‘THE STAKE OF DEATH HAS BEEN PLANTED’, ‘WE HAVE THROWN AWAY THE HOE’ AND ‘THERE ARE NO MORE NAMES LEFT’

Kouhouesso had seen Oprah. And Oprah had seen Kouhouesso: she agreed to be a co-producer. The film shoot would be on a boat, following the chronology of the novel: leaving from the Thames in a schooner, navigating the coast of West Africa, then upriver in a little steamboat. If not in the Congo—let’s be reasonable—then in Gabon or in southern Cameroon: better logistics, fewer heavy weapons. Kouhouesso pulled a face, but Canal Plus was coming on board. And the screenplay had been sent to Vincent Cassel.

‘It’s going to be shot in the Congo,’ he said to her. Yes, to her. She focused less on the hubris of his assertion than on the fact that he trusted her and was confiding in her. They were smoking a joint in bed, their bags packed for Paris. The flight was the next day. Kouhouesso in the Congo. She smiled. A good antidote to Tintin. Kouhouesso had never set foot in the Congo, any more than she had. For him, too, it was the unknown. For him, too, it was Africa: jungle, untouched, inaccessible. For both of them: no asphalt, no guardrails. Being Kouhouesso—being black—did not immunise him against anything.

From what she had gleaned, he was born in a relatively arid area of Cameroon (she’d only recently learnt that there were arid areas in Cameroon). He was about two when he ran away from the concession. His mother found him, dead, stiff and dried out like a log of wood. She took him to the medicine woman, but the medicine woman said she needed to take him to the witch. He was probably under a spell. There was only one witch in the valley and she did nothing for less than a goat. The father was violently opposed to the expense and to resorting to such extremes; he was a rational man and didn’t want to hear anything about spirits, from either the natives or anyone else. But Kouhouesso was still dead and looking more and more like a log of Assemela hardwood; he was getting harder and blacker before their eyes, turning into charcoal. When there was nothing but powder left of him, his mother sneaked away from the other wives, taking the family’s only goat with her.

While his mother set off towards the hollow tree where the witch lived, with him dead and the goat on a leash, a never-ending stream of car headlights disappeared behind the Hotel Bel-Air. She asked him if it was a traditional folk tale. Traditional of what? He laughed. Of the suffering of mothers, perhaps, she thought. She could picture her own mother lying down between her two aluminium bedside tables from the 1970s. But Kouhouesso’s childhood seemed to be from an earlier time, as far in the past as she and he were in the future, bathed in the cone of light from the Bel Air cars. Cars that were not going to take him away, and into which he would not disappear—him, speaking now, alive and well, in her arms.

The witch took the goat and studied what was left of the dead child. She said that the child’s name was Kouhouesso, that he had several other names but Kouhouesso was his real name. That he was an only child, but not the first. That his mother had had other children before him.

All that was true, the absolute truth. The witch said he was one of the children from a series of abikus. An abiku is a spirit child who lodges itself in the belly of women and is born in order to die, over and over again. As long as the spirit child is not recognised for what it is—an evil, tormenting and unrelenting creature—he will come back to blight hopes and promises.

The witch said that she would keep the child for as long as was necessary, but that it cost more for abikus: they would need to bring another goat. Otherwise, although the child would live, it would stay crouching under the roots, waiting to be reborn as an abiku.

So Kouhouesso spent days and nights in the hollow tree with the witch. When his mother returned, he was well and truly alive: he had got some colour back, and had even put on weight. Two fresh cuts, little triangles, were forming scars on his forehead. The witch told them to coat the scars with soot. Scarification was part of the treatment.

According to the adult Kouhouesso, bearer of triangles on his forehead, while he was in the tree, the old woman had buried him up to his neck in the moist, loose earth, the rich humus under the hollow tree, and she persevered in feeding him a mixture of water and milk, drop by drop, into his little mouth, just like the Fulani people do in the case of severe dehydration—and the Khoisan, the Tuareg, the Songhai, the Berabiche, the Reguibat, the Toubou, the Hausa, the Toucouleur, and the Australian Aborigines.

During all those days and all those nights, at church, and before altars, his mother had offered up prayers—prayers of struggle. And she had argued at length with his father, insisting that he sell an acre of wine palm trees in order to purchase another goat. The father had protested that it was a case of kidnapping and ransom, and that he would go himself to get his son, dead or alive. But some strange phenomenon prevented him: he kept banging into an invisible wall. He tried to leave the house but found himself laid out on the floor like a drunkard, his forehead swollen with unsightly bumps. So the mother took the opportunity to carry out the goat-acre transaction and to recover her son, Kouhouesso, who right now was speaking to Solange on a Los Angelean night.

He claimed to be able to remember the smell of goat on the witch, and a sensation of being enveloped in the damp, dark softness. Henceforth, he no longer needed anything or anyone.

Solange assured him that it was an intrauterine memory, a metaphor for a lost state of bliss that we have all known. Like the memories produced under the influence of LSD.

Kouhouesso smiled and took a drag of the joint. Africa exists, he said. Before him, three children had died, three sons mourned when in fact they were the same spirit returned to the same womb. He was the first to have lived because the preceding child, finally recognised for what he was, had been buried with the proper funeral rites. On his grave, near his head, the shaman had planted a special stake around which were woven carefully chosen leaves. The abiku would no longer trouble the family. Nine months later, Kouhouesso was born. His name meant ‘The stake of Death has been planted’. He had been born to carry this name, a name he had lived up to by surviving beyond the age of seven, when the abiku could still make an appearance, and by remaining alive all the years since then.

After him, a girl was born, who had also survived and whose name was Losoko, which meant ‘We have thrown away the hoe’—the hoe used for digging graves. She had stayed in their homeland and they sometimes shared photos on Facebook. And last of all, a brother, who had also survived and who worked on construction sites in South Africa. His name was Orukotan, ‘There are no more names left’.

It was a powerful name, which banished the abiku children forever, but also any other children, and so the mother stopped giving birth. And the father died quite quickly of septicaemia.

‘I was born after a child died, too,’ said Solange. If they had performed funeral rites in the village, if they had managed to cover up the whole business with stakes, hoes and unpronounceable names, if they had gathered around the little dead body and behaved like Zulus, would their devastation have been less brutal? Would they perhaps have managed to speak to each other? To get together with a little bit of joy at Christmas? She was about to reach for the photograph on the bookshelf when Kouhouesso pronounced solemnly, ‘You’re a sort of abiku of the north. Perhaps that’s what appealed to me.’

So she appealed to him. He had said it: ‘appealed to me’. And just as she was going to divulge the name of her brother (an ordinary name, and so French), just as she was about tell him a tiny portion of all her huge secrets, just as, in their lovers’ intimacy, on the eve of their departure, in the intimacy of the shared joint, she was about to reveal the tiniest portion of what they never talked about, or at least not yet—about the past, families, perhaps her son, perhaps the future—just as she was going to speak, he kissed her passionately and they made love again.