Class: ‘And only for the people!!!’
Adriano: ‘Victory or we die!’
Class: ‘Victory or we die!!!’
Adriano: ‘Who do we die for?’
Class: ‘We die for the people!!!’
Adriano: ‘What do we die for?’
Class: ‘We die for the Revolution!!!’
And now the class is warmed up, Adriano recites the speech of the Immortaclass="underline" The year 1969 is drawing to a close. A year at whose end we can measure the length of the road that we have travelled, the pitfalls encountered, our sorrows and our joys. In short, one more year after which to take stock of our efforts and above all our failures. In the course of this very year our most dangerous enemies briefly entertained the hope that the National Revolutionary Council would give its approval to an executive conference bringing together a group of renegades in an attempt to lay the foundations of a national unity based on pro-ruling class, pro-colonialist factors: tribalism, regionalism and sectarianism. This hope, recently much nurtured in reactionary circles, was quickly dashed. Better still, after a glorious victory over imperialism and those who have betrayed the nation, our young and dynamic people had the courage this very day to found the boldest creation in the history of our Revolution: the Congolese Workers’ Party. The Congolese people have thus revived the flames of the Three Glorious Days of the Revolution of 1830. Today and from this day onwards we shall no longer sing the Internationale out of tune. On this day, 31 December 1969, Congo-Brazzaville has entered the annals of the great global proletarian Revolution…
The class applauds. You kneel there crying with your brick over your head, and the teacher turns to you and orders: ‘Put the brick down, now you recite the speech of the immortal Marien Ngouabi, like Adriano.’
And since you can’t recite it like Adriano, without stammering or forgetting a single word, you cry even harder. So the teacher takes the strap he has hidden in his bag and hands it to Adriano: ‘Here, Adriano, give him twenty strokes with the strap, since he can’t recite the most famous speech of the immortal Marien Ngouabi.’
So Adriano wallops you while the rest of the class counts to twenty and you call out for your poor mother, who is fortunately unaware of what’s happened to you.
There’s a map of the People’s Republic of Congo pinned up by the blackboard, just next to the map of Africa. We have to chant that the People’s Republic is a country in Central Africa, surrounded by Zaire, Angola, Gabon, Cameroon and the Central African Republic.
I often say our country is really small, but you mustn’t say it in class, or the teacher will get mad and beat you even though everyone can see on the map of Africa that our neighbour Zaire is one of the biggest countries on the whole continent. No, you mustn’t say that either, or the people of Zaire will start to wake up; at the moment, they don’t even know their country is bigger than a lot of countries in Europe or that their president-dictator Mobuto Sese-Seko gave millions and millions of dollars to Don King so George Foreman and Mohammed Ali would go and fight there, when the people of Zaire are living in poverty.
The teacher insists we memorise all the names of all the regions in our country, from north to south, east to west. We especially have to know exactly where to find the village of the immortal Marien Ngouabi. His native village is Ombélé, it’s up in the north, in the Owando district. It’s where there’s a red cross on the map. During our citizenship lesson we learn that the Immortal’s mother is called Maman Mboualé and his father is called Osseré Dominique. And even though the Immortal was murdered by Northerners like himself, who wanted to take over from him, we’ve been taught what to say about these sad events. We have to say: The immortal Marien Ngouabi, founder of the Congolese Workers’ Party died fighting on the 18th March 1977. He had been murdered by the cowardly forces of Imperialism and its local lackeys.
The teacher told us that in the end the government had managed to catch and imprison the local lackeys of Imperialism who killed comrade Marien Ngouabi. The Immortal fought hard but there was nothing he could do because it was a plot that had been hatched in Europe and the Europeans are brilliant at selling their plots to the Africans. The local Lackeys of Imperialism who killed our Immortal are black like us, Congolese, like us. The government promised that they will be tried and judged and sentenced to public hanging at the Revolution Stadium. The people must understand that you don’t mess with the Immortals. So, for the moment all we have to do is put Imperialism on trial. It will be hard to catch it and put it in prison because it doesn’t live here, unlike its local lackeys. And anyway, it’s White.
~ ~ ~
According to Lounès, he and his classmates at secondary school study subjects that we can’t learn yet at primary school because our brains haven’t finished growing. We mustn’t put anything too difficult in them, or they’ll explode, and we’ll probably go mad and start talking to invisible people and picking up rubbish in the street. That’s why the mad people in this town all write arithmetic on the walls of houses, and sometimes poems too, thinking they’ve made them up themselves, when in fact it’s just their madness doing it. The mad people round here have the strangest names, I don’t know where they get them. Lounès told me about one of them called Athena. The police arrested him because he’d make up problems and write them on the walls of houses in the Avenue of Independence. Athena also gave the schoolchildren all the answers, so they just had to copy them down. And since it so happened that the problems went up during the exams, the children from the high school went looking for Athena in the streets of Pointe-Noire. When they found him, they brought him things to eat and drink, and sang him songs from when he was a tiny baby in his mother’s arms. Athena wept when he heard these songs, and they knew that crying would help his imagination even more. The pupils offered him new clothes, cut his hair and his beard for him, and led him to a huge wall opposite Vicky’s Photo Studio.
‘Athena, you have to help us, write up the problem on this wall, then tell us the answer.’
Athena trembled with fear because, Lounès says, mad people always think children are giants, so they’re more afraid of children than of grown-up people. Anyway, Athena thought for a bit, then began scribbling away on the wall. The pupils all scrambled to write it down. After that they all said: ‘Athena, are you sure that’s the right answer? Athena are you sure this is the problem we’ll get in the exam?’
Then there’s another madman over in Savon, they call him Archimedes, and another in Bloc 55 called Mango. Archimedes wanders around naked, likes to bathe in the river Tchinouka and fart in the waters to see the bubbles go Pop! Pop! Pop! Mango sits under any mango tree he can find at the side of the road. And when anyone asks what he’s doing there he’ll say he’s waiting for a mango to fall on his head.
Lounès thinks Archimedes and Mango went mad because they were taught things in their childhood that their brains were too young to understand. Then the things all rotted inside their brains, and then the poor men started talking to invisible people and picking up rubbish in the streets of our town, as though they worked in Refuse Disposal.
So complicated maths is for the big boys and girls at high school, and we do mental arithmetic, geometry and so on. First of all we do rectangles, then triangles, then squares, then circles, then cubes. With all that, our brains will gradually get used to the exercises you do at high school.
But I don’t agree with Lounès. I think the stuff we do at primary school’s pretty difficult too. Once they gave us a problem I’ll never forget because instead of trying to find the answer I just kept thinking: ‘Is that the way it is in real life?’ This was the problem: a shopkeeper has bought ten hectolitres of red wine at thirty CFA francs a litre and a hundred and fifty litres of palm wine at twenty-five CFA francs a litre, how much must he pay? The whole class watched while Adriano, Willy-Dibas and Jérémie worked out how much the shopkeeper had to pay. I just sat there in the middle of the class, watching. They looked like hunchbacks looking for a needle they’d dropped on the floor. They were writing away furiously, while the rest of us just kept reading the exercise over and over. I was thinking: Why should we work out what the shopkeeper has to pay? Why can’t he do it himself, instead of bothering us when we’re still too young to be shopkeepers? Do Maman Pauline and Madame Mutombo think about bizarre sums in their business? Still, the answer had to be found, and only Adriano, Willy-Dibas and Jérémie found it. They got out of class before everyone else and I was the last to go.