KABANGA’S LAWYER IS speaking to the press. He’s perorating. Meanwhile, Kagamé, the president of Rwanda, must be preparing to welcome his friend Kabanga who delivered him diamonds, gold, and coltan. The Western media are ecstatic over the audacious and remarkable concept of justice that holds sway in The Hague. International justice is perfect, flawless even. The future biographies of the judges won’t be bothered with these facts: the search for perfection kills people, frees criminals, creates shock waves in countries that are already unstable—who cares? Reading the world press casts me into a despair that has nothing theoretical about it. Now that Kabanga is free, my life is slipping away, like blood dripping slowly from a wound next to the heart. I was asked to “write a few lines,” polite, prefabricated formulas that put a decent set of clothes on defeat and failure. I try, but can’t. My ability to analyse and synthesize disappeared with Kabanga. Astonishingly, I discovered anger, rage, real revolt, rejection of the established order, of the rules and conventions that once governed me. And if these emotions are so strong and so clear, they must have been in me all the while, and I was denying them, I was wrapping them carefully in sheets of silk paper known as pragmatism and my rational method, I was filing them away as if they were items of objective information. What if I’d used the same care to wrap up everything that involved feelings, in order to avoid distress, uncertainty, and pain? I was a coward. Kabanga never knew fear and he was free. He could become the emperor of Bunia once more. When you’re like me, you don’t decide to change and free yourself, you understand that the process has been completed a long time ago, and you accept that transformation without worrying about the consequences. You let yourself be carried by the great tide that will erode the oldest granite cliffs in the world and modify the landscape forever.