Sixty years later, I still think of him. I think of him whenever I see a bald man! Undoubtedly, this is because it was the first time I’d ever seen someone so truly bald: His whole head was completely bare down to where his neck began, his scalp so smooth and bright that it caught the reflections of the club’s lights and seemed to return them as a mirror would.
I also think of him every time I think of tenderness.
Since then, the word “tenderness” evokes in me the feeling that his smile and his gaze produced, and also the feel of his bald head. His smile had a way of spreading like a soft nightlight with an almost voluptuous sweetness. His gaze rested on people like a soothing balm. And in the end, one always gave in to the desire to touch his extraordinary bald head, where your hand would stay as if magnetized, trapped.
I also think of him each time I feel like dreaming while awake, out loud, undoing and remaking the world, imagining future ordeals, then inventing tricks and solutions to confront them successfully. For he is the first person I saw being and living in that way.
With his velvet voice, he could design whole cities, all through the night, installing and moving fountains, statues, and monuments, public parks, and bridges.
His cities had the peculiarity of boasting prestigious and generous governing authorities, who walked the pedestrian streets and wrought miracles, solving every problem that the population laid before them. As a result, the streets occupied a large part of his designs, all ending in superb squares like the spokes on a wheel of fortune. How could I have known that such dreams could never be realized? How could I have known that governments would amputate all the creativity, inventiveness, and imagination from their elites, and most of all refuse them the means of making their dreams come true? Had I known it, I would have foreseen the wretchedness that at millennium’s end would bring the people down. Perhaps I would have foreseen what the famous Armageddon would look like, the one that the religion of both my mothers Naja mentioned so often. Had I known it, I would have devoted more time to Ndiffo, to help him realize even one of his visions. At the very least, I would have helped him better formulate the concept of his “cities of responsible people.”
Regrettably, I listened to him with only half an ear, preoccupied with my worries about earning a better living. He then made an even greater effort to make me understand his brilliant dream. He would take a gold pen from his pocket and scribble some outline that he’d explain to me at length. When the lights went down in the club for the languorous slow dances, he’d light his lighter and keep on drawing his vision by the spark alone, as naturally as if he could see in the near-dark. Nothing could be allowed to stop the flow of his inspiration, least of all myself. I would have felt like someone who refuses to come to the aid of a person in danger. And besides, if I rose, suddenly aware that I was there to earn a living and not to dream and that it would be helpful to increase the drink orders to raise my percentages; or if I went to greet new customers, he would cling to me as to a lifebuoy, begging me not to break his train of thought. He reached a point where he would pay my boss for ten or fifteen drinks each evening, provided I stay and listen to him and ask my naive questions. So each time he came to the club, three or four times a month, after I sang my sets I was wholly absorbed in a purely intellectual and aesthetic activity that, in addition, made me some money. I became more and more interested in the professions connected to this pursuit. He told me about teaching, journalism, commercial exploration, literature, and much more—new possibilities for me, as long as I worked hard. He began to give me a new book each time he saw me.
After a while I was completely immersed in careful listening and voracious reading. From then on, sharing his exhilaration was like a drug. I found it fascinating that just by thinking alone you could come up with so many ideas and images, and know how to transmit them so effectively that the public was able to feel it had actually experienced them! I lived in these imagined cities, knew their streets and monuments and even their inhabitants: innately rich people full of generosity toward their fellow citizens, people who were always prepared to recreate their own world, constantly correcting and improving not only the structures and infrastructures but their own habits and customs as well. Soon I couldn’t tell his cities apart from those in the novels I devoured. It would be wonderful to sing in cities like these, where all people participated in never-ending renewal using their own tools. For me, those tools would be lyrics and voice, since I didn’t know how to design as well as Ndiffo, whom I now saw as my master.
Decades later, I still hold on to the conviction he inspired, which is that we create hell or heaven through deliberate thought. Thank you, Master Ndiffo, for teaching me and giving me your blessing.
SONG 16
Often I think of Master Ndiffo, too,
Every time I graze despair,
Every time I have dark thoughts,
Thinking about my father, about the masses of creators
I met after him, and all the intellectuals
I saw who had to fight to no avail,
Fight the monstrous epidemic of despair
Come crashing down on all Africa’s intellectuals,
For three decades running, without a shred of doubt,
Endangering the education, the future, of several generations,
So that in the end they drowned in it, became inured,
Threw in the towel, had no self-protection, not even to remain immune,
Depending only on humanitarian aid;
Yet each time, my dear Ndiffo, I remember, too, that you were
The first to be affected, or so I think,
And that is why my compassion for you is now rekindled,
And so to you I say, as to all lost generations, that
We, divine, must find ourselves, inside our spirit, once again.