A Belgian planter in flight from his past finds that he must confront it at
the onset of Congolese independence .
I walked with the tata for almost an hour. Finally we
came upon something that looked more like an African village than plantation buildings.
There was a cleared area. Huts stood at the edge of this, mud-walled and thatched with
palm fronds. Outside one of these a bare-breasted woman was pounding manioc tubers in a
mortar, singing to herself and wearing a light-skinned baby tied to her back. She did not
hear us approach.
Other African women were sleeping on mats in the shade with
their children nearby. Some were as dark as black coffee; others had the color of cafe au
lait. When the woman at the mortar saw me, she screamed with fright, threw down her pestle
and ran off into the bush. The other women woke terrified and ran after her. It seemed
unlikely that white men visited Lenoir very often.
The tata showed me a sturdy structure, built with home-made
bricks and covered with a corrugated iron roof. Lenoir apparently used it as a storehouse.
Across from it stood a second building, properly roofed but less well constructed:
Lenoir's house. There were no windows, nor even a door. Most of the furniture stood under
the roof, but in the open air. There was one lounge chair, a plain table with a stool
beneath it, a rude armoire he'd obviously made himself, a kerosene lamp and a large, heavy
footlocker with a combination lock. Inside a brick-walled cubicle he had a hard-looking
bed with patched mosquito netting over it. The place had only one embellishment: an old
photograph, framed and set on the footlocker. . . It showed a young woman, rather pretty,
but sedate and shy. She had probably doubled her age since the photograph was taken. I
kept wondering who she was: a sister, a dead fiancée, someone else's wife? Who meant so
much to Lenoir that after all his years in the Congo he still displayed her photograph? |