lowering the price to three hundred. A rumour went round the town that the Zaireans were more ‘competent’ and knew how to keep hold of their clientele, so much so that many men with wives and children were handing them most if not all of their salary. People had lost count of how many wives had come looking for their husbands in the Three-Hundreds. But how could you hope to find your man in this web of backstreets, passages, culde-sacs and dark dives, joining one plot to the next, one house to another, when he was probably fast asleep in the bed of some Amazon from the ‘Other Congo’?
The battles between the sex professionals sometimes spilled out into the Avenue of Independence, where the two camps attacked each other with hammers, sometimes even throwing caustic soda in their adversaries’ faces, a final solution designed to send them into retirement. We passed prostitutes with corroded faces who, even so, still continued to work in dark corners, where their features would be mostly hidden from the clients.
The public authorities became increasingly concerned by this situation. Probably because of certain practices said to be used by the Zaireans, particularly the use of gris-gris and poison with delayed effect, with the intention of wiping out their colleagues. And when sorcery and poisoning didn’t work, they would engage crooks — usually compatriots — who were paid in kind to assassinate the Pontenegrin girls, and dump their bodies in the River Tchinouka, or on the Côte Sauvage. The ineffectiveness of the police, in addition to the prevailing mood of fear, led the Pontenegrins to abandon the territory in the short term, and move back towards the town centre. The result was a considerable loss of income, as the town centre, though busy during office hours, emptied after nightfall. They had no choice but to fall in line with the prices of the Zaireans, or shut up shop. The tariff of three hundred CFA francs eventually became the norm, and the two camps buried the hatchet. The only difference between them now was technique, and woe betide anyone who failed to take note of the words declaimed by Brassens in ‘Le mauvais sujet repenti’:
There’s an art to how you walk the streets,
and how to shake your arse…
Depending who you’re out to catch,
The chemist, the sexton, the clerk…
When you walk alone in the Three-Hundreds district, the women watch you from their booths. They sense, just by looking, what brings the ‘passer-by’ to their fiefdom. There are men who hesitate, pretend they’ve lost their way, retrace their footsteps and then do exactly the same all over again a quarter of an hour later. The bravest walk confidently, putting up a smokescreen by whistling a happy tune; they never look behind them, and slip, swift as predators, into one of the lots, emerging only half an hour later.
Venturing this far myself, I don’t know how the watching women will classify me. The fact remains that as I leave the Avenue of Independence, taking the first alleyway down to the heart of the district, I feel a presence behind me. I go past Koblavi’s place, then turn around: a woman with legs like a wading bird’s and brightly painted red lips comes towards me and shouts:
‘What you looking for here? You a journalist?’
I start to walk faster, and try to reach the rue de Loukenéné, on my right. But the woman knows where all the little side roads in her neighbourhood come out, she cuts through the rue Moe-N’Dendé, and I find her standing in front of me again, determined, this time, with a piece of paper in her hands.
‘I want you to read that, it’s my story, I told it to another journalist, like you…’
Her prominent eyes have the look of someone who hasn’t spoken in a long while, on whom life has weighed heavy for many years. She points to a plot a few steps away. Without hesitating, I go in with her, and in the yard find other women too, who all look me carefully up and down.
‘I was the one who got them all to leave our native village and come here to work…’
Then, turning to the silent shadows, she exclaims:
‘Don’t be scared, girls, this gentleman is a journalist who works with the whites! I saw him yesterday near the Cinema Rex, and I promised myself I wouldn’t let him leave without hearing my story. Then at last the whole world will know about our troubles. There’s only one thing we want in this district: no sex without condoms!..’