Cruel City. Mongo Beti
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real descendants of Ham. Today, Europe no longer finds it necessary to justify its African adventure in so paltry a manner.
2. I have given myself permission to cite these titles written before the war, such as Batouala, and Karim. My thinking here is that even though these books don’t belong to the period or the field that I had given myself as an object of study, they might be of use to the reader curious about African literature.
3. Translator’s note: This quotation is in fact from Pierre Joseph Proud-hon.
4. I know that there will be no end of people to accuse me of a bias, of lacking in objectivity, of seeing only one facet of colonization, without even bothering to look at the other: its benefits. Indeed, European rhetoric, especially French rhetoric, demands that every reality have two sides: an ugly one and a beautiful one. Nevertheless, if we examined the war from this perspective, wouldn’t we risk justifying it? That being said, it is true that Hitler’s regime had already done this. In my opinion, the war and colonization are connected in that respect, as in many others: they cannot be judged according to the methods of argumentation taught in the last year of high school; colonization, like war, is entirely ugly or entirely beautiful; finding them both ugly and beautiful at the same time is but a vulgar self-justification.
5. Lettres françaises is a literary and cultural journal heavily trending toward the Left. From 1953 to 1972, its chief editor was the communist Louis Aragon, and at the outset the paper was heavily funded by the French Communist Party. Conversely, Le Figaro littéraire trends heavily to the Right.
6. Published by the Editions Gallimard.
CRUEL
CITY
1
“I’m the most miserable girl of them all. Think about it, Banda. Women mock me relentlessly in their songs. The old folks pity me. When I walk by, the young can barely turn away; they can hardly keep from laughing. But I’m not holding any of this against you. I still need to know why you did this to me. Why didn’t you want me? All I need is an explanation.”
Fearing this discussion yet anticipating it, Banda cast a melancholy gaze on his girlfriend: he examined her face with a combination of annoyance and pity. He was visibly perplexed. His whole body, particularly his mouth, expressed the distaste of the generous spirit in the face of life’s demands.
He turned his gaze away just as languidly as he had looked in her direction and buried his head in the filthy yellowing pillow as if it held the answer. He remained stretched out on the bed among the filthy sheets. His long lean body evoked those gigantic black snakes suffering from indigestion that one occasionally crosses in the fields.
In the nearby brush, a few straggling partridges continued to call each other from place to place. A clear, noisy, and turbulent morning forced its way in through the roof and the cracks in the door. Outside, roosters began to stir, crowed at the top of their lungs, and mumbled a few gallant phrases. Banda closed his eyes as if he wanted to ignore it all, wanted to forget.
In a tired, halting, yet undeterred voice, she resumed her interrogation.
“Tell me why you refuse to marry me. How could you prefer a kid who will never know how to cook? I, on the other hand . . . and besides, you’d never have to pay for a thing.”
“You’re annoying me,” Banda blurted out suddenly. It was a cry of despair rather than anger. She sat at the very edge of the bed. Both unsettled and curious, she examined this overgrown boy, this man who suddenly appeared to her in a completely new light. Yes, men were all cruel and insensitive. A stifling and pregnant silence followed. Then Banda spoke.
“What exactly were you thinking? That I had to marry you because you feed me beef—and I wonder where you get it, though again, I’d rather not know . . . and because you let me between your sheets? So, am I to understand that this is a transaction? Why didn’t you say so immediately?”
Just as quickly he was silent again, then he sighed. Perhaps he already regretted the outburst, that it went too far. Perhaps he was just relieved, realizing suddenly that he had just ended their relationship and that this was one less thing to worry about.
She broke the silence in a voice that remained hesitant but determined.
“I’m no longer asking you to marry me; simply tell me why you’re abandoning me. How can you have forgotten the time we spent together, the things you said to me, that I was beautiful, that I was the only woman in the world with whom you were truly at ease? Did I do something that made me undesirable? Did . . . Tell me, I need to understand . . . “
Banda said nothing. After a short pause, he imprudently blurted out:
“My mother!”
“What about your mother?”
“Yes, my mother. She feared that you’d become sterile. Rumor had it that you slept with so many men . . . “
He avoided her gaze, which he could feel lashing his face.
“Banda,” she whispered, softly pursing her lips, “you should be ashamed! Your mother said that and you just accepted it? Will you always be a child? Your mother will soon be dead; can’t you see that?”
Deep down she was ecstatic. What the young man’s confession also revealed was that the “kid” wouldn’t be a significant obstacle. But Banda’s piercing gaze put an end to any such hope.
“You see,” he confided, as if half regretting it, “for me, my mother is . . . Oh! What good is it; you couldn’t possibly understand. As you know, I barely remember my father.”
Lying on his back, he stared obstinately at the smoke-blackened thatch of the roof. His sentences were interspersed with heavy pauses.
“I only had my mother,” he continued.
“And the others?” she snapped.
“What others?”
“Other boys your age . . .”
“What about them?”
“Few of them got to know their fathers. They only had their mothers. That doesn’t mean they worship them as if they’d invented the world. Am I right?”
Banda exhaled deeply. Was he going tell her everything? He was overwhelmed by weariness, as he was whenever he faced an impossible task.
“No, it’s not the same thing,” he said, looking at her pleadingly. “Listen carefully.”
He had turned toward her; while he spoke, bracing himself on one elbow, he gesticulated wildly with his free hand, as if to give his explanation more plausibility. In the face of her dark and ardent stare, he soon realized that she would never understand. He therefore promptly rolled onto his back, stretching out full length, losing his gaze in the thatch. One would have thought that he was now speaking for himself, or at least an invisible audience.
“I love my mother. Aiiii! I love her in a way you couldn’t possibly understand. Have you ever loved someone? When my father died, I was only a couple of years old. My mother took on the task of raising me; she gave this responsibility all her attention. She did absolutely everything for me, you hear? She stuffed me with food. Good food. She administered a colonic once a week. Every night she put me into an enormous kettle of warm water and scrubbed my entire body. Three times a week she sent me off to the catechist . . . I was better dressed than those kids my age who had fathers. We slept on bamboo cots on either side of a fire that my mother stoked continuously while she told me stories, or spoke of my father, or of her own childhood, or of the country where she was born, or of my grandmother who died shortly before I was born. On some nights we would hear an owl hoot or a chimpanzee howl; I would curl up in my bed and my mother, laughing all the while, would say, ‘Don’t be scared, son. He’s not going to come get you while I’m here . . .’ On other nights, the rain drummed on the roof while violent gusts of wind swept through the courtyard, shaking the trees outside the village; then my mother would say: ‘My God!