The Lights of Pointe-Noire (13 page)

We exit in single file, the pastor at the front, and walk round to the back of the building. We find ourselves outside a plot where a man with a shaven head in a pair of bermuda shorts and vest is sitting in front of one of three doors in a long building up for rental.

The man notices us, opens his eyes wide in amazement when he sees me, and gives a great yell, leaving the pastor stunned:

‘It's the American! I can't believe my eyes! You came to see old Koblavi!'

The pastor murmurs something in his ear, but Koblavi pushes him aside:

‘No! No! No! He belongs here! He can photograph whatever he likes! You know the little street opposite the cinema, rue du Louboulou, that was his uncle who made that!'

The pastor stands with his arms drooping, his head on one side, and offers his apologies. Retracing his steps, he stops three times, to bow. Koblavi points to a chair at his side:

‘Please, take a seat, little brother! Gilbert and madame, you go and film the cinema while I have a chat with my American…'

As soon as Gilbert and my girlfriend are gone, Koblavi assumes a pained expression:

‘I've seen you so often on the TV, talking about your books. I'm sorry, I'm ashamed, I've never read them… One day in an interview you even mentioned the Cinema Rex, I can't tell you what pleasure it gave me to hear that!…'

He looks up at the sky:

‘The Lord has forsaken this town, and in doing so He also turned His back on the Cinema Rex… Sometimes I go into the auditorium, I close all the doors, and I sit down in the middle, just to remember the old days, when it was packed full. I can hear the noise, the shouting, I can still see the dreams of those young people floating up above their heads, forgetting their everyday troubles, just for an hour or two…'

‘There are video recorders now, DVD machines, they can still have their dreams and…'

‘That's all garbage, Mr American! How could that replace the atmosphere we had at the Cinema Rex? All these new things, it's the age of individualism! We've forgotten the true meaning of cinema, little brother! A film you watch at home doesn't affect you like a film you watch with a crowd at the cinema!'

He brushes away a couple of flies buzzing round his head and continues:

‘You've come from America, let me recommend you watch
Becky Sharp
! Now that's real cinema, you take my word! And it's not just because I like Miriam Hopkins, though I have seen her before, in
Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde
! She's quite marvellous!'

He stands up, goes into the house, comes back a minute later with a photo of the American actress and hands it to me:

‘Look at her, wasn't she beautiful? I insisted we show every film she'd ever been in at the Cinema Rex! Of course, people would rather watch shoot-outs and native Indians and Louis Funès fooling about, and all those idiot actors in the martial arts films. What can you learn from a martial arts film?'

He practically snatches the photo out of my hands and blows on it.

‘I'm not having any dust on my idol's picture!'

He goes to put the photo back inside, and comes back with a bottle of beer and two glasses. I tell him about America, since he asks me. His eyes shine, he's almost like a child who's thrilled with a present:

‘So you've actually seen Miriam Hopkins' two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?'

‘No, sadly, I haven't… I don't know that actress. I wasn't paying attention when I saw
Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde
…'

His face stiffens, as though I had just committed sacrilege. With eyes half closed, he murmurs:

‘That's my dream, to go to Hollywood. I can't believe you live in the city of cinema and you've never found time to go and see Miriam Hopkins' two stars…'

Resigned now, he launches into a diatribe against the political authorities who failed to help him, obliging him to rent the Cinema Rex out to a religious congregation:

‘Those politicians, they killed the cinema! And it's the same everywhere, little brother! Even in Brazzaville there are no cinemas left! How will young people ever get to know Miriam Hopkins? The cinema was something magical; wherever there was a picture house, the neighbourhood took its name. We've got the Rex district and the Duo district and the Roy district, but those politicians understand nothing about that kind of impact!'

Out of pure modesty, Koblavi avoids mentioning his historic and prestigious family name, the name of his Ghanaian grandparents, who, in the late 1940s, dominated the fishing trade in Pointe-Noire. But the thing their descendant is apparently most proud of is the cinema, whose demise he continues to bewail. He's almost apologising for having done a deal with these servants of God who sell tickets to paradise to their flock, unaware that many children in Pointe-Noire will never taste the atmosphere of those darkened movie houses, the succession of adverts and the opening credits of the film, followed by the applause of the audience. Noticing the little chain with a cross on around his neck, I say nothing critical about religion. But he touches it and tells me:

‘Ah no, I don't belong to the New Jerusalem, I'm still a Catholic in the strict sense of the word…'

And finally he talks about my mother, whom he knew, about Uncle Albert, who was a friend of his father. As though speaking his last words, he murmurs very softly:

‘I know my origins are Ghanaian, by my parents, but I've always felt Pontenegrin. D'you hear my accent? No one's more Pontenegrin than I am in this town! I've never been made to feel an outsider here, by anyone. This is where I live, this is where they'll bury me…'

Gilbert and my girlfriend are back now. They've spent over half an hour taking photos of the old Cinema Rex, and as they show them to Koblavi his features, sunk in nostalgia till now, light up with a smile. He even allows himself to be photographed, with his broadest smile:

‘You should never look sad in a photograph, you don't know who might look at it in ten years' time, or twenty, or thirty, or forty, or fifty!'

He comes with us as far as the exit to his plot, and watches as we walk away.

We pass by the cinema again, where the two worshippers are still standing guard like a pair of Cerberuses. This time they don't dare look us straight in the eye. There's even a shadow behind them: the pastor, who watches us closely as we cross the Avenue of Independence…

Wild nights

M
ost districts in Pointe-Noire still have the same names, based on the activity of the inhabitants, or on their ethnic or geographical origins. The ‘popo' villages, for example, all along the Côte Sauvage, were created by fishermen from Ghana and Togo, and by the popos from Benin, who came here in the late 1940s, like the Koblavi family. They had a monopoly on traditional sea fishing, using a technique, and material – the famous fourteen-metre popo pirogue, or dugout canoe – which the natives, coastal people of Vili origin, in their comparatively basic boats, which measured no more than five or six metres, could not compete with. The Senegalese, Malians and Mauritians, all of them great traders, made up the ‘Grand Marché' district, where they put up the only mosque in a city which is otherwise mostly Christian or even animist. The boutiques selling imported pagnes, and the general food and white goods shops, were all kept by West Africans from these countries, who, as their own retirement drew near, passed the business on to their own compatriots, so that the Pontenegrins began to think they never died, especially as many of them shared the same surnames.

Was it a herding instinct which led those originating from certain departments in the west of the coutnry – the Niari and the Lékoumou – to come together again in districts such as ‘Cocotier-du-Niari' and ‘Pont-de-la-Lékoumou', while those from the south of the country, notably from the Bouenza department, and above all from the Mouyondzi region, settled in ‘Pont de la Bouenza' district and ‘Mouyondzi'? In this way the economic capital was in line with the rest of the country, where ethnicity was more important than nationhood. How could it have been otherwise when even at the pinnacle of the state, power was distributed according to this pattern? The southerners had felt frustrated for decades by the northerners' stranglehold on political power. Of course, from time to time the latter shuffled the pack and assigned the portfolio for hydrocarbons to a minister from the south. The population didn't fall for it: the minister was merely a stooge, whose only legitimacy came from the fact that he was from the southern region where petrol was to be found. This did not suffice to quash the southerners' dissatisfaction. They were supposed to feel they had cornered the main source of wealth in the Congo, whereas in fact everyone knew the minister had no control whatsoever over the contracts, which all went to northerners.

Then there is the popular neighbourhood which the Pontenegrins all call ‘the Three-Hundreds', a name to be found on none of the various street signs. Is this a kind of delicacy or an attempt to wipe out the true story behind it? Tell someone you're from the Three Hundreds and their jaw will drop. You might as well live in a different town altogether, or on the raft of the Medusa. To avoid saying it, some people instead call it ‘the Rex district', the name by which it is more officially known, thanks to the renown of the former cinema of the Koblavi family, but which hardly reflects the little kingdom of prostitution dominated by itinerant girls from the former Zaire in the 1970s. These working girls were attracted by the superiority of the CFA franc at that time to the ‘zaire', which was created on a whim as part of the policy of authenticity instigated by Mobutu Sese Seko. Sese Seko forbade his people to take Western names, and outlawed suits and ties in favour of the ‘
abacost
'.
*

The girls weren't the only ones who crossed the River Congo, boarding the train at the station in Brazzaville to come and conquer Pointe-Noire, where the harbour activity guaranteed a stable economy. Builders, carpenters and rickshaw drivers arrived too, from ‘the opposite country'. Since we speak the same language and have the same culture, the migrants felt quite at home, they melted into the crowd and would have gone unnoticed, had they not been prepared to do jobs which the Congolese turned down on the grounds that they were ‘intellectuals'. The Zaireans who pitched up with us lived by the rule of ‘article 15': ‘Live as best you can' – a phrase dreamed up by a populace abandoned to their fate by the fourteen articles of the Zairean Constitution, cleverly stitched together by the kleptocrat Mobutu to keep himself in power for life.

The Three-Hundreds, situated behind the Rex cinema, was the area where the girls peddled their charms. This is still the case today. Housing made of wood or metal sheeting often stands side by side with unfinished – but inhabited – brick buildings. Should you lose your way in the winding streets of this sector, you will find yourself walking on condoms, which litter the ground. It's as though the girls desert their ill-lit alcoves after dark to come and work ‘outside', as though, when it comes down to it, all cats really are grey.

The name ‘Three-Hundreds', according to some, refers to the war waged between the Zairean prostitutes and those from our town, who, way back when, had fixed the price of a trick at five hundred CFA cents. The Zaireans changed the rules by lowering the price to three hundred. A rumour went round the town that the Zaireans were more ‘competent' and knew how to keep hold of their clientele, so much so that many men with wives and children were handing them most if not all of their salary. People had lost count of how many wives had come looking for their husbands in the Three-Hundreds. But how could you hope to find your man in this web of backstreets, passages, culde-sacs and dark dives, joining one plot to the next, one house to another, when he was probably fast asleep in the bed of some Amazon from the ‘Other Congo'?

The battles between the sex professionals sometimes spilled out into the Avenue of Independence, where the two camps attacked each other with hammers, sometimes even throwing caustic soda in their adversaries' faces, a final solution designed to send them into retirement. We passed prostitutes with corroded faces who, even so, still continued to work in dark corners, where their features would be mostly hidden from the clients.

The public authorities became increasingly concerned by this situation. Probably because of certain practices said to be used by the Zaireans, particularly the use of gris-gris and poison with delayed effect, with the intention of wiping out their colleagues. And when sorcery and poisoning didn't work, they would engage crooks – usually compatriots – who were paid in kind to assassinate the Pontenegrin girls, and dump their bodies in the River Tchinouka, or on the Côte Sauvage. The ineffectiveness of the police, in addition to the prevailing mood of fear, led the Pontenegrins to abandon the territory in the short term, and move back towards the town centre. The result was a considerable loss of income, as the town centre, though busy during office hours, emptied after nightfall. They had no choice but to fall in line with the prices of the Zaireans, or shut up shop. The tariff of three hundred CFA francs eventually became the norm, and the two camps buried the hatchet. The only difference between them now was technique, and woe betide anyone who failed to take note of the words declaimed by Brassens in ‘
Le mauvais sujet repenti
':

There's an art to how you walk the streets,

and how to shake your arse…

Depending who you're out to catch,

The chemist, the sexton, the clerk…

When you walk alone in the Three-Hundreds district, the women watch you from their booths. They sense, just by looking, what brings the ‘passer-by' to their fiefdom. There are men who hesitate, pretend they've lost their way, retrace their footsteps and then do exactly the same all over again a quarter of an hour later. The bravest walk confidently, putting up a smokescreen by whistling a happy tune; they never look behind them, and slip, swift as predators, into one of the lots, emerging only half an hour later.

Venturing this far myself, I don't know how the watching women will classify me. The fact remains that as I leave the Avenue of Independence, taking the first alleyway down to the heart of the district, I feel a presence behind me. I go past Koblavi's place, then turn around: a woman with legs like a wading bird's and brightly painted red lips comes towards me and shouts:

‘What you looking for here? You a journalist?'

I start to walk faster, and try to reach the rue de Loukenéné, on my right. But the woman knows where all the little side roads in her neighbourhood come out, she cuts through the rue Moe-N'Dendé, and I find her standing in front of me again, determined, this time, with a piece of paper in her hands.

‘I want you to read that, it's my story, I told it to another journalist, like you…'

Her prominent eyes have the look of someone who hasn't spoken in a long while, on whom life has weighed heavy for many years. She points to a plot a few steps away. Without hesitating, I go in with her, and in the yard find other women too, who all look me carefully up and down.

‘I was the one who got them all to leave our native village and come here to work…'

Then, turning to the silent shadows, she exclaims:

‘Don't be scared, girls, this gentleman is a journalist who works with the whites! I saw him yesterday near the Cinema Rex, and I promised myself I wouldn't let him leave without hearing my story. Then at last the whole world will know about our troubles. There's only one thing we want in this district: no sex without condoms!…'

The other girls all chorus:

‘No sex without condoms!!!'

And in the lots behind us, like a rallying call they were waiting to hear, voices cry:

‘No sex without condoms! No sex without condoms! No sex without condoms!'

I unfold the piece of paper the woman has handed me. It's a press release from the Syfia agency, dated 19 September 2009, entitled:
Congo-Brazzaville: Prostitutes care more for their lives than for money
. To this woman, this piece of paper is more important than her own birth certificate.

‘Read that, monsieur, that's my story, and the story of all the women you see here!'

I smooth out the piece of paper and start to read out loud, with the woman nodding at every word:

Sex without condoms is a thing of the past. The sex workers of Pointe-Noire, Congo, now understand the dangers of their profession, in particular Aids, thanks to an organisation set up by a group of the women involved. These days they are intransigent with their clients, however much money he offers. This woman, who has asked not to be named, lives at present in the Rex district, in Pointe-Noire. A professional sex worker since 1990, she sees her clients at home, or rents a room. Her children live elsewhere, since ‘they must be spared this ugly spectacle', she says. At 500 CFA francs (0.76 euros) a time, she earns over 80,000 CFA francs (122 euros) a month, enough to keep her family. She speaks about her profession without shame: ‘Some of my family know. Life is a choice. You just have to make sure you stay safe when you work.'

While I'm noticing that the price of a trick is now fixed at five hundred CFA francs and that the district hasn't changed its name to reflect this, the prostitute points out:

‘The woman who won't be named in this article is me. I'm not going to tell you my name either, we know what you journalists are like! You come here to get us to talk, and then when you go back to Europe what people read is the opposite of what we've told you, and of what you've seen! If you want to give me a name when you write the article, call me Madame Claude…'

‘But madame, I'm not a journalist…'

‘Yes you are! Why not be proud of your profession? Is it worse to be a journalist than a tart like me?'

‘I'm actually here to retrace my childhood…'

‘Oh, we've heard that before! That's like the clients who come by and make out they've got the wrong street and are only looking for directions! Bullshit! They want to get laid, but their conscience won't let them be! I know you're a journalist, I saw you with my own eyes yesterday, outside the Cinema Rex, with a man and a white woman, then you went and had a chat with old Koblavi in his lot, am I right?'

‘Yes, but I…'

‘Don't interrupt me, if you please! Did old Koblavi say bad things about us here in the Three-Hundreds?'

‘No, not at all…'

Somewhat reassured, she hands me a stool and sits down herself on the ground. With a nod of the head she tells the other women to go, and one by one they leave the lot, without saying a word.

‘I've nothing to offer you, Mr Journalist… Switch on the recorder on your phone, I'm going to tell you my story and please don't interrupt…'

I take my phone out of my pocket. She clears her throat, wipes the sweat running down from her brow with the back of her hand and folds her arms:

‘I'm no little girl, Mr Journalist. I'm a woman who's lived, and let me tell you, this body you see here has been touched by filthy rickshaw pushers as well as the most high-up people in my old country, and yours too. This business is my life, it's what I know how to do best, and it's what has brought me here to this country. The day I can't do it any more, I'll pack my bags and return to my native land, way back to my village of Bandundu, where I'll work the soil. I told the other journalists I had children. It's not true, I made lots of things up, to shock people…

‘I never had children, my seven brothers all left Kinshasa. Three of them live in Brussels in the Matongé district, and are married to white women; two of them manage to make a living in Angola, in the food trade, and the last two wander about the metro in Paris busking illegally, or so I've gathered from people back here on holiday. It's as if there's a wall between us, in their eyes I'm just the disgrace of the family. I never hear from any of them, perhaps because they resent me for following in the footsteps of our mother. Was it really her fault? I'm not judging, only God can judge our acts. Does anyone ever stop and wonder how a woman comes to sell her own body? Do they think it's an activity you choose like any other, like becoming a hairdresser, or a carpenter, or a journalist, like you? I studied at school, I even got my baccalaureate, but what use was it to me? A woman isn't born a tart, she becomes one. There comes a day, you look in the mirror, there's nowhere to go, you've got your back to the wall. So you cross the line, you offer your body to a passer-by, with an empty smile, because you have to seduce the client, like in any business. You tell yourself, you may debase your body tonight, but tomorrow you'll wash it clean, and restore its purity. So you wash it once, you wash it twice, but your scruples wear thin through habit, then you stop washing altogether, you accept your acts as your own, because no water on earth, including the Ganges, ever gave anyone back their purity. If it could, surely with all the streams and rivers and seas and oceans there are on earth, all men and women here below would be pure and innocent. I simply followed the destiny God saw fit to give me, even if all anyone sees in me is the pimp who controls the girls she's brought over from her own country. I'm the woman they throw the stone at, it's even written down in black and white in the Bible, I believe, but didn't Jesus protect tarts? I make a few of the men round here happy, at least that's something. My father had abandoned us when I was a child, and my mother brought me up to this trade, which she plied herself till the end of her days. Thanks to that we had a roof over our heads, my seven brothers and I. While the girls in our village were playing with their dolls, my mother was already explaining to me how to hold on to a man: cooking and sex, she said, the rest is an illusion, including beauty and diplomas. A beautiful woman with a diploma who can't cook and yawns in bed will soon find herself supplanted by an ugly ignoramus who can make a good dish of saka-saka and give her lover a great time in bed. I want you to put that in the article you write about us. I've never said any of what I've said to you to any journalist, but something makes me think you're different, you won't betray us, or old Koblavi wouldn't have invited you into his lot, I know him. But don't forget, call me Madame Claude… now, switch off your mobile, that's the end!'