The Death of Comrade President by Alain Mabanckou

Author:Alain Mabanckou
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2020-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

Voice of America

So now Papa Roger and I are listening to Voice of America, and it’s all quite different. There are two journalists commenting on the bad news of two days ago, a woman and a man, but it’s the woman who’s in charge, because she always asks the difficult questions and the man answers like a pupil who’s learned his times tables, or maybe he knows everything about our country because he’s lived in Brazzaville and works for this woman, who I imagine being very tall, very beautiful, with high heels like the ones Maman Pauline wears when she goes into town and drops in to say hello to Papa Roger at the Victory Palace Hotel, so my father can see she’s an elegant woman with her wrap knotted tightly about her and gold-plated earrings, which do look like gold from a distance.

The journalist asks the man who knows everything about our country:

So, Christopher Smith, you’ve been watching the political situation in Africa at first hand, what’s your analysis of the present situation in Brazzaville?

Christopher is only too happy to be asked this question and to have it pointed out that he’s often in Africa and has worked there for years. It is also pointed out that he has been in several places where there were civil wars on this continent, and that he’s written a big book with lots of evidence inside, evidence that explains how the people who colonised us are often hiding behind us, selling us arms and getting us to fight each other.

Instead of talking directly about our problems, which right now are extremely serious, Christopher Smith goes round in circles like a truck warming up its engine before setting off:

Well, Sophie, as discussed in detail in my book Night Falls over Africa, political assassinations on the dark continent have become a sinister tradition in the years since the first steps towards independence in the early sixties, from the start, in fact, of the movements to liberate Africa from the yoke of the western colonisers …

And he throws in names, dates, explanations, which our journalists could never provide. But maybe all that is already in his book, whose title he mentions rather a lot. I’m very surprised to hear how well he pronounces the name of our prophet André Grenard Matsoua, and I’m also proud that he calls him a ‘politician’. He says Matsoua was a stubborn man who faced up to the colonisers. He’d attended the seminary, the school of the whites, and worked for the customs office in Brazzaville and joined the French army to fight in Morocco against a dreadful resistance fighter called Abd el-Krim, who the colonisers lost sleep over because he was winning battles against the Spanish, the French and the British! And it’s thanks to men like André Grenard Matsoua that these countries were able to save a bit of face, because they fought for them!

Christopher Smith carries on:

Sophie, no one denies that Matsoua added his own stone to the edifice of the French empire.

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