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.