Black Moses: A Novel

Loango

IT ALL BEGAN WHEN I WAS a teenager, and came to wonder about the name I’d been given by Papa Moupelo, the priest at the orphanage in Loango: Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. A long name, which in Lingala means ‘Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors’, and is still inscribed on my birth certificate today…

Papa Moupelo was an unusual character, definitely one of those who made the greatest impression on me during the years I spent in the orphanage. A pocket-sized man, he wore Salamanders with thick heels – elevator heels, we called them – and loose flowing white boubous, supplied by the West African stallholders at the Grand Marché in Pointe-Noire. He ended up looking like a scarecrow in a field of maize, especially when crossing the central courtyard, with the wind shaking the filao trees that grew round the edge of the orphanage walls.

Every weekend we looked forward to his arrival and started cheering as soon as we caught sight of his old Renault 4L, with its engine that suffered, we liked to say, from chronic tuberculosis. The priest struggled to park his car in the yard, and would repeat the same manoeuvre maybe five or six times, though the worst driver in the world could have done it with his eyes shut. This grotesque battle was not simply his idea of fun: the aim, he explained, was that the front of the car should be ‘pointing at the exit’, to make it easier for him two hours later, when he wanted to drive back home to Diosso, ten kilometres from Loango…

Once we were all inside the premises assigned by the institution for his use, opposite the buildings we used for classrooms, we stood in a circle round him, and he handed out sheets of paper printed with the words for the song he was going to teach us. At that point the noise level usually rocketed, as we complained how difficult most of us found the arcane Lingala vocabulary taken from the books written by European missionaries, in which they had recorded our age-old beliefs, legends, tales and songs.

We concentrated hard, and within a quarter of an hour we felt confident, modulating our voices as Papa Moupelo suggested, the girls giving yelps of joy we called youyous, the boys responding as low as they could while he himself sat there with his eyes shut and a smile on his face, moving to the music, spreading his legs, then crossing them again. His movements were executed so quickly, we quite believed he was the fastest man on earth.

After a few minutes he’d be wiping his face with the back of his hand, panting with his mouth hanging open, and a look that said: ‘Over to you now!’

And if we hesitated, the priest would leap in, instructing and demonstrating all at once. ‘Come on now, don’t be shy, children! Everyone join in! Jiggle your shoulders up and down now. That’s it! Now, imagine your shoulders are wings and you’re about to take flight! That’s it! Now nod your heads at the same time, like over-excited little geckos! Marvellous, children! That’s how you do the dance of the north in this country!’

Inflamed by these moments of jubilation, when it seemed as though this servant of the Lord had come not to evangelise us, but to distract us from punishments we’d endured over the last few days, we’d go wild, perhaps sometimes a bit too much so, then realise we weren’t really free to do as we pleased, we weren’t in the famous court of King Mokoko, where the Batékés partied non-stop, while their sovereign snored, by day and by night, lulled by his storytellers’ songs.

Papa Moupelo watched us out of the corner of his eye and intervened if we looked like overstepping the mark. There was no question, for example, of going up to the girls in the hope of grabbing them by the waist and fastening ourselves to them like leeches. He was equally intransigent with the more lecherous pupils, such as Boumba Moutaka, Nguékena Sonivé and Diambou Dibouri, who used bits of broken mirror to peep at the colour of the girls’ underwear, then teased them about it later.

Papa Moupelo quickly called them to order:

‘Now then children, I’ll have none of that here! Sin often walks in with a smile!’

For a couple of hours or more we’d forget who or where we were. Our shouts of laughter rang out beyond the confines of the orphanage as Papa Moupelo entered one of his trances and imitated the frog leap from the famous dance of the Pygmies of Zaire, his own country! A dance quite unlike that of the northerners of our country, far more technical, requiring the suppleness of a cat, the speed of a squirrel being chased by a boa and above all a remarkable wriggle of the hips, at the end of which the priest would lower himself onto his haunches and do a little kangaroo hop, landing on his feet a metre away. Again, still shaking his hips, he’d raise his arms high in the air and give a great shout from the back of his throat, coming at last to a standstill, fixing us with his big red eyes. This was the moment when we’d give him a cheer, after which he’d adopt a less comical posture and we’d move to take our places on our bamboo seats that creaked at the slightest movement. We were all in seventh heaven, high on the mood of the moment, and we’d talk about it the next day in the canteen, or the library, the play area, the yard, especially in the dormitory, where we’d go over the moves until the six corridor wardens, jealous of this man of God’s influence over us, would brandish their sticks and send us diving back under our sheets. We called them the ‘corridor wardens’ because that was where where they hid out, spying on us, reporting back upstairs to the Director, Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako. The most determined wardens were Mpassi, Moutété and Mvoumbi, who, as relatives of the Director on his mother’s side, behaved like deputy directors, till Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako told them to knock it off. The three others, Mfoumbou Ngoulmoumako, Bissoulou Ngoulmoumako and Dongo-Dongo Ngoulmoumako, who were proud of their family name, inherited from the paternal line of the Director, looked down their noses at everyone, even though they’d only got the job because of their uncle and had zero experience in educating children, who they treated no better than cattle.

As soon as they’d finished bullying us and left, one of us would say a funny word in Lingala, Papa Moupelo’s language, and we’d leave our beds, form a little circle, and start our steps again, the steps that later would haunt even our dreams. Sometimes you’d hear the children humming the old-time tunes in their fretful sleep, singing in the old-fashioned language of this good-hearted man, who sold us Hope at the lowest possible price, so convinced was he that his mission in life was to save souls, every single soul in our institution…

Papa Moupelo had never admitted it was he who gave me the most kilometrically extended name in the entire orphanage of Loango, the entire town, in fact, and possibly the entire country. Maybe that was the way things were done back in Zaire, where they had names as long as they were unpronounceable, starting with the name of their own President, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, which meant ‘the warrior who goes unstoppably from one victory to the next’.

Whenever I complained that so-and-so had not pronounced my name right, or had shortened it, Papa Moupelo would tell me to keep calm and say a prayer at bedtime, to thank the Almighty, because according to him, a person’s destiny lay hidden in their name. To convince me, he took his own name as an example: ‘Moupelo’ meant ‘priest’ in Kikongo, and it was no coincidence that he’d become a messenger of God like his father before him. He loved the way my detractors called me simply ‘Moses’ or ‘Mose’. Moses, he’d argue, to flatter me, wasn’t just any old prophet. All the prophets, including the ones in the Old Testament that wore beards even longer and more grizzled than his, were midgets next to him: he was the one God chose to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. Aged forty, revolted by the wretched daily existence of his people, Moses killed an Egyptian overseer who was punishing an Israelite. Afterwards he had to flee into the desert, where he became a shepherd and married one of the daughters of the priest who had taken him into his home. When he was eighty, and tending his father-in-law’s sheep, God called to him from inside a bush and charged him with setting the Hebrew people free from slavery in Egypt. Did any of those who teased me have such a significant name?

Even as I write these lines, imprisoned in this place that was once so familiar, but is now so very different, I can almost hear the voice of Papa Moupelo, taking me aside to recite the biblical passage in which God appeared before Moses:

‘The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed…’

I can picture him now, peering up at the sky, then looking at me for several seconds before saying, in his most serious voice:

‘Oh yes, little Moses, the Angel of the Lord will appear to you too. Don’t expect him to burst out of a bush, though, that’s already been done, and God hates to do the same thing twice. He’ll come out of your own body, and you may not recognise him, his appearance will revolt, even disgust you. But he’ll have come to save you…’

During his next few visits, I stuck like a limpet to Papa Moupelo, so that some of the others started accusing me of brown-nosing, and being his midday shadow. All I did was beg him to let me sit at the back, in the very last row, remembering how he had enthralled us in previous lessons with the parable of the vine workers who turned up at the eleventh hour and got paid even before the other workers, who’d turned up at the third and the sixth hours.

‘In the kingdom of heaven,’ he had concluded, ‘as for the workers in the vineyard, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. But don’t panic: God doesn’t forget little children, even if they aren’t sitting at the back.’

No, I wasn’t panicking; I’d been a bit worried, though, since I’d started expecting God to help me, especially when the Director beat us and no sign came from the Almighty to reassure us. I felt the Director was like the bad pharaoh in the Bible, who tormented the Hebrew people, and I wondered why God was taking so long to unleash terrible plagues on the orphanage, like the ones that forced the Egyptian monarch to acknowledge His superiority and His power. Or had God broken His word and chosen another Moses, a darker, handsomer, taller, cleverer, freer Moses, living in a different country where they prayed and danced and sang more than they did in ours?

My inner torment may have looked ridiculous and pathetic from the outside, but it encouraged me to read the scriptures very closely and find weaknesses which I could use to stand up to the priest, despite my great love for him. He’d be pleased to see me use the holy book to make sense of the world, even if my quest focussed mainly on my own identity and the meaning of my name. I couldn’t use the book to catch Papa Moupelo out, he knew it like the back of his hand. And after all, I owed him respect: he was our moral compass, the spiritual father of all us children who’d never known their biological father, and whose only example of paternal authority came at best from the priest, and at worst from the Director of the orphanage. Papa Moupelo stood for tolerance, absolution and redemption, while Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako was the embodiment of malice and disrespect. The affection we showed our priest came from the bottom of our hearts, and we looked for nothing in return except the kindness in his eyes, which gave us strength, while the Director’s sullen mien served only to remind us we were children to whom life’s normal course had sadly been denied. The way that people looked at us said it all: to the Pontenegrins, ‘orphanage’ meant ‘prison’, and you went to prison for committing a serious offence, or maybe even a crime…

Of all the questions I asked myself during the period of inner turmoil that signalled the start of my adolescent crisis, one in particular haunted me day and night, and stopped me from swallowing my saliva, like having a fishbone in my throat: was I the only Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko in the world? I felt positively about the length of my name and enjoyed the feeling of being a rather singular child. But Papa Moupelo also visited other orphanages in Pointe-Noire, in Tchimbamba and Ngoyo. I retained niggling doubts about the originality of my name. I was beset with jealousy even at the idea that I might be only one of hundreds, or even thousands of Moses, all of them better loved by Papa Moupelo than me.

Only he could reassure me. And since it was only the middle of the week, I was impatient for Saturday, so I could put the question directly to him. I did not, alas, foresee that an unexpected event would throw our lives in this forgotten corner of the Kouilou region into disarray. I could have foreseen anything short of an upset on that scale.

Curiously, and it was this that alarmed me most, Papa Moupelo didn’t see it coming either, even though he was so very close to heaven…

BONAVENTURE KOKOLO , aged thirteen at the time like me, was beside himself:

‘It’s serious, Moses! Really serious!’

Irritated by him using my first name, Moses, I gave him a bit of a shove with my elbow and moved away a little. But I was forgetting that he was possessed of the obstinacy of a bloodsucking swamp leech:

‘Where are you going, Moses? I’m telling you, this is serious!’

‘You always say that – I know you!’

‘Just look at the warders’ faces – there’s something they’re not telling us! You might as well start weeping right now, I’m sure Papa Moupelo is dead!’

As a sob escaped him, I waved my fist at his face:

‘If you cry I’ll put this in your face, and you’ll wake up over there, in the infirmary!’

‘But he’s dead! That’s the end of catechism!’

‘Right, so how did he die?’

‘By accident! You’ll see, they’ll say he’s gone to