There’s isn’t a picture of Friedrich Engels on the back of this book. I would have liked to compare it with the one at my uncle’s house. Perhaps when someone’s famous they stop putting their photo on the back of the books they write, and if they do put someone’s photo on the back of the book it’s to get them known, because no one has heard of them yet. Is Engels more famous than our President? I think he must be, and that’s why on the book our President wrote there’s a big photo of him, smiling.
I open the book by Engels just to see if there are any photos in it. There aren’t, there are only words, in really small type, as if they didn’t want us children to be able to read what it says.
‘Michel, don’t read it! You’re still too young to understand. Even my comrades on the People’s Neighbourhood Committee find it hard. Engels was a true visionary! The world has to change, and the change can only come about through farming; the peasants must own their means of production, we must put an end to capitalist profit, and set up a true proletariat dictatorship! And how can this be done? I’ll tell you: we must re-read history, as Marx tells us, in the light of historical materialism or more correctly, new materialism, because in fact, though the popular masses — supposedly the beneficiaries of Marxist thought — don’t like to hear it, Marx never talked about historical materialism, but about new materialism! It’s a crucial distinction, and I might even say, a fundamental one. Do you follow?’
We nod our heads, though we still don’t understand. He takes this as encouragement, and he goes on, ‘It’s blindingly obvious: all social relationships are of necessity founded on confrontation, textually speaking you might almost say on the class struggle. Our relationships are based on our everyday experience and not on ideology, I mean, the superstructure, since we now know that ideology will never change the world for us in the sense that it changes our living conditions, or our social relationships, etc. Marx is quite clear about that, he set it down in black and white, and I quote: The new materialism sees things from the perspective of human society, or social humanity, unquote.’
Talking about Engels, Lenin and Karl Marx, and the immortal Marien Ngouabi makes him sweat heavily. He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his brow. He’s just realised that in fact we haven’t understood a word he’s been saying and once more he turns to my mother. ‘Well, I’ll leave it there. I get the feeling I’m preaching in the Sahara desert. You come with me, we need to sort out a few things. But not in front of the boy.’
They leave the house and go and talk out in the yard. But they talk too loud, and I hear everything. Yet again, it’s about the inheritance of my grandmother Henrietta Ntsoko’s land. She was married to my grandfather, Grégoire Moukila, the chief of Louboulou village. My grandfather had land, chickens, sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, manioc fields and maize. He left it all to my grandmother. Now she’s dead, Uncle René claims everything’s his, because he’s the older brother and my mother will have to wait till he dies to recover my grandmother’s inheritance, along with Uncle René’s.
Maman Pauline disagrees.
‘René, this is family, not your politics that come from books by Angèle.’
‘Engels!’
‘Whoever! This is about our family. Why are you telling me these lies? You’ve already taken our brother’s house, when it should be his children who get it!’
‘Are you kidding? Why should his children get the house?’
‘Because children should be the ones who inherit!’
‘Oh no, that’s a typical capitalist point of view. You see — we’re still all under the sway of imperialism! We need to get back to our own traditions, get back in touch with ourselves. This house belonged to my brother and it’s my job to look after it because I was the one who paid for his medicines when he was in hospital. And don’t forget, I bought Albert’s coffin and fed the people who came to his wake! What did Albert’s children actually do for him while he was ill at the Adolphe-Cissy Hospital?’
The deceased brother they’re talking about was my grandfather’s oldest child, and worked for the electricity company in Pointe-Noire. He died when I was very small. Now I realise the beautiful house where Uncle René and his wife and children live is in fact Uncle Albert Moukila’s house. My mother sometimes talks to me about his children, who I’ve never met. Some of them, apart from the older sister, Albertine, have names that make me giggle. The cousin they call ‘Abeille’ comes after Albertine and has studied in the USSR. Then there’s ‘Pretty Boy’ Firmin, who has a little amateur band in the Rex quartier. Then there’s Gorgeous Djoudjou, who’s finishing his studies in France. Finally, there are the twins, Gilbert ‘the Magician’ and Nzoussi ‘Miss Picky’, who call my mother ‘Papa Pauline’. Uncle René threw them all out of their father’s house and took the inheritance for himself, as if he’d earned all this wealth through hard work.
‘This time I’m not going to let you take all our mother’s things,’ Maman Pauline continues.
‘You only have to wait till I die, then you’ll get everything that’s mine, mother’s things and the house I inherited from Albert.’
‘And what if I die before you?’
‘There’s your son, Michel. He’ll get everything!’
‘Michel isn’t our mother’s son, he’s my son! And don’t forget, there are other people in the family too!’
Then I hear the names of my aunts and uncles, who I haven’t met yet: Aunt Bouanga, who lives in Dolisie, over two hundred kilometres from Pointe-Noire. Aunt Dorothée, who’s married and lives in the village of Moussanda. Uncle Joseph who lives in Louboulou and is the youngest in the family, just after my mother. They’re just names to me. I haven’t met them yet. Maman Pauline often tells me they’re all very nice, that they think of me, and would like to see me too, one day.
Uncle René acts like he’s the big brother in this family, when in fact Aunt Bouanga and Aunt Dorothée are older than him. These two aunts are afraid of him, they can’t stand up to him and he’s just waiting for the day someone in the family dies so he can dash to the wake and announce, ‘Everything belonging to the deceased is mine.’ And if Maman Pauline dies, will he come and take our house and throw me out like he threw out Uncle Albert’s children? I can’t believe he will because this house was bought for us by Papa Roger and my name is on the papers. How could Uncle René come and take it? Papa Roger would wage a world war on him first, because usually the inheritance should go to the children. I try to understand why Uncle René acts the way he does, and I tell myself, ‘Perhaps if you’re rich in this life, you always want to get richer, and you stop noticing that the people around you have nothing.’
Before he left, my uncle threw a 100 °CFA franc note on the ground. My mother refused to take it. As soon as his car had started up, I quickly picked up the note, before the wind blew it away and into the middle of the street in the Avenue of Independence and everyone started fighting for it and saying it was theirs and we’d have no proof it belonged to us.
~ ~ ~
Lounès has been to the Rex with his father to see Mandala, daughter of India. They said people were weeping in the cinema, including Monsieur Mutombo, and it’s not every day you see him cry.
While we’re walking over to the football pitch in Savon, for a match between the Tié-Tié Caids and the Voungou Dragons, Lounès tries to explain the film to me. He tells me about a prince called Samsher and his sister, princess Rajshree, who live a life of such luxury that compared to them even capitalists look like paupers. They have elephants, tigers, lions, a beautiful palace in all the colours of the rainbow, rivers full of flowers and beautiful women, bathing and dancing, swaying their Netherlands. I listen to him, envy him, I feel jealous of him. But I do rather wonder if Lounès isn’t adding a bit of spice to his story, to get me to ask Papa Roger to take us to see it, because children aren’t allowed to go to the cinema on their own.