The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
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ORLEANNA PRICE
What is the conqueror’s wife, if not a conquest herself? You’ll say I walked across Africa with my wrists
unshackled, and now I am one more soul walking free in a white skin, wearing some thread of the stolen goods:
cotton or diamonds, freedom at the very least, prosperity. Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and
some of us don’t, but we wear it all the same. There’s only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live
with it?
I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience
clean as snow. It’s easy to point at other men, conveniently dead, starting with the ones who first scooped up
mud from the riverbanks to catch the scent of a source. Why, Dr. Livingstone, I presume, wasn’t he the rascal!
He and all the profiteers who’ve since walked out on Africa as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked
body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb.
I would be no different than the next one, if I hadn’t paid my own little part in blood. In the midst of all those
steaming nights and days darkly colored, smelling of earth, I believe there lay some marrow of honest instruction.
Sometimes I can nearly say what it was. If I could, I would fling it at others, I’m afraid, at risk to their ease. I’d slide
this awful story off my shoulders, flatten it, sketch out our crimes like a failed battle plan and shake it in the faces
of my neighbors.
We aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth. And so it came to
pass that we stepped down there on a place we believed unformed, where only darkness moved on the face of
the waters. What else could we have thought? Only that it began and ended with us. We can only speak of the
things we carried with us, and the things we took away.
RUTH MAY PRICE
God says that the Africans are the Tribes of Ham. Ham was the worst one of Noah’s three boys: Shem, Ham, and
Japheth. Everybody comes down on their family tree from just those three, because God made a big flood and
drowneded out the sinners. But Shem, Ham, and Japheth got on the boat so they were A-okay.
Ham was the youngest one. After they all got off the ark and let the animals go is when it happened. Ham found
his father Noah laying around pig-naked drunk one day and he thought that was funny as all get-out. The other
two brothers covered Noah with a blanket, but Ham busted his britches laughing. When Noah woke up he got to
hear the whole story from the tattletale brothers. So Noah cursed all Ham’s children to be slaves for ever and
ever. That’s how come them all turn out dark.
ADAH PRICE
Speaking- along with the rest of life’s acrobatics- can be seen in a certain light as a distraction.
***
Here, bodily damage is more or less considered to be a by-product of living, not a disgrace. In the way of the
body and other people’s judgment I enjoy a benign approval in Kilanga that I have never, ever known in
Bethlehem, Georgia.
ORLEANNA PRICE
I was just one of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer
another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the
earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.
***
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
LEAH PRICE
Our family always seems to know too much, and at the same time not enough.
***
Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in
their eyes. Then you’ll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything,
shifting easily off to the side as if they’ve already seen most of what there is. Married eyes.
***
The game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson.
***
It struck me what a wide world of difference there was between our sort of games—“Mother May I?,” “Hide and
Seek”—and his: “Find Food,” “Recognize Poisonwood,” “Build a House.” And here he was a boy no older than
eight or nine. He had a younger sister who carried the family’s baby everywhere she went and hacked weeds with
her mother in the manioc field. I could see that the whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing
guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the
front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress. For the first time ever I felt a stirring of anger against my father for
making me a white preacher’s child from Georgia.
RUTH MAY PRICE
Without looking up from my arm, the doctor said, “We Belgians made slaves of them and cut off their hands in the
rubber plantations. Now you Americans have them for a slave wage in the mines and let them cut off their own
hands. And you, my friend, are stuck with the job of trying to make amends.”
“Up to me to make amends? I see no amends to make! The Belgians and American business brought civilization
to the Congo! American aid will be the Congo’s salvation. You’ll see!”
“Now, Reverend, this civilization the Belgians and Americans brought, what would that be?”
Why, the roads! Railroads…”
The doctor said, “Oh. I see.” Then he bent down in his big white coat and looked at my face. He asked me, “Did
your father bring you here by automobile? Or did you take the passenger railway?”
“I do not like to contradict, but in seventy-five years the only roads the Belgians ever built are the ones they use
to haul out diamonds and rubber. Between you and me, Reverend, I do not think the people here are looking for
your kind of salvation. I think they are looking for Patrice Lumumba, the new soul of Africa.”
He told my father there were only eight Congolese men in all this land who have been to college. Not one single
Congolese doctor or military officer, nothing, for the Belgians don’t allow them to get an education. He said,
“Reverend, if you are looking for Congo’s new leaders, do not bother looking in a school hall. You might better
look in prison—Mr. Lumumba landed himself there after the riots last week. By the time he is out I expect he will
have a larger following than Jesus.”
RACHEL PRICE
If these children haven’t lost interest by the time they are twelve or so, their education is over and out. It’s more
or less something like a law. Imagine: no school after age twelve. (I wouldn’t mind!) Mrs. Underdown told us the
Belgians have always had the policy of steering the Congolese boys away from higher education. Girls too, I
guess that goes without saying, because the girls around here, why, all they ever do is start having their own
babies when they’re about ten, and keep on having them till their boobies go flat as pancakes. Nobody has their
eye on that all-important diploma, let me tell you.
***
Anatole says that one-quarter of the world’s diamonds come from the diamond mines down south in Katanga.
ADAH PRICE
Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.
LEAH PRICE
I would say Nelson is gifted. But I’ll tell you what, gifted doesn’t count for a hill of beans in the Congo, where even
somebody as smart as Nelson isn’t allowed to go to college. According to the Underdowns, the Belgians are bent
on protecting against independent thought on native ground.
RACHEL PRICE
I sashayed in and picked up the newspaper after father had thrown it down on the floor. I read the page they’d
folded back: “Soviet Plan Moves Forward in Congo.” It said Khrushchev wanted to take over the Belgian Congo
and deprive the innocent savages of becoming a free society, as part of his plan for world domination. Jeez
Louise, if Khrushchev wants the Congo he can have it, if you ask me. The newspaper was from last December,
anyway. If his big plan was going so well, seems like we would have seen hides or tails of the Russians by now.
The article told how the Belgians are the unsung heroes, and when they come into a village they usually interrupt
the cannibal natives in the middle of human sacrifice. Huh. If they came to our village that day they would have
interrupted Mother in the middle of scrubbing the floor and about twelve little naked boys having a pee-pee
contest across the road. A few pages later there was a cartoon: big, fat, bald-headed Nikita Khrushchev in his
Communist uniform was holding hands and dancing with a skinny cannibal native with big lips and a bone in his
hair. Khrushchev was singing, “Bingo Bango Bongo, I don’t want to leave the Congo!”
The Underdowns went “Ahem, ahem” and crossed their legs and got around to what appeared to be their big
news: the Congo is going to have an election in May and declare their independence in June.
“Belgium won’t possibly accept the outcome of an election,” Father said. Oh, well, naturally he already knew all
about it. No matter what happens on God’s green earth, Father acts like it’s a movie he’s already seen and we’re
just dumb for not knowing how it comes out.
“What about the threat of a Soviet takeover?” Mother wanted to know.
“Frankly, I think Belgium is more concerned about the threat of an African takeover. The Russians are a
theoretical threat, whereas the Congolese are quite actual and seem to mean business. We say in French, if
your brother is going to steal your hen, save your honor and give it to him first.”
“They settled on a parliamentary system of government. Elections will be mid-May. Independence Day, June
thirtieth.
“Last year when De Gaulle gave independence to all the French colonies, the Belgians insisted that this had
nothing to do with us! No one even took the ferry across to Brazzaville to watch the ceremony. The Belgians
went on speaking of rule with a fatherly hand.”
“A fatherly hand, is that what you call it!” Mother shook her head from side to side. “Using these people like
slaves in your rubber plantations and your mines and I don’t know what all? We’ve heard what goes on. There’s
men right here in this village with tales to make your hair stand on end. One old fellow got his hand whacked off
up at Coquilhatville, and ran away while he was still spurting blood! Your King Baudouin is living off the fat of this
land, is what he’s doing, and leaving it up to penniless mission doctors and selfless men like my husband to take
care of their every simple need. Is that how a father rules? Hells bells! And he didn’t expect trouble?”
“And there won’t be any transition at all? No interim for- I don’t know- a provisional government-in-training? Just
wham, the Belgians are gone and the Congolese have to run everything on their own? Not a soul among these
people has even gone to college or traveled abroad to study government. And now you’re saying they’ll be left
overnight to run every single school, every service, every government office? And the army? What about the
army, Frank?”
Father said, “An election. Frank, I’m embarrasses for you. You’re quaking in your boots over a fairy tale. Why,
open your eyes, man. These people can’t even read a simple slogan: Vote for Me! Down with Shapoopie! An
election! Who out here would even know it happened?”
“Two hundred different languages,” he said, “spoken inside the borders of a so-called country invented by
Belgians in a parlor. You might as well put a fence around sheep, wolves, and chicken, and tell them to behave
like brethren. If these people are to be united at all, they will come together as God’s lambs in their simple love
for Christ. Nothing else will move them forward. Not politics, not a desire for freedom- they don’t have the
temperament or the intellect for such things. I know you’re trying to tell us what you’ve heard, but believe me,
Frank, I know what I see.”
“Nathan, the Minors have declined their contract, on our advice. There may not be a transition. It may be years
before this mission resumes.”
Father stared at the trees, giving no indication he’d heard his poor frightened wife, or any of this news. Father
would sooner watch us all perish one by one than listen to anybody but himself. Years before they send someone
else to this mission.
Mrs. Underdown pitched in helpfully, “We are making preparations to leave, ourselves. We have called the
Congo our home for many years, as you know, but the situation is very extreme. Nathan, perhaps you don’t
understand how serious this is. In all likelihood the embassy will evacuate from Leopoldville.”
“I believe I understand perfectly well,” Father said, turning around suddenly to face them. In his khakis and rolled-
up white shirt sleeves he looked like a working man, but he raised up one hand above his head the way he does
in church to pronounce the benediction. “Only God knows when our relief may arrive. But God does know. And
in His benevolent service we will stay.”
ADAH PRICE
Waiting for a child to die is not an occasion for writing a poem here in Kilanga: it isn’t a long enough wait. Every
day, nearly, one more funeral. It used to astonish us that everyone here has so many children: six or eight or
nine. But now, suddenly, it seems no one has enough.
According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in
the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point
in my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. At age five I
raised my good left hand in Sunday school and used a month’s ration of words to point out this problem to Miss
Betty Nagy. Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be
such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for
the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did not earn? Miss Betty sent me to the
corner for the rest of the hour to pray for my own soul while kneeling on grains of uncooked rice. When I finally
got up with sharp grains imbedded in my knees I found, to my surprise, that I no longer believed in God.
Dearly Beloved who resides in north Georgia does not seem to be paying much attention to the babies here in
Kilanga. They are all dying. Dying from kakakaka, the disease that turns the body to a small black pitcher,
pitches it over, and pours out all its liquid insides. The heavy rains brought the disease down the streams and
rivers. Everyone in this village knows more about hygiene than we do, we have lately discovered. While we were
washing and swimming in the stream any old place, there were rules, it turns out: wash clothes downstream,
where the forest creek runs into the crocodile river. Bathe in the middle. Draw water for drinking up above the
village. In Kilanga these are matters of religious observance, they are baptism and communion. Even defecation
is ruled by the African gods, as you are only permitted to use bushes far away from the drinking water. Our
latrine was probably neutral territory, but on the points of bathing and washing we were unenlightened for the
longest time. We have offended all the oldest divinities, in every thinkable way. I wonder what new, disgusting
sins we commit each day, holding our heads high in sacred ignorance while our neighbors gasp, hand to mouth.
***
The story of Congo they are telling now in America is a tale of cannibals. I know about this kind of story- the
lonely look down upon the hungry; the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged.
Those of doubtful righteousness speak of cannibals, the unquestionably vile, the sinners and the damned. It
makes everyone feel much better. So, Khrushchev is said to be here dancing with the man-eating natives,
teaching them to hate the Americans and the Belgians. It must be true, for how else would the poor Congolese
know how to hate the Americans and the Belgians?
LEAH PRICE
“We have known les maisons magnifiques for the whites in the cities, and the falling-down houses for the
Negroes.” Oh, I understood that all right. He was right, I’d seen it myself when we went to the Underdowns’.
Leopoldville is a nice little town of dandy houses with porches and flowery yards on nice paved streets for the
whites, and surrounding it, for miles and miles, nothing but dusty run-down shacks for the Congolese. They make
their homes out sticks or tin or anything in the world they can find. Father said that is the Belgians’ doing and
Americans would never stand for this kind of unequal treatment. He says after Independence the Americans will
send foreign aid to help them make better houses.
ORLEANNA PRICE
Unto the woman God said: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, in sorrow thou shalt bring forth
children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
My mother died when I was quite young, and certainly a motherless girl will come up wanting in some respects, but
in my opinion she has a freedom unknown to other daughters. For every womanly fact of life she doesn’t get told,
a star of possibility still winks for her on the horizon.
In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had- a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination?
Really, they’d sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn’t occur to them to feel
sorry for themselves. Except when children died- then they wept and howled.
LEAH PRICE
Watching my father, I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in
the room.
***
For Father, the Kingdom of the Lord is an uncomplicated place, where tall, handsome boys fight on the side that
always wins. I suppose it resembles Killdeer, Mississippi, where Father grew up, and played the position of
quarterback in high school. In that kind of a place it is even all right for people to knock into each other hard
every once in a while, in a sportsmanlike way, leaving a few bruises in the service of the final score.
RACHEL PRICE
“Have you heard the songs they sing here in Kilanga?” he asked. “They’re very worshipful. It’s a grand way to
begin a church service, singing a Congolese hymn to the rainfall on the seed yams. It’s quite easy to move from
there to the parable of the mustard seed. Many parts of the Bible make good sense here, if only you change a
few words.” He laughed. “And a lot of whole chapters, sure, you just have to throw away.”
“Well, it’s every bit God’s word, isn’t it?” Leah said.
“God’s word, brought to you by a crew of romantic idealists in a harsh desert culture eons ago, followed by a
chain of translators two thousand years long.”
Leah stared at him.
“Darling, did you think God wrote it all down in the English of King James himself?”
“Och, I shouldn’t be messing about with your thinking this way, with your father out in the garden. But I’ll tell you a
secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that,
darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.”
LEAH PRICE
To the Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the
other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses. That means almost half the
people will be unhappy, and according to Anatole, in a village that’s left halfway unhappy you haven’t heard the
end of it. There is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line.
The way it seems to work here is that you need one hundred percent. It takes a good while to get there. They
talk and make deals and argue until they are pretty much all in agreement on what ought to be done, and then
Tata Ndu makes sure it happens that way. If he does a good job, one of his sons will be chief after he dies. If he
does a bad job, the women will chase Tata Ndu out of towns with big sticks and Kilanga will try out a new chief. So
Tata Ndu is the voice of the people.
***
Drumming on chairs may have been of no special consequence in a Bethlehem school where little boys acted up
whenever they took a mind. But these boys’ families were scraping together extra food or cash for their sons to
go to school, and no one ever forgot it. Going to school was a big decision. Anatole’s students were as earnest
as the grave. Only when I tried to teach math, while Anatole was working with the older students, did they raise
pandemonium.
“Understand, first, you are a girl. These boys are not accustomed to obeying their own grandmothers. If long
division is really so important to a young man’s success in the world, how could a pretty girl know about it? This is
what they are thinking. And understand, second, you are white.”
“White,” I repeated. “Then they don’t think white people know about long division, either?”
“Secretly, most of them believe white people know how to turn the sun on and off and make the river flow
backward. But officially, no. What they hear from their fathers these days is that now Independence is here and
white people should not be in Congo telling us what to do.”
“They also think America and Belgium should give them a lot of money, I happen to know. Enough for everybody
to have a radio or a car or something. Nelson told me that.”
“Yes, that is number three. They think you represent a greedy nation.”
“How do you figure?”
“When one of the fishermen, let’s say Tata Boanda, has good luck on the river and comes home with his boat
loaded with fish, what does he do?”
“He sings at the top of his lungs and everybody comes and he gives it all away.”
“Even to his enemies?”
“I guess. Yeah. I know Tata Boanda doesn’t like Tata Zinsana very much, and he gives Tata Zinsana’s wives the
most.”
“All right. To me that makes sense. When someone has much more than he can use, it’s very reasonable to
expect he will not keep it all himself.”
“But Tata Boanda has to give it all away, because fish won’t keep. If you don’t get rid of it, it’s just going to rot and
stink to high heaven.”
Anatole smiled and pointed his finger at my nose. “That is just how a Congolese person thinks about money.”
“But you need some money,” I persisted.
“All right then, some money,” he agreed. “One automobile and a radio for every village. Your country could give
us that much, e-e?”
“Probably. I don’t think it would really make a dent. Back in Georgia everybody we knew had an automobile.”
“A bu, don’t tell stories. That is not possible.”
“Yes, it is! Some families even have two!”
“What is the purpose of so many automobiles at the same time?”
“Well, because everybody has someplace to go every day. To work or to the store or something.”
“And why is nobody walking?”
“It’s not like here, Anatole. Everything’s farther apart. People live in big towns and cities. Bigger cities than
Leopoldville, even.”
“Beene, you are lying to me. If everyone lived in a city they could never grow enough food.”
“Oh, they do that out in the country. In big, big fields. Peanuts and soybeans and corn, all that. The farmers
grow it, then they put it on big trucks and take it all to the city, where people buy it from the store.”
“How can there be enough food, Beene? If everyone lives in a city?”
“There just is. Things are different from here.”
“What is so different?”
“Everything.” In Congo, it seems the land owns the people. How can I explain to Anatole about soybean fields
where men sat in huge tractors like kings on thrones, taming the soil from one horizon to the other? It seemed
like a memory trick or a bluegreen dream: impossible.
He laughed. “Manioc fields as long and wide as Kwilu.”
“You don’t believe me, but it’s true! You can’t picture it because here, I guess, if you cut down enough jungle to
plant fields that big the rain would just turn it into a river of mud.”
“And then the drought would bake it.”
“Yes! And if you ever did get any crops, the roads would be washed out so you’d never get your stuff into town
anyway.”
He clucked his tongue. “You must find the Congo a very uncooperative place. And still your father came here
determined to plant his American garden in the Congo.”
“My father thinks the Congo is just lagging behind and he can help bring it up to snuff. Which is crazy. It’s like he’
s trying to put rubber tires on a horse.”
Anatole raised his eyebrows. I don’t suppose he’s ever seen a horse. They can’t live in the Congo because of
tsetse flies. I tried to think of some other work animal for my parable, but the Congo has none. Not even cows.
The point I was trying to make was so true there was not even a good way to say it. “I don’t think you’re very keen
on what my father aims to accomplish here.”
“I don’t entirely know what he aims to accomplish here. Do you?”
“Tell the stories of Jesus, and God’s love. Bring them all to the lord.”
“And if no one translated his sermons, how would he tell those stories?”
“So you’re just being polite. You don’t believe in Jesus Christ at all.”
“What I believe is not so important. I am a teacher. Do I believe in multiplication tables? Do I believe in la langue
francaise, with its extra letters hanging onto every word like lazy children? No matter. People need to know what
they are choosing. I’ve watched many white men come into our house, always bringing things we never saw
before. Maybe scissors or medicine or a motor for a boat. Maybe books. Maybe a plan for digging up diamonds
or growing rubber. Maybe stories about Jesus. Some of these things seem very handy, and some turn out to be
not so handy. It is important to distinguish.”
“And if you didn’t translate the Bible stories, then people might sign up to be Christian for the wrong reasons.
They’d figure our God gave us scissors and malaria pills so He’s the way to go.”
He smiled at me sideways. “This word beene-beene, you want to know what it means, then?”
“Yes!”
“It means, as true as the truth can be.”
ADAH PRICE
Always they say: as good as dead. Patrice Lumumba. The voice on the radio said it many times. But the name
the two men spoke out loud to each other was The President. No Lumumba. President: Eisenhower, We Like
Ike. Eki Ekil Ew. The King of America wants a tall, thin man in the Congo to be dead. By this secret: the smiling
bald man with the grandfather face has another face. It can speak through snakes and order that a president far
away, after all those pebbles were carried upriver in precious canoes that did not tip over, this President
Lumumba shall be killed.
By morning it had lost the power to shock. Really, in daylight, where is the surprise of this? How is it different
from Grandfather God sending the African children to hell for being born too far from a Baptist Church? I should
like to stand up in Sunday school now and ask: May Africa talk back? Might those pagan babies send us to hell
for living too far from the jungle? Because we have not tasted the sacrament of palm nuts? Or. Might the tall,
thin man rise up and declare: We don’t like Ike. So sorry, but Ike should perhaps be killed now with a poison
arrow. Oh, the magazines would have something to say about that all right. What sort of man would wish to
murder the president of another land? None but a barbarian. A man with a bone in his hair.
Joe from Paris is coming, the radio says. Joe from Paris has made a poison that will seem to be a Congolese
disease, a mere African death for Lumumba.
LEAH PRICE
“God hates us,” I said.
“Don’t blame God for what ants have to do. We all get hungry. Congolese people are not so different from
Congolese ants.”
“They have to swarm over a village and eat other people alive?”
“When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only
way they know.”
“What does that mean? That you think it’s right to hurt people?”
“You know me as a man. I don’t have to tell you what I am.”
What I knew was that Anatole had helped us in more ways than my family could keep track of. My sister was now
sleeping on his shoulder. “But you believe in what they are doing to the whites, even if you won’t do it yourself.
You’re saying you’re a revolutionary like the Jeune Mou Pro.”
“Things are not so simple as you think,” he finally said, sounding neither angry nor especially kind. “This is not a
time to explain the history of Congolese revolutionary movements.”
“Adah says President Eisenhower has sent orders to kill Lumumba,” I confessed suddenly. She showed me the
conversation between Axelroot and another man, written down in her journal. Since then I’ve had no clear view of
safety. Where is the easy land of ice cream cones and new Keds sneakers and We Like Ike, the country where I
thought I knew the rules. Where is the place I can go home to? “I want to be righteous, Anatole. To know right
from wrong, that’s all. I want to live the right way and be redeemed.” I shouted to make him hear. “Don’t you
believe me? When I walk through the valley of the shadow the Lord is supposed to be with me, and he’s not! Do
you see him here in this boat?”
But Anatole said suddenly, “Don’t expect God’s protection in places beyond God’s dominion. It will only make you
feel punished. I’m warning you. When things go badly, you will blame yourself.”
“What are you telling me?”
“I am telling you what I am telling you. Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and
everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still
get lucky.”
I could see what he thought: that my faith in justice was childish, no more useful here than tires on a horse.
ORLEANNA PRICE
Maybe it was just a chance meeting. A Belgian and an American, let’s say, two old friends with a hunger in
common, a hand in the diamond business. A map of the Congo lies on the mahogany table between them. While
they talk of labor and foreign currency their hunger moves apart from the gentlemanly conversation with a will of
its own, licking at the edges of the map on the table, dividing it between them. They take turns leaning forward to
point out their moves with shrewd congeniality, playing it like a chess match, the kind of game that allows civilized
men to play at make-believe murder. Between moves they tip their heads back, swirl blood-colored brandy in
glass globes and watch it crawl down the curved glass in liquid veins. Languidly they bring their map to order.
Who will be the kings, the rooks, and bishops rising up to strike at a distance? Which sacrificial pawns will be
swept aside? African names roll apart like the heads of dried flowers crushed idly between thumb and forefinger—
Ngomo, Mukenge, Kasavubu, Lumumba. They crumble to dust on the carpet.
Behind the gentlemen’s barbered heads, dark mahogany planks stand at attention. The paneling of this office
once breathed the humid air of a Congolese forest, gave shelter to life, felt the scales of the snake belly on its
branches. Now the planks hold their breath, with their backs to the wall. So do the mounted heads of rhinoceros
and cheetah, evidence of the Belgian’s skill as a sport hunter. He lives in a world of his own making. The curtains
are damask. The carpet is Turkish. The cock on the table is German, old but still accurate. The heads on the
wall observe with eyes of imported glass. The perfect timepiece ticks, and in that small space between seconds
the fancy has turned to fact.
Given time, legions of men are drawn into the game, both ebony and ivory: the Congo’s CIA station chief, the
National security Council, even the President of the United States. And a young Congolese man named Joseph
Mobutu, who’d walked barefoot into a newspaper office to complain about the food he was getting in the army. A
Belgian newspaper man there recognized wit and raw avarice—a useful combination in any game. He took this
young Mobutu under his wing and taught him to navigate the airy heights where foreigners dwell. A rook who
would be king. And the piece that will fall? Patrice Lumumba, a postal worker elected to head his nation. The
Belgians and Americans agree, Lumumba is difficult. Altogether too exciting to the Congolese, and disinclined to
let White control the board, preferring the counsel and company of Black.
The players move swiftly and in secret. Each broad turn sweeps across rivers, forests, continents, and oceans,
witnessed only by foreign glass eyes and once-mighty native trees cut away from their roots.
Fifteen years after Independence, in 1975, a group of Senators called the Church Committee took it upon
themselves to look into the secret operations that had been brought to bear on the Congo. The world rocked with
surprise. The Church Committee found notes from secret meetings of the National Security Council and
President Eisenhower. In their locked room, these men had put their heads together and proclaimed Patrice
Lumumba a danger to the safety of the world. The same Patrice Lumumba, mind you, who washed his face each
morning from a dented tin bowl, relieved himself in a carefully chosen bush, and went out to seek the faces of his
nation. Imagine if he could have heard those words—dangerous to the safety of the world!—from a room full of
white men who held in their manicured hands the disposition of armies and atomic bombs, the power to extinguish
every life on earth.
On a day late in August, 1960, a Mr. Allen Dulles, who was in charge of the CIA, sent a telegram to his Congolese
station chief suggesting that he replace the Congolese government at his earliest convenience. The station chief,
Mr. Lawrence Devlin, was instructed to take as bold an action as he could keep secret: a coup would be all right.
There would be money forthcoming to pay soldiers for that purpose. But assassination might be less costly. A
gang of men quick with guns and unfettered by conscience were at his disposal. Also, to cover all bases, a
scientist named Dr. Gottlieb was hired to make a poison that would produce such a dreadful disease (the good
doctor later testified in the hearings), if it didn’t kill Lumumba outright it would leave him so disfigured that he
couldn’t possible be a leader of men.
Mr. Devlin and his friends sat down with the ambitious young Mobutu, who’d been promoted to colonel. On
September 10, they provided one million dollars in UN money for the purpose of buying loyalty, and the State
Department completed its plans for a coup that would put Mobutu in charge of the entire army. All the ducks were
lined up. On September 14, the army took control of the momentarily independent Republic of Congo, and
Lumumba was put under house arrest in Leopoldville, surrounded by Mobutu’s freshly purchased soldiers.
On November 27, very early in the day, Lumumba escaped. He was secretly helped along by a net of supporters
stretching wide across the Congo, from Leopoldville to our own little village and far beyond. In our village, while
he waited in the shade of a tree, brushing dried mud from his trousers, the Prime Minister was recognized by a
villager and pulled into what quickly became an excited crowd. He gave an impromptu speech about the
unquenchable African thirst for liberty. Somewhere deep in that crowd was a South African mercenary pilot who
owned a radio. Very shortly, the CIA station chief knew Lumumba was free. All across the Congo on invisible
radio waves flew the code words: The Rabbit has escaped.
The army recaptured Lumumba less than fifty miles from our village. People flocked to the roads, banging with
sticks and fetishes on the hoods of the army convoy that took him away. Lumumba was taken to Thysville prison,
then flown to Katanga Province, and finally beaten so savagely they couldn’t return the body to his widow without
international embarrassment. The Congo was left in the hands of soulless, empty men.
Fifteen years after it all happened, I sat by my radio in Atlanta listening to Senator Church and the special
committee hearings on the Congo. I dug my nails into my palms till I’d pierced my own flesh. Where had I been?
Somewhere else entirely? Of the coup, in August, I’m sure we understood nothing. From the next five months of
Lumumba’s imprisonment, escape, and recapture, I recall—what? The hardships of washing and cooking in a
drought. A humiliating event in the church, and rising contentions in the village. Ruth May’s illness, of course.
And a shocking scrap with Leah, who wanted to go hunting with the men. I was occupied so entirely by each day,
I felt detached from anything so large as a month or a year. History didn’t cross my mind. Now it does. Now I
know, whatever you burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion. On that awful
day in January 1961, Lumumba paid with a life and so did I. On the wings of an owl the fallen Congo came to
haunt even our little family, we messengers of goodwill adrift on a sea of mistaken intentions.
LEAH PRICE
You can’t just point to the one most terrible thing and wonder why it happened. This has been a whole terrible
time, from the beginning of the drought that left so many without food, and then the night of the ants, to now, the
worst tragedy of all. Each bad thing causes something worse. As Anatole says, if you look hard enough you can
always see reasons, but you’ll go crazy if you think it’s all punishment for your sins. I see that plainly when I look
at my parents. God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.
*****
Tata Ndu turned directly to Father and spoke to him in surprisingly careful English, rolling his r’s, placing every
syllable like a stone in a hand. “Tata Price, white men have brought us many programs to improve our thinking,”
he said. “The program of Jesus and the program of elections. You say these things are good. You cannot say
now they are not good.”
Father blew up. “Man, you understand nothing! You are applying the logic of children in a display of childish
ignorance.” He slammed his fist down on the pulpit, which caused all the dried-up palm fronds to shift suddenly
sideways and begin falling forward, one at a time. Father kicked them angrily out of the way and strode toward
Tata Ndu, but stopped a few feet short of his mark. Tata Ndu is much heavier than my father, with very large
arms, and at that moment seemed more imposing in general.
Father pointed his finger like a gun at Tata Ndu, then swung it around to accuse the whole congregation. “You
haven’t even learned to run your own pitiful country! Your children are dying of a hundred different diseases!
You don’t have a pot to piss in! And you’re presuming you can take or leave the benevolence of our Lord Jesus
Christ!”
If anyone had been near enough to get punched right then, my father would have displayed un-Christian
behavior. It was hard to believe I’d ever wanted to be near to him myself. If I had a prayer left in me, it was that
this red-faced man shaking with rage would never lay a hand on me again.
Tata Ndu seemed calm and unsurprised by anything that had happened. “A, Tata Price,” he said, in his deep,
sighing voice. “You believe we are mwana, your children, who knew nothing until you came here. Tata Price, I am
an old man who learned from other old men. I could tell you the name of the great chief who instructed my father,
and all the ones before him, but you would have to know how to sit down and listen. There are one hundred
twenty-two. Since the time of our mankulu we have made our own laws without help from white men.”
He turned to the congregation with the air of a preacher himself. Nobody was snoozing now, either. “Our way was
to share a fire until it burned down, ayi? To speak to each other until every person was satisfied. Younger men
listened to older men. Now the Beelezi tell us the vote of a young, careless man counts the same as the vote of
an elder.”
“White men tell us: Vote, Bantu! They tell us: You do not all have to agree, ce n’est pas necessaire! If two men
vote yes and one says no, the matter is finished. A bu, even a child can see how that will end. It takes three
stones in the fire to hold up the pot. Take one away, leave the other two, and what? The pot will spill into the fire.”
It’s true, that was what we believed: the majority rules. How could we argue?
ADAH PRICE
Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this
kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.
*****
The curtain of heat divided the will to survive from survival itself. I could have fallen trembling on the ground but
stood and watched instead, watched Kilanga’s children shout and dance each time they found the scorched,
angular bodies of a mother baboon and baby seared together. On account of these deaths, Kilanga’s gleeful
children would live through another season.
On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and
we are animals. The lion kills the baboon; the baboon kills fat grasshoppers. The elephant tears up living trees,
dragging their precious roots from the dirt they love. The hungry antelope’s shadow passes over the startled
grass. And we, even if we had no meat or even grass to gnaw, still boil our water to kill the invisible creatures that
would like to kill us first. And swallow quinine pills. The death of something living is the price of our own survival,
and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and
bound to keep.
RACHEL PRICE
Now everything has changed; being American doesn’t matter and nobody gives us any special credit. Now we’re
all in this stewpot together, black or white regardless. And certainly we’re not children. Leah says in Congo there’
s only two ages of people: babies that have to be carried, and people that can stand up and fend for themselves.
No in-between phase. No such thing as childhood. Sometimes I think she’s right.
ORLEANNA PRICE
Don’t dare presume there’s shame in the lot of a woman who carries on. On the day a committee of men decided
to murder the fledgling Congo, what do you suppose Mama Mwanza was doing? Was it different, the day after?
Of course not. Was she a fool, then, or the backbone of a history? When a government comes crashing down, it
crushes those who were living under its roof. People like Mama Mwanza never knew the house was there at all.
Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you’re a nation or merely a
woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce
are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it
looks like rain.
I know now that Nathan’s kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it’s wife or
nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them. The
Pharaoh died, says Exodus, and the children of Israel sighed by reason of their bondage. Chains rattle, rivers
roll, animals startle and bolt, forests inspire and expand, babies stretch open-mouthed from the womb, new
seedlings arch their necks and creep forward into the light. Even a language won’t stand still. A territory is only
possessed for a moment in time. They stake everything on that moment, posing for photographs while planting
the flag, casting themselves in bronze. Washington crossing the Delaware. The capture of Okinawa. They’re
desperate to hang on.
But they can’t. Even before the flagpole begins to peel and splinter, the ground underneath arches and slides
forward into its own new destiny. It may bear the marks of boots on its back, but those marks become the
possession of the land. What does Okinawa remember of its fall? Forbidden to make engines of war, Japan
made automobiles instead, and won the world. It all moves on. The great Delaware rolls on, while Mr.
Washington himself is no longer even what you’d call good compost. In Congo a slashed jungle quickly becomes
a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity,
stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn’t matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror’s music and sang a new song
of her own.
I can hardly think where to cast my stones, so I just go on keening for my own losses, trying to wear the marks of
the boot on my back as gracefully as the Congo wears hers. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to
acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I’
ve only found sorrow.
ADAH PRICE
In organic chemistry, invertebrate zoology, and the inspired symmetry of Mendilian genetics, I have found a
religion that serves. I recite the Periodic Table of Elements like a prayer; I take my examination as Holy
Communion, and the pass of the first semester was a sacrament. My mind is crowded with a forest of facts.
Between the trees lie wide-open plains of despair. I skirt around them. I stick to the woods.
*****
There are only two of us now, and I owe her my very life. She owes me nothing at all. Yet I have left her, and now
she is sad. I’m not used to this. I have always been the one who sacrificed life and limb and half a brain to save
the other half. My habit is to drag myself imperiously through a world that owes me unpayable debts. I have long
relied on the comforts of martyrdom. Now I owe a debt I cannot repay. She took hold of me with a fierce grip and
pulled me through. Mother was going to drag me out of Africa if it was her last living act, and it very nearly was.
Mother’s reasons for saving me were as complicated as fate itself, I suppose. Among other things, her
alternatives were limited. Once she betrayed me, once she saved me. Fate did the same to Ruth May, in the
opposite order. Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the
other side. Betrayal is a friend I have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back with a
clear, earnest suspicion of good fortune. I have always felt I would make a clear-eyed scientist on account of it.
As it turns out, though, betrayal can also breed penitents, shrewd minor politicians, and ghosts. Our family seems
to have produced one of each.
LEAH PRICE
Mobutu’s army was known to be ruthless and unpredictable. Bulungu could be accused of anything for harboring
me. Bulungu could also be burned to the ground for no reason at all. Everyone learned fast, the best strategy
was to be invisible.
“I’d fight alongside the Simbas if they’d let me,” I confessed to Therese once.
“But it’s not your place to fight with the Simbas, even if you were a man. You’re white. This is their war and
whatever happens will happen.”
“It’s no more their war than it is God’s will be done. It’s the doing of the damned Belgians and Americans. If God
is really taking a hand in things,” I informed Therese, “he is bitterly mocking the hope of brotherly love. He is
making sure that color will matter forever.”
The Simbas would shoot me on sight, it’s true. They’re an army of pure desperation and hate. Young Stanleyville
boys and old village men, anyone who can find a gun or a machete, all banded together. They tie nkisis of leaves
around their wrists and declare themselves impermeable to bullets, immune to death. And so they are, Anatole
says, “For how can you kill what is already dead?” We’ve heard how they sharpened their teeth and stormed the
invaders in northeastern Congo, feeding on nothing but rage.
Thirty whites killed in Stanley, two Americans among them—we heard that over the shortwave radio and knew
what it meant. By nightfall the United Nations would launch their answer, an air and land attack. The Combined
Forces, they’re calling this invading army: the US, Belgium, and hired soldiers left over from the Bay of Pigs. Over
the next weeks we heard a hundred more times about the whites killed by Simbas in Stanleyville. In three
languages: Radio France, the BBC, and Mobutu’s Lingala newscasts from Leopoldville, the news was all one.
Those thirty white people, rest their souls, have purchased an all-out invasion against the pro-Independents. How
many Congolese were killed by the Belgians and labor and starvation, by the special police, and now by the UN
soldiers, we will never know. They’ll go uncounted.
RACHEL AXELROOT
It isn’t living here in South Africa that I mind. It hardly even seems like a foreign country here. And the scenery is
beautiful, especially taking the train down to the beach. My girlfriends and I love to pack up a picnic basket with
champagne and Tobler biscuits, and then we just head out to the countryside for a view of the green rolling hills.
Of course you have to look the other way when the train goes by the townships, because those people don’t have
any perspective of what good scenery is, that’s for sure. They will make their houses out of a piece of rusted tin
or the side of a crate—and leave the writing part on the outside for all to see! But you just have to try and
understand, they don’t have the same ethics as us. That is one part of living here. Being understanding of the
differences.
*****
After that one time the Prime Minister got shot in the head, there was a big old crackdown on the blacks, which
was absolutely necessary, but resulted in misunderstandings at many of the foreign embassies. The nation of
France, especially, has gotten all high-and-mighty about threatening to remove their associations from South
Africa.
LEAH PRICE NGEMBA
It’s taken a lot to dampen our hopes. But everything has turned around so fast, like a magician’s trick: foreign
hands moved behind the curtain and one white King was replaced with another. Only the face that shows is
black. Mobutu’s US advisors even tried to hold elections here, but then got furious when the wrong person won—
Antoine Gizenga, Lumumba’s lieutenant. So they marched the army into parliament and reorganized it once
again in Mobutu’s favor.
“If the Americans mean to teach us about democracy, the lesson is quite remarkable,” Anatole observed.
“Breathtaking,” I agreed.
We know that to criticize Mobutu, even in private, is to risk having your head cracked open like a nut, which
naturally would discourage one’s hopes entirely. We live on what we can find, and when we’re offered news of
friends, we take a deep breath first. My old friend Pascal and two other former students of Anatole’s were
murdered by the army on the road south of here.
This is the kind of crazy dread we live with. Our neighbors are equally terrified of Mobutu’s soldiers and their
opposition, the Simbas, whose reputation is stalking northern Congo like a lion itself. The Simbas’ anger against
all foreigners is understandable, but increasingly their actions aren’t. We hear of atrocities on the shortwave,
then hear them exaggerated on Mobutu’s official newscasts, and it’s hard to know what’s real.
*****
If people are shocked by these unexplained losses—the post, their salary, a friend walking home on the road—
they don’t mention it. What do the people here know but forbearance? They take one look at the expensive,
foreign-made uniforms of Mobutu’s police and know to keep their thoughts to themselves. They know who stands
behind Mobutu, and in some place as far away as heaven, where the largest rules are made, white and black lives
are different kinds of currencies. When thirty foreigners were killed in Stanleyville, each one was tied somehow to
a solid exchange, a gold standard like the hard Belgian franc. But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese
bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant’s hand, and still not purchase a single
banana. It’s dawning on me that I live among men and women who’ve simply always understood their whole
existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me.
*****
In every package there’s one oddball thing from Adah, a sort of secret message is how I think of it. This time it
was an old Saturday Evening Post she’d found in the bottom of Mother’s closet. An article called “Will Africa Go
Communist?” Adah retains her eagle eye for irony. It was all about how the US ought to take better charge of the
maverick Congo; the two photographs stopped my heart. In one, a young Joseph Mobutu looks out imploringly
above a caption declaring his position in jeopardy. Next to him is a smiling, rather crafty-looking Patrice
Lumumba, with a caption warning: “Hey may be on his way back!” The magazine is dated February 18, 1961.
Lumumba was already a month dead, his body buried under a chicken coop in Shaba. And Mobutu, already well
assured of his throne. I can picture the Georgia housewives shuddering at the Communist challenge, quickly
turning the page on that black devil Lumumba with the pointed chin. But I was hardly any less in the dark, and I
was in Bulungu, the very village where Lumumba had been captured. We have in this story the ignorant, but no
real innocents.
Now everyone’s pretending to set the record straight: they’ll have their hearings, while Mobutu makes a show of
changing all European-sounding place names to indigenous ones, to rid us of the sound of foreign domination.
And what will change? He’ll go on falling over his feet to make deals with the Americans, who still control all our
cobalt and diamond mines. In return, every grant of foreign aid goes straight to Mobutu himself. We read he’s
building himself an actual castle with spires and a moat near Brussels, to provide a respite, I guess, from his villas
in Paris and Spain and Italy. When I open my door and look out, I see a thousand little plank-and-cardboard
houses floating at every conceivable tilt on an endless ocean of dust. We hardly have a functional hospital in our
borders, or a passable road outside Kinshasa. Why doesn’t the world just open its jaws like a whale and swallow
this brazenness in one gulp?
I survive here on outrage. Naturally I would. I grew up with my teeth clamped on a faith in the big white man in
power—God, the President, I don’t care who he is, he’d serve justice! Whereas no one here has ever had the
faintest cause for such delusions.
The radio informed us the two American boxers would be paid five million American dollars each, from our
treasury, for coming here. And it will cost that much again to provide high security and a festival air for the
match. “All the world will respect the name of Zaire,” Mobutu declared in a brief taped interview at the end of the
broadcast.
“Respect!” I practically spat on the floor, which would have horrified Elisabet more than the ill-considered use of
twenty million dollars. “Do you know what’s under the floor of that stadium?” I asked.
“No,” Elisabet said firmly, though I’m sure she does know. Hundreds of political prisoners, shackled. It’s one of
Mobutu’s most notorious dungeons, and we’re all aware that Anatole could end up there, any day. For what he
teaches, for his belief in genuine independence, for his loyalty to the secret Parti Lumumbist Unifie, he could be
brought down by one well-bribed informant.
“People from the world over will come watch this great event, two black men knocking each other senseless for
five million dollars apiece. And they’ll go away never knowing that in all of goddamned Zaire not one public
employee outside the goddamned army has been paid in two years.”
The Congolese have an extra sense. A social sense, I would call it. It’s a way of knowing people at a glance,
adding up the possibilities for exchange, and it’s as necessary as breathing. Survival is a continuous negotiation,
as you have to barter covertly for every service the government pretends to provide, but actually doesn’t. How
can I begin to describe the complexities of life here in a country whose leadership sets the standard for absolute
corruption? You can’t even have a post office box in Kinasha; the day after you rent it, the postmaster may sell
your box to a higher bidder, who’ll throw your mail in the street as he walks out the door. The postmaster would
argue, reasonably, he’s got no other way to support his family—his pay envelope arrives empty each week, with
an official printed statement about emergency economic measures. The same argument is made by telephone
operators, who’ll place a call outside the country for you only after you specify the location in Kinasha where you’ll
leave l’enveloppe containing your bribe. Same goes for men who handle visas and passports. To an outsider it
looks like chaos. It isn’t. It’s negotiation, infinitely ordered and endless.
Anybody who needs anything in Kinasha—a kidney-stone operation or a postage stamp—has to bargain for it,
shrewdly. The Congolese are used to it and have developed a thousand shortcuts. They sum up prospects by
studying each other’s clothing and disposition, and the bargaining process is well under way before they open
their mouths to speak. The Congolese are skilled at survival and perceptive beyond belief, or else dead at an
early age. Those are the choices.
It’s a grief to see the best of Zairean genius and diplomacy spent on bare survival, while fortunes in diamonds and
cobalt are slipped daily out from under our feet. “This is not a poor nation,” I remind my sons till they hear it in
their sleep. “It is only a nation of poor.”
*****
“Mobutu? He is not even African now.”
“Well, what is he, then?”
“He is one wife belonging to many white men.”
Anatole explained it this way: Like a princess in a story, Congo was born too rich for her own good, and attracted
attention far and wide from men who desired to rob her blind. The United States has now become the husband of
Zaire’s economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitive and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the
moral decline inevitable to her nature.
“Oh, I understand that kind of marriage alright,” I said. “I grew up witnessing one just like it.”
*****
I signed on to an American payroll, rationalizing that I’d scatter dollars over the vendors in my little corner of la
cite, at least, as it’s certain no foreign relief will reach them any other way. I taught at a special school in the
compound for Americans who came to work on the Inga-Shaba power line. This was the great nuptial gift from the
US to the Congo—financing the construction of the Inga-Shaba. It’s an enormous power line stretching across
eleven hundred miles of jungle, connecting hydroelectric dams below Leopoldville to the distant southern mining
region of Shaba. The project brought in Purdue engineers, crews of Texas roughnecks, and their families, who
lived outside Leopoldville in a strange city called Little America. I rode the bus out there every morning to teach
grammar and literature to the oddly unpoetic children of this endeavor. They were pale and displaced and
complained of missing their dire-sounding TV shows, things with Vice and Cop and Jeopardy in their titles. They’d
probably leave the Congo never knowing they’d been utterly surrounded by vice, cops, and pure snake-infested
jeopardy of a jungle.
I’d step up on to the bus at my street corner at the end of 17 Janvier, doze bumpily through a half an hour of
predawn, then open my eyes in another world. The compound had row after row of shining metal houses and
dozens of liquor bars glittering at daybreak with an aura of fresh vomit and broken glass. The bus would hiss to a
stop just inside the gate for a bizarre shift change: we teachers and maids would step down, and the bus would
take on the weary, disheveled whores. Congolese girls, with bleached orange hair and a crude phrase or two of
English, and the straps of expensive American bras sliding down their shoulders from under skimpy blouses. I
could just imagine them getting home, folding this uniform, and wrapping themselves in pagnes before going to
the market.
In the course of a year I watched these rough-and-ready foreigners go out to build thousands of miles of
temporary roads for carting cable, machine tools, and sheet metal, past villagers who’ll live out their days without
electricity, machine tools, or sheet metal. The Shaba province, incidentally, roars with waterfalls, more than
enough to generate its own electricity. But with all the power coming from the capital, the mines could be lit up by
Mobutu’s own hand, and shut down at the first sign of popular rebellion.
Since I quit, we’ve learned more, enough for me to curse my small contribution to the Inga-Shaba. It was not
merely a misguided project; it was sinister. The power line was never meant to succeed at all. With no way to
service a utility stretching across the heart of darkness, the engineers watched the monster’s tail crumble as fast
as the front was erected. The whole of it was eventually picked clean in the way a forest tree gets gleaned by leaf-
cutter ants: nuts, bolts, and anything that might serve for roofing material trailed off into the jungle. Anyone could
have predicted that exact failure. But by loaning the Congo more than a billion dollars for the power line, the
world Export-Import Bank assured a permanent debt that we’ll repay in cobalt and diamonds from now till the end
of time. Or at least the end of Mobutu.
With a foreign debt now in the billions, any hope that was left for our Independence is handcuffed in debtor’s
prison. Now the black market is so much healthier than the legitimate economy I’ve seen people use zaires for
repairing cracks in their walls. Foreign bootlegging of materials is so thorough that our neighbor the French
Congo, without a single diamond mine in its borders, is the world’s fifth largest exporter of diamonds. And
whatever hasn’t left the country is sitting in the King’s pantry.
*****
The present regime’s single goal is to keep itself in power. Mobutu relies on the kind of men who are quick with
guns and slow to ask questions. For now, the only honorable government work is the matter of bringing it down.
RACHEL PRICE
We argued about positively everything: even communism! Which you would think there was nothing to argue
about. I merely gave Leah the very sensible advice that she should think twice about going to Angola because
the Marxists are taking it over.
“The Mbundu and the Kongo tribes have a long-standing civil war there, Rachel. Agostinho Neto led the Mbundu
to victory, because he had the most popular support.”
“Well, for your information, Dr. Henry Kissinger himself says that Neto and them are followers of Karl Marx, and
the other ones are pro-United States.”
“Imagine that,” Leah said. “The Mbundu and Kongo people have been at war with each other for the last six
hundred years, and Dr. Henry Kissinger has at long last discovered the cause: the Kongo are pro-United States,
and the Mbundu are followers of Karl Marx.”
“Hah!” Adah said.
“You two can just go ahead and laugh,” I said. “But I read the papers. Ronald Reagan is keeping us safe from
the socialist dictators, and you should be grateful for it.”
“Socialist dictators such as?”
“I don’t know. Karl Marx! Isn’t he still in charge of Russia?”
Adah was laughing so hard in the backseat I thought she was going to pee herself.
“Oh, Rachel, Rachel,” Leah said. “Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and
dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. Socialism and
capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who owns the wealth of your nation, and who gets to eat. Can
you grasp that?”
“I never said I was the expert. I just said I read the papers.”
“Okay, lets take Patrice Lumumba, for example. Former Prime Minister of the Congo, his party elected by popular
vote. He was a socialist who believed in democracy. Then he was murdered, and the CIA replaced him with
Mobutu, a capitalist who believes in dictatorship. In the Punch and Judy program of American history, that’s a
happy ending.”
“Leah, for your information I’m proud to be an American. Your precious Lumumba would have taken over and
been just as bad a dictator as any of them. If the CIA and them got rid of him, they did it for democracy.
Everybody alive says that.”
“Now, look, Rachel,” Leah said. “You can get this. In a democracy, Lumumba should have been allowed to live
longer than two months as head of state. The Congolese people would have gotten to see how they liked him,
and if not, replaced him.”
Well, I just blew up at that. “These people here can’t decide anything for themselves! I swear, my kitchen help
still can’t remember to use the omelet pan for an omelet! For God’s sakes, Leah, you should know as well as I do
how they are.”
“Yes, Rachel, I believe I married one of them.”
ADAH PRICE
My mother’s sanest position is to wear only the necessary parts of the outfit and leave off the rest. Shoes would
interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness.
Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I
suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one: “My life: what I stole from
history, and how I live with it.”
Oddly enough, it has taken me years to accept my new position. I find I no longer have Ada, the mystery of
coming and going. Along with my split-body drag I lost the ability to read in my old way. When I open a book, the
words sort themselves into narrow-minded single file on the page; the mirror image poems erase themselves half-
formed in my mind. I miss those poems. Like Jekyll I crave that particular darkness curled up within me.
No one else misses Ada. Not even Mother. She seems thoroughly pleased to see the crumpled bird she
delivered finally straighten up and fly right.
“But I liked how I was,” I tell her.
“Oh, Adah. I loved you too. I never thought less of you, but I wanted better for you.”
Don’t we have a cheerful, simple morality here in Western Civilization: expect perfection, and revile the missed
mark! Adah the Poor Thing, hemiplegious egregious besiege us. Recently it has been decided, grudgingly, that
dark skin or lameness may not be entirely one’s fault, but one still ought to show the good manners to act
ashamed. When Jesus cured those crippled beggars, didn’t they always get up and dance off stage, jabbing their
canes sideways and waggling their top hats? Hooray, all better now, hooray!
If you are whole, you will argue: Why wouldn’t they rejoice? Don’t the poor miserable buggers all want to be like
me?
Not necessarily, no. The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we’d like to be able to get
places quickly, and carry things in both hands, but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you, or get
The Verse. We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right.
And how can I invent my version of the story, without my crooked vision? How is it right to slip free of an old skin
and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must allow
our anguish and our regrets.
To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.
Even the Congo has tried to slip out of her old flesh, to pretend it isn’t scarred. Congo was a woman in shadows,
dark-hearted, moving to a drumbeat. Zaire is a tall young man tossing salt over his shoulder. All the old injuries
have been renamed: Kinshasa, Kisangani. There was never a King Leopold, no brash Stanley, bury them,
forget. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
But I don’t happen to agree. If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the
shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You’ll look at the scars on your arms and see
mere ugliness, or you’ll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words
for the story of where you came from.
Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The
power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
LEAH PRICE NGEMBA
Our plan is to pack up our truck again and drive from here to Sanza Pombo, Angola, as soon as we possibly can.
There we’ll keep our hands busy in a new, independent nation, whose hopes coincide with our own.
I don’t believe Anatole has many regrets, but he would have been proud to work with Neto or dos Santos. Thanks
to those remarkable men, plus others uncounted who died along the way, Angola has wrested itself free of
Portugal and still owns its diamonds and oil wells. The industry of Angola doesn’t subsidize foreigners, or any
castles with moats, and their children are likely to get vaccinations and learn to read. They’re still desperately
poor, of course. They kept their diamonds and oil at a horrific cost. None of us predicted what came to pass
there. Least of all Neto, the young doctor-poet who just meant to spare his people from the scarring diseases of
smallpox and humiliation. He went to the US looking for help and was shown the door. So he came home to try to
knock down Portuguese rule on his own and create a people’s Angola. Then he got some attention from the
Americans. For now he was a Communist devil.
Ten years ago, when Anatole received that first letter stamped with the new, official seal of the Presidency of
Independent Angola, it looked like dreams could come true. After six hundred years of their own strife and a few
centuries of Portuguese villainy, the warring tribes of Angola had finally agreed to a peace plan. Agostinho Neto
was President, in an African nation truly free of foreign rule. We so nearly packed up and went, that very day.
We were desperate to move our sons to a place where they could taste hope, at least, if not food.
But within two weeks of the peace agreement, the United States violated it. They airlifted a huge shipment of
guns to an opposition leader, who vowed personally to murder Neto.
Murdering Lumumba, keeping Mobutu in power, starting it all over again in Angola—these sound like plots
between men but they are betrayals, by men, of children. It’s thirty million dollars, Anatole told me recently, that
the US has now spent trying to bring down Angola’s sovereignty. Every dollar of it had to come from some
person, a man or woman. How does this happen? They think of it as commerce, I suppose. A matter of
hardware, the plastic explosives and land mines one needs to do the job. Or it’s commerce of imagined dreads,
the Bethlehem housewives somehow convinced that a distant, black Communist devil will cost them some quarter
in their color-matched living rooms.
But what could it possibly of mattered to them that, after the broken treaty and Neto’s desperate plea for help, the
Cubans were the only ones to answer it? We cheered, the boys and Anatole and our neighbors all jumping and
screaming in our yard, when the radio said that the planes had come into Luanda. There were teachers and
nurses on board, with boxes of smallpox vaccine. We imagined them liberating Angola and marching right on up
the Congo River to vaccinate us all!
Rachel informs me I’ve had my brains washed by a communist plot. She’s exactly right. I’ve been won to the side
of schoolteachers and nurses, and lost all allegiance to plastic explosives. No homeland I can claim as mine
would blow up a struggling, distant country’s hydroelectric dams and water pipes, inventing darkness and
dysentery in the service of its ideals, and bury mines in every Angolan road that connected food with hungry
children. We’ve watched this war with our hearts in our throats, knowing what there is to lose. Another Congo.
Another wasted chance running like poison water under Africa, curling our souls into fists.
But with nothing else to hope for, we lean toward Angola, waiting, while the past grows heavy and our future
narrows down to a crack in the door.
We are still the children we were, with plans we keep secret, even from ourselves. Maybe I’ll never get over my
grappling for balance, never stop believing that life is going to be fair, the minute we can clear up all these
mistakes of the temporarily misguided. Like the malaria I’ve never shaken off, it’s in my blood. I anticipate
rewards for goodness, and wait for the ax of punishment to fall upon evil, in spite of the years I’ve rocked in this
cradle of rewarded evils and murdered goodness. Just when I start to feel jaded to life as it is, I’ll suddenly wake
up in a fever, look out at the world, and gasp at how much has gone wrong that I need to fix.
Our waiting is almost over. It’s taken ten years and it seems like a miracle, but the Americans are losing in
Angola. Their land mines are still all over the country, they take off the arm or the leg of a child every day, and I
know what could happen to us if we travel those roads. But in my dreams I still have hope, and in life, no safe
retreat.
RACHEL PRICE
You make something, seems like, and spend the rest of your days toiling so it won’t go all unraveled. One thing
leads to another, then you’re mired in.
Years ago, when things first started going sour with Axelroot, that was probably when I should have gone home. I
didn’t have anything invested in Africa yet but a little old apartment boudoir decorated to the best of my abilities in
blush pink.
I had my bags packed more than once. But when push came to shove I was always afraid. Of what? Well, it’s
hard to explain. I wouldn’t be able to fit back in is the long and short of it. Not to mention the Congo. My long
tramp through the mud left me tuckered out and just too worldly-wise to go along with the teen scene.
Let’s face it, I could never have been popular again at home. The people I’d always chummed around with would
stop speaking to you if they so much as suspected you’d ever gone poo behind a bush.
You can’t just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle
to change you right back.
*****
That’s my advice. Let others do the pushing and shoving, and you just ride along. In the end, the neck you save
will be your own. This is darkest Africa, where life roars by you like a flood and you grab whatever looks like it will
hold you up.
LEAH PRICE
About five hundred years ago, the Portuguese came poking the nose of their little wooden ship into the mouth of
the Congo River. They saw Africans. Men and women black as night, strolling in bright sunlight along the
riverbanks. But not naked—just the opposite! They wore hats, soft boots, and more layers of exotic skirts and
tunics that would seem bearable in the climate. This is the truth. I’ve seen the drawings published by those first
adventurers after they hurried back home to Europe. They reported that the Africans lived like kings, even
wearing the fabrics of royalty: velvet, damask, and brocade. Their report was only off by a hair; the Kongo people
made remarkable textiles by beating the fibrous bark of certain trees, or weaving thread from the raffia palm.
From mahogany and ebony they made sculptures and furnished their homes. They smelted and forged iron ore
into weapons, plowshares, flutes, and delicate jewelry. The Portuguese marveled at how efficiently the Kingdom
of Kongo collected taxes and assembled its court and ministries. There was no written language, but an oral
tradition so ardent that when the Catholic fathers fixed letters to the words of Kikongo, its poetry and stories
poured into print with the force of a flood. The priests were dismayed to learn the Kongo already had their own
Bible. They’d known it by heart for hundreds of years.
Impressed as they were with the Kingdom of Kongo, the Europeans were dismayed to find no commodity
agriculture here. All food was consumed very near to wear it was grown. And no cities, no giant plantations, and
no roads necessary for transporting produce from the one to the other. The kingdom was held together by
thousands of miles of footpaths crossing the forest, with suspension bridges of woven vines swinging quietly over
the rivers.
“But what if it’s a huge river,” I asked him once—“like the Congo, which is much broader than the reach of any
vine?”
“This is simple,” he said. “Such a river should not be crossed.”
If only a river could go uncrossed, and whatever lie on the other side could live as it pleased, unwitnessed and
unchanged. But it didn’t happen that way. The Portuguese peered through the trees and saw that the well-
dressed, articulate Kongo did not buy or sell or transport their crops, but merely lived in place and ate what they
had, like the beasts of the forest. In spite of poetry and beautiful clothes, such people were surely not fully
human—were primitive; that’s a word the Portuguese must have used, to salve their conscience for what was to
come. Soon the priests were holding mass baptisms on shore and marching their converts onto ships bound for
sugar plantations in Brazil, slaves to the higher god of commodity agriculture.
There is not justice in this world. This world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of
the gentle, and I’ll not live to see the meek inherit anything. What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for
human errors to level themselves like water throughout their sphere of influence. That’s pretty much the whole of
what I can say, looking back. There’s the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow
does bear with a certain grace.
The boundary between Congo and Angola is nothing but a line on a map—the Belgians and Portuguese drawing
their lots. The ancient Kongo used to spread across all of central Africa. As a nation it fell, when a million of its
healthiest citizens were sold into slavery, but its language and traditions did not.
In our village there are very few boys of an age to climb trees for birds’ nests, or girls stomping self-importantly
down the road with a sibling clutched sideways like an oversized rag doll. I notice their absence everywhere. The
war cost most of its lives among children under ten. That great, quiet void is moving slowly upward through us. A
war leaves holes in so much more than the dams and roads that can be rebuilt.
Our hardest task is teaching people to count on a future: to plant citrus seeds, and compost their waste for
fertilizer. This confused me at first. Why should someone resist something so obvious as planting a fruit tree or
improving the soil? But for those who’ve lived as refugees longer than memory, learning to believe in the nutrient
cycle requires something close to a religious conversion.
This is not Brussels or Moscow or Macon, Georgia. This is famine or flood. You can’t teach a thing until you’ve
learned that. The tropics will intoxicate you with the sweetness of frangipani flowers and lay you down with the
sting of a viper, with hardy room to breathe in between. It’s a great shock to souls gently reared in places of
moderate climate, hope, and dread.
The Portuguese were so shocked, evidently, that they stripped the gentle Kongo and chained them down in rows,
in the dark, for the passage. Condemned for their lack of cash crops. The Europeans couldn’t imagine a
reasonable society failing to take that step, and it’s hard for us to imagine even now. In a temperate zone it’s the
most natural thing in the world, right as rain, to grow fields of waving grain. To grow them year after year without
dread of flood or plague, in soil that offers up green stems that bend to the scythe again and again, bread from a
bottomless basket. Christians could invent and believe in the parable of the loaves and fishes, for their farmers
can trust in abundance, and ship it to burgeoning cities, where people can afford to spend their lives hardly
noticing , or caring, that a seed produces a plant.
Here you know what a seed is for, or you starve. A jungle yields no abundance to feed the multitudes, and
supports no leisure class. The soils are fragile red laterite and the rain is savage. Clearing a rain forest to plant
annuals is like stripping an animal first of its fur, then its skin. The land howls. Annual crops fly on a wing and a
prayer. And even if you manage to get a harvest, why, you need roads to take it out! Take one trip overland
here and you’ll know forever that a road in the jungle is a sweet, flat, impossible dream. The soil falls apart. The
earth melts into red gashes like the mouths of whales. Fungi and vines throw a blanket over the face of the dead
land. It’s simple, really. Central Africa is a rowdy society of flora and fauna that have managed to balance
together on a trembling geologic plate for ten million years: when you clear off part of the plate, the whole slides
into ruin. Stop clearing, and the balance slowly returns. To be here without doing everything wrong requires a
new agriculture, a new sort of planning, a new religion.
My father stamped me with a belief in justice, then drenched me in culpability, and I wouldn’t wish such torment
even on a mosquito. But that exacting, tyrannical God of his has left me for good. I don’t quite know how to name
what crept in to take his place. Creation, which is made fresh daily and doesn’t suffer in translation. This God
does not work in especially mysterious ways. The sun here rises and sets at six exactly. A caterpillar becomes a
butterfly, a bird raise its brood in the forest, and a greenheart tree will only grow from a greenheart seed. He
brings drought sometimes, followed by torrential rains, and if these things aren’t always what I had in mind, they
aren’t my punishment either. They’re rewards, let’s say, for the patience of a seed.
ADAH PRICE
In the world, the carrying capacity for humans is limited. History holds all things in the balance, including large
hopes and short lives. When Albert Schweitzer walked into the jungle, bless his heart, he carried antibacterials
and a potent, altogether new conviction that no one should die young. He meant to save every child, thinking
Africa would then learn to have fewer children. But when families have spent a million years having nine in hopes
of saving one, they cannot stop making nine. Culture is a slingshot driven by the force of its past. When the
strap lets go, what flies forward will not be family planning, it will be the small, hard head of a child.
Overpopulation has deforested three-quarters of Africa, yielding drought, famine, and the probable extinction of
all animals most beloved by children and zoos. The competition for resources intensifies, and burgeoning tribes
itch to kill each other. For every life saved by vaccination or food relief, one is lost to starvation or war. Poor
Africa. No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign
goodwill.
This is the story I believe in: When God was a child, the Rift Valley cradled a caldron of bare necessities, and out
of it walked the first humans upright on two legs. With their hands free, they took up tools and beat from the bush
their own food and shelter and their own fine business of right and wrong. They made voodoo, the earth’s oldest
religion. They engaged a powerful affinity with their habitat and their food chain. They worshipped everything
living and everything dead, for voodoo embraces death as its company, not its enemy. It honors the balance
between loss and salvation.
God is everything, then. God is a virus. Believe that, when you get a cold. God is an ant. Believe that, too, for
driver ants are possessed, collectively, of the size and influence of a Biblical plague. They pass through forest
and valley in columns of hundred meters across and many miles long, eating their way across Africa. Animal and
vegetable they take, mineral they leave behind. This is what we learned in Kilanga: move out of the way and
praise God for the housecleaning.
Africa has a thousand ways of cleansing itself. Driver ants, Ebola virus, acquired immune deficiency syndrome: all
of these are brooms devised by nature to sweep a small clearing very well. Not one of them can cross a river by
itself. And none can survive past the death of its host. A parasite of humans that extinguished us altogether, you
see, would quickly be laid to rest in human graves. So the race between predator and prey remains exquisitely
neck and neck.
God is not just rooting for the dollies. We and our vermin all blossomed together out of the same humid soil in the
Great Rift Valley, and so far no one is really winning. Five million years is a long partnership. If you could for a
moment rise up out of your own beloved skin and appraise ant, human, and virus as equally resourceful beings,
you might admire the accord they have all struck in Africa.
Death is the common right of toads and men. My colleagues accuse me of cynicism, but I am simply a victim of
poetry.
Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It’s everyone’s, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the
pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.
RUTH MAY PRICE
Remember the forest eats itself and lives forever.
The woman and her daughters are looking for something they will not find. There plan was to find a way back to
Kilanga and finally to the sister’s grave. It’s impossible to cross the border. In the six months since they began to
plan their trip, the Congo has been swept by war. A terrible war that everyone believes will soon have been worth
the price. A good boil, they say here, a good boil purifies the rotten meat. After thirty-five years the man Mobutu
has run away into the night. Thirty-five years of sleep like death, and now the murdered land draws a breath,
moves its fingers, takes up life through its rivers and forests.
On this same day at this hour of early morning the man Mobutu lies in bed in his hiding place. The shades are
drawn. His breath is so shallow the sheet drawn across his chest does not rise or fall: no sign of life. The cancer
has softened his bones. The flesh of his hands is so deeply sunken the bones of his fingers are perfectly
revealed. They have assumed the shape of everything he stole. All he was told to do, and more, he has done.
Now in his darkened room, Mobutu’s right hand falls. This hand, which has stolen more than any other hand in
the history of the world, hangs limp over the side of the bed. The heavy gold rings slide forward to the knuckles,
hesitate, then fall off one at a time. They strike the floor with five separate tones: a miraculous, brief song in an
ancient pentatonic scale.
Soon the news will reach every city and lodge like a breath or a bullet in all the different breast. The flesh of
General Eisenhower consumed by generations of predators will speak aloud. The flesh of Lumumba, also
consumed, will speak aloud. For a time the howl will drown out everything. But right now the world is caught in
that small blank space in which no one has yet heard the news. Lives proceed for one last moment unchanged.
In the marketplace they buy and sell and dance.