Mapapouville Blues
Today I’m prey to a certain nostalgia. I don’t know why I can’t stop thinking of our capital. I have moments like this, when my thoughts wander independently of me.
I’m seeing the city again. From here I can dive back into its streets, its depths, into the soul of the place, which has gone to pieces since the Okonongo Affair.
Mapapouville was a huge metropolis famed throughout the continent despite the contrast between its various neighborhoods. Political, cultural, and religious capital, it was known as the Green City thanks to its greenery: the flame trees lining its avenues, its public gardens, the flower-covered roundabouts, and the fountains from which doves with golden plumage would rise into the air. The downtown area, once the European city, housed government offices, large businesses, and services. Towers of glass. Multistory housing. Reinforced concrete bridges. The architecture had been modeled on the West, and it contrasted sharply with other parts of the city—to the south especially there was a multitude of lively residential quarters with countless children in motion, always outside, on the public squares, in the dead-end streets, or in the passages that ran between private properties. The same urchins could be seen in front of the stalls of sidewalk sellers, when they weren’t chasing after a moped or some aging automobile.
If today everything has been demolished, the fact remains that our capital still extends along the bank of the Vietongo River, like a vast boa constrictor sleeping off a filling meal.
The expansion of the city led to the appearance of myriad outlying neighborhoods, unsurveyed, with bamboo huts and shacks of plywood or aluminum sheeting, that ringed the center closely on stretches of land as diverse as plains, ravines, and plateaus. In the places still covered with trees, electricity was lacking. When night fell, these favela-like constructions were plunged in darkness. From time to time a flashlight, the headlights of a moped or car, or a hurricane lamp would reveal the existence of the souls huddling in those places.
Forgotten Splendor
Today I find it impossible to believe that Mapapouville was once a mélange of ethnic groups. Men and women from different regions, all brought together. A conglomeration of origins sharing the city. This world was jumbled up, mixed together in the markets, the factories, the buses, the stations, the restaurants and bars. Here you forgot the mud of your native village, the customs of your region, your local accent. A particular tribe was no longer denounced because they liked the meat of dogs or cats; another because they had a weakness for spicy shark soup, monkey, or gorilla; a third because they were keen on grasshoppers or caterpillars, to be eaten with large chunks of cassava and a big tumbler of cool water. At these moments of mingling, of the crowd, a different culture emerged—an urban culture that was composite and hybrid. People clinked glasses together. They helped old ladies carry their bags, cross the road, or get around a puddle. They let the skinny bald old man have their seat on public transportation and gave him directions when he got off. People spoke one of the country’s two official languages, French and Lingala, so the different tribes could understand each other better. The same restaurant in the neighborhood or at the market would serve dog, cat, gorilla, and monkey. There were dishes of boa and of palm rat. Shark was also available, and you could comfortably order any number of grasshoppers from the Mayombe forest and grilled caterpillars from the Dziama grasslands. And when the beer flowed—yes, real beer, not the stuff they drink today, but a well-chilled beer that lingered on the palate to the point that it made your tongue click, filled your throat, slipped down your gullet—well, when that beer flowed, no one knew anymore which tribe ate what, and all hands dipped in all the different dishes being served. On a single table there’d be empty bottles of chilled Kronenbourg, Primus, or Ngok, the local beer. Then there were the older folks, with their long bottle of red wine. They’d come into the bar and ask for a Sonvico long, or the half long they’d not been able to finish the night before and had set aside.
The Mapapouvillians forgot their differences and their customs during these moments of jubilation and intermingling. The ethnic organization of the city was anchored in our traditions, and it extended to many facets of everyday life.
I say to myself now that Mapapouville was like our soccer teams from that time. Because like other big cities of our continent, our political capital was prey to football fever. Every game was a national event. The Revolution Stadium would fill up early in the morning, even though kickoff wasn’t till late afternoon. The makeup of the teams showed the point to which tribal identity was set in people’s minds. A. S. Kilahou consisted of players, a coach, and managers from the South of the country. A. S. Bokondima, on the other hand, was the team of the North, from their physio to their fan club, including the administration and the sponsors. A few teams from the central region and from little towns had walk-on parts in the national championship. Do I need to stress how the entire country would be in a turmoil of excitement when Bokondima faced Kilahou? It was obviously a contest between northerners and southerners. In other words, between those who were in power and those who were not. The city would grind to a halt during this confrontation. Traffic came to a standstill. The bars were packed; people would sit around a big wooden radio set, a colonial fossil, that was so dilapidated the listeners constantly had to take turns, between the referee’s whistles, at turning the antenna so they could follow the spirited and partisan commentaries by the two official sports journalists (one northerner and one southerner).
This idyllic image contrasts sharply with the analysis I heard the day before yesterday on Radio-Intercontinentale, summing up the events in Mapapouville. According to that station, the city has been nothing but a dead house since General Edou and his Romans laid siege to it. The broadcast added that the legitimate regime of His Excellency Lebou Kabouya was smashed to pieces after a coup d’état in which the general was implicated. The deposed president’s Anacondas have vanished into the scenery. Some of them became turncoats and laid down their arms at the feet of the new strongman of Mapapouville. Only the Negro Grandsons, loyal to the southern former prime minister Vercingetorix, are still in place in the poorer districts of the capital, making life difficult for the putschists. But they are being pushed back by the Romans, who have the advantage of aid from Vietongo’s neighbors. General Edou has become sole master of the country. In the South, the radio confirmed, the Negro Grandsons are refusing to recognize the general’s authority, and it has been established that at present Vercingetorix is back in Batalébé, his native district. He has decided to remind the general that his men are heroes and that they will not spare any northerner living in the South of the country.