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Tribaliks (1987)Henry Lopes
The title, a concocted expression, indicates the author’s disenchanted look at the ways in which tribal affiliations are allowed to resurface and to dominate and skew Congolese society, after the achievement of political “independence”. Not that tribalist divisions feature in every one of the short stories collected under this title, for Lopes’s grim yet compassionate understanding of the pressures to which members of this society are subjected takes in a wide spectrum of issues, notably gender oppression, power corruption, political incompetence and the continuing domination of French culture long after the decolonisation of the Congo. Lopes is a highly sophisticated writer who, after studying in France, returned to teach and then held leading political positions in his own country. He later became Assistant Director-General of UNESCO. In these stories, however, he writes with deliberate simplicity. He is perhaps reaching towards the widest possible readership by doing so, but as a writing strategy the apparent straightforwardness of his style gives the eight tales collected here tremendous impact. The story sarcastically titled “The Esteemed Representative” is a case in point. It opens on a very public occasion, citing a speech given by the protagonist, Ngouakou-Ngouakou (to whom the title refers). The theme of the speech he gives at an international conference sponsored by the National Federation of Radical Women is Congolese Women’s rights and equal pay for equal work. The satirical quality of the portrayal emerges as soon as one notices that the oppression of these women is ascribed solely to French colonisation, and that the equal pay called for is demanded only for “waitresses in bars and night clubs” — now to be “reserved for Africans” (32), and forbidding European women employment in these menial positions. It is, in other words, more accurately to be described as a campaign for the more efficient exploitation of AFRICAN women! But the satire intensifies when Ngouakou-Ngouakou (hereafter N-N.) is given a standing ovation for his supposed denunciation of “masculine tyranny” (33). A glimpse of the representative’s (N-N.’s) home life follows. He pampers and favours his youngest and only male child and insists that the daughter who is hard at work on a school paper serve him his whiskey, punishing her for having failed to replenish the supply. “Writing [a paper] won’t teach her how to please her husband,” he declares (34). N-N. is evidently a household tyrant — capricious, selfish, demanding, condescending and rude towards his wife and daughters. After his supper he goes off, predictably, to his young mistress, with whom he spends most of the night in a hotel room. When she informs him that she is expecting his child, he asks her: “What proof do you do you have that it’s mine?” (41). The story ends with one of his daughters hearing the radio report of her father’s declaration (at the aforementioned conference) that women “are not inferior beings but are men’s equals”. Many of the stories focus on the responsibilities of social and political leaders, and on their failures. If these tales are almost fable-like in the lucidity with which they convey moral insights and discern moral failures, they nevertheless clearly spring from a close knowledge of actual conditions, awareness of political pressures and recognition of temptations and difficulties. In other words, the stark lines of betrayal, failure or exploitation that most of the tales delineate nevertheless convey an awareness of complex and challenging conditions. There is a quality of acerbic compassion in the author’s vision: he is harsh, but he helps us see how difficult it is in the neo-colonial situation to retain one’s integrity. Indeed, several characters are shown paying the price for the adoption of critical or oppositional roles within their autocratically-ruled society. Particularly stark and harrowing is the final story, “The Conspiracy”. It is told from the perspective of an over-zealous state agent, a police officer convinced that a (patently inoffensive) medical doctor is an “agent from Moscow” (78). The hapless doctor is arrested and his refusal to divulge a (non-existent) role in a recent political conspiracy is interpreted (by the protagonist) as proof of how hard a nut the doctor is to crack. The police officer turns his most “efficient” torturers loose on the doctor, who in despair, and because of the pain of his battered body, commits suicide in his cell — just before the protagonist goes (reluctantly) to free the patently innocent man on orders from his (far more punctilious) superior officer. The one thing that is achieved by this dreadful eventuality is a loss of the protagonist’s cocksureness. Lopes is fond of giving a story a title that indicates a broad social trend, while telling a story which simultaneously brings that reality home to us (from “the statistics” to “the experience”) and makes it poignant and personal, hence giving it a much fuller significance. Such a story is the opening tale, “Exodus of the Skilled Workers”. It tells of three bosom friends, two young men and a young woman, who keep together through thick and thin — to such an extent that the love affair which blossoms between the one young man and Mbâ (the young woman) is more or less kept from the other friend, so as not to make him feel excluded. But Mbâ’s lover leaves for France. He at first writes regularly and then stops communicating. Although it is never explicitly stated, it is evident that the other young man also loves Mbâ, but cannot convey this to her, out of loyalty to their mutual friend. Yet when he eventually visits France and tracks down their errant friend, he finds that he has no intention of returning — his earnings are so much higher and his lifestyle so much more comfortable there. He has, moreover, married a Frenchwoman and established a family there. And this news must now be broken to Mbâ by the returning friend — “his face drawn as if announcing death” (8). A story in which tribalism plays a particularly prominent role is the tale of lost love titled “Oh, Apolline” — yet for three quarters of its length one has no sense of the power of that divisive influence. The protagonist, a studious young man who formerly aspired to the priesthood, is delighted and surprised that the glamorous Apolline should seek him out. She does refer to a former boyfriend with whom she has broken off relations because he turned “nasty” (19). Later in their intense and deeply committed relationship, however, Apolline withdraws from him without warning. Pressurised, she acknowledges that she is being forced to marry the boyfriend she rejected — because he’s of the same tribe, is wealthy (he is a diamond merchant) and would ruin her family financially if she were to reject his proposal. Though he is comforted by an older friend (a political associate) the end of the story (and its title) reflects the narrator’s inconsolable sense of loss. A slightly more “hopeful” story bears the unpromising title “Whiskey”, but demonstrates the sense of moral victory (most importantly, over himself) experienced by the protagonist when he at last decides to stick his neck out in risking the articulation of political criticism and in attempting to help mobilise others. Even as he is flung into the police van, “inside he felt light, free” and has a sense of regained innocence, “better than the whiskey” (77). “The Veteran” is also a tale that more or less inverts the expectations of its title, for here the Congolese war veteran turned ambassador (in Algeria) discovers that the young Algerian with whom he is having an affair is the daughter of an Algerian liberation war heroine — whom he had shot in his former role as officer in the French colonial army. The story called “The Advance” makes a shift into the world of women’s work and women’s hardships. The chief protagonist is a childminder to a Frenchwoman. She looks diligently after this woman’s pampered child for an inadequate salary, while her own little son’s condition rapidly deteriorates. From her employer she meets the predictable resentful response when she asks for a loan to buy medicine for her sick child — only to find on coming home that he, too (like her two previous children), has died of neglect. Our discussion of these stories can conclude with the presentation of “The Honourable Gentleman”, a tale as urbane as its title in its presentation of the title character. This is no mere corrupt politician, but a Congolese provincial governor who is so concerned not to offend foreign commercial (tellingly, copper mining) interests that he allows a cabinet minister’s direct order (to investigate this company’s activities in the Congo) to be countervailed. This evidently humiliates and deeply disappoints the protagonist, who was sent to conduct the investigation, and who had had the director of the company summoned to meet the Governor (with himself) to discuss the issue. So disappointed is he by the Governor’s placatory attitude that he wonders whether he will ever bother to write his report. He knows he is “up against an entire social structure that must be knocked down” — if that happens, he says, “I don’t know what will become of a gentleman as charming and honourable as Ndoté” (55). On this ironic note the tale concludes. The French original of this noteworthy short story collection was first published in 1971. That their author was so prescient all of thirty years ago is perhaps as remarkable as it is saddening to think of how much worse Congolese society has fared since then. |
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The Congolese writer Henri Lopes is best known for his novel in French, Le Pleurer-Rire, which has been translated into English as The Laughing Cry (Readers International, 1987) — a title perhaps better rendered in English as “The weeping laugh”, indicative of Lopes’s sardonic perspective on the neocolonial regime in countries like the Congo. In this piece, however, Lopes’s earliest literary publication, TRIBALIQUES in French, will be discussed.