Alain Mabanckou - Black Bazaar

“Why are they laughing like that?” she would ask me, tilting her head in the direction of Roger the French-Ivorian, Willy the barman and Yves the just-Ivorian.

“They’re being kids,” would be my answer.

Despite their jibes, I approached the girl’s penalty area, and I kept going, eyes closed, convinced I was in the right, and that the others were blind men without white sticks. Did Bosco the Chadian Poet and Pierrot the White from the small Congo really have anything to teach me on the subject? I didn’t appreciate it when Yves the just-Ivorian gave me a hard time in front of everybody:

“Wake up, Buttologist! We’re in France here and you’ve got real goals to score because an away goal always counts as two points, my friend. But you’ve chosen the easy path, going for a compatriot. Is this how you intend to make the people of this country compensate us for everything they inflicted on us during colonisation, eh? They stripped us of our primary resources, so we’ve got to steal their treasures, and by that I mean their women! So ditch that fat-arsed sun-roasted woman of yours and bag a pretty blonde with blue or green eyes, you can’t move for them in the streets of Paris and beyond. And another thing, those White girls won’t give you a hard time compared to our sisters who are first-class pains in the neck. It’s her butt that’s making you lose your head like this, isn’t it? Well then pay a visit to where I come from, in the Ivory Coast, and you will see what a real woman’s backside looks like, how it moves, how it trembles, how it rotates like the blades of a helicopter. The girl I see smoking in front of Soul Fashion is just a tiny mirage, you’ll be disappointed the day she takes off those trousers of hers because her butt will collapse all the way down to her calves …

I didn’t take kindly either to the remarks of Vladimir the Cameroonian who smokes the longest cigars in France and Navarre. He made it clear that in order to satisfy Original Colour my thing down there would have to be as long as two of his cigars stuck together.

“Buttologist, have you seen how long my cigar is, eh? Does it remind you of anything?”

I didn’t react.

“Now, I’m going to take another cigar out of my pocket and I’m going to stick them end to end like this. Look …!”

And then Vladimir finished off with:

“You’ll need a tool as big as that, you see, or the girl will laugh in your face. And you can count your lucky stars I haven’t managed to get hold of the longest cigar in the world yet, made by the Cuban José Castelar and measuring eleven metres and four centimetres! You’re just a Sapper, a dandy, a lover of Westons and suits from the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. Back in the Cameroon, we say that length isn’t so much of a Congolese attribute. My advice to you is get fit!”

But I decided to go with the advice of Paul from the big Congo, who told me I should do the business and then beat it at the first opportunity …

Later on, I wouldfind out from Original Colour that her parents lived in Nancy where they had a lawyers’ practice, that only French was spoken at home and that she didn’t understand a single one of the hundreds of languages in our country. Her father was opposed to the regime in power, and consequently he was banned from entering the Congo, but he hoped that one day it would be his turn to become President of our Republic, and then he would snatch our oil from the hands of the French and give it to the Americans instead. He would crush all the northerners and throw them into the Congo River because he believes his tribe has been experiencing nothing short of genocide for decades now and that this has been met with indifference from the international community. According to the lawyer from Nancy, the only hope for the Congo is for half the country to break away, or else the extermination plain and simple of those from the North who have confiscated the reins of power since Independence and who steal the gas from the South in order to sell it off at a knock-down price to the French. According to Original Colour, her father still had a big grey beard like most African rebels who copied the look of the Angolan resistance fighter of the day, Jonas Savimbi, a charismatic man who, right up until his death, prevented his rival, President Eduardo Dos Santos, from sleeping soundly at night.

Original Colour harboured a grudge against her father. And that spark of hatred would flare up as soon as I tried to find out a bit more about him. She sounded very vexed on the subject. She used to say: “That proslaver”, “that creature”, “that tribalist”, “that person I don’t know” and even “that man who calls himself my father”. According to her, this lawyer was just a Southern extremist, a man who cultivated intolerance even in his own home, a political fanatic whose wife soaked up his words without raising her voice. He would receive at home the bosses of our former regime, which was now shot to pieces following two civil wars. The lawyer and his frustrated guests would ponder a new political party in order to win back power, by force if needs be. He was waiting on the green light from America because, he maintained, these days you can’t have political change in any French-speaking country in Africa without the help of the Yankees given that the French kept everything under lock and key in their former colonies …

* * *

I’d had to push for Original Colour to explain how she’d ended up on her own in Paris instead of living in Nancy. She had fallen out with her father — and so, on the rebound, with her mother too — on account of a marriage deal that her parents had struck with Doyen Methuselah, our former Finance Minister back in the home country, the one who had emptied the state coffers when he realised that the regime in which he was a senior minister wouldn’t survive the second civil war, because the new strong man in the country had the support of France as well as more tanks, missiles, helicopters and rockets than the regular army. And so Doyen Methuselah had fled in great haste across the Congo River together with the ex-president, before catching a plane to Belgium, then France where he was accorded the status of a political exile. The minister liked to proclaim it from the Paris rooftops that he could feed every member of the Congolese opposition living in France, including those in Corsica and Monaco, for a hundred and fifty years. The Congolese in France would visit him at his private mansion in the 8th arrondissement and leave clutching big fat envelopes stuffed with notes. His fortune was estimated to equal the entire debt of our country. So all he had to do was give back to the people what he had stolen and then our nation could stop snivelling at the summits of rich countries about getting our debt cancelled. But Doyen Methuselah led the high life in France. He threw private parties in grand palaces where, in the middle of the night, he would have his wicked way with young Congolese girls barely out of puberty. Doyen Methuselah was very close to Original Colour’s father, who had defended him in a trial about embezzling public monies that had made a lot of noise in France a while back, and he had set his heart on the daughter of his former lawyer and his friend. He wanted to marry her despite the thirty-eight years that separated them. This would have tied things up nicely for the lawyer from Nancy who was hoping to benefit from the financial support of Doyen Methuselah so as to strengthen his political party while waiting for the green light from the Yankees.

Original Colour wanted to turn the page. So I didn’t ask her any more questions on the subject. She talked to me instead about one of her childhood friends, Rachel Kouamé, who had left Nancy for Paris ahead of her. They had been inseparable from elementary school all the way through to lycée. The day before Original Colour, in accordance with her father’s wishes, was supposed to marry Doyen Methuselah she packed her bags for Paris and went to knock on the door of her childhood friend …