Fire of Origins by Emmanuel Dongala

Author:Emmanuel Dongala
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2001-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

For several months, Mankunku dragged himself around in the capital, living on his meager savings in a room he rented by the week. He became so accustomed to the city that he felt as if he had lived there all of his life. But one concern became increasingly urgent: the need for money. You had to make money, you could no longer live outside of the new system of value imposed by the foreigners.

One of his friends got him a job as a houseboy with an official in the colonial administration, but he didn’t even get through the first day; certainly the world had changed, but still, to let himself be treated like a kid by a woman who lazily dragged her slippers around the house, even if she was the wife of a white boss—it was too much for him, son of a blacksmith, a blacksmith himself, and a great hunter. There was still a dignity in his culture which no foreign civilization, no matter how powerful, could destroy. He found other things, working one day digging ditches, one day sweeping streets, two days moving furniture. But he was getting fed up with these sporadic jobs where he was bounced around from one place to another. And then, by chance, he thought of the railroad connecting the river to the Ocean. The line had been completed, the hundreds of dead buried and forgotten, their tears and cries carried away by the wind and scattered over the Ocean. The line had been completed, inaugurated by the minister of the Colonies in the presence of the governor general; along with dozens of other foreigners, they had drunk a beverage the color of pineapple wine, bubbly as fermenting palm wine, the Saras and the Bandas had been paid and repatriated, and two stations had been named after them, other stations bearing the names of heroes of the foreigners’ countries, they had cut with scissors a tricolored ribbon stretched over the rails, but not before several speeches followed by hearty bravos. The line had definitely been completed: nothing remained of all those tears and all that sweat but the click-clack of the cars, full of tropical wood, manganese, and passengers, pulled by big steam-engine locomotives fed with water and coal, later to be replaced by diesel engines fueled with heavy petroleum.

Mandala Mankunku, who had formerly prepared gravel beds, carried ties, laid rails, and dug tunnels, thought with emotion about this railroad, and decided to go and try his luck.

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