Ngongo Chronicle

By Ron Singer

Ngongo Chronicle

Part One: Pierre Tshombe, or the Making of an Insurrectionist

Note: The namesake of protagonist Pierre Tshombe, Moise Tshombe (1919-1969), was a businessman who became President of the secessionist province of Katanga (1960-63), in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He then became the country’s Prime Minister (1964-65). Despite his complicity with western interests, which gained him notoriety among African nationalists, Tshombe’s death was possibly orchestrated by the C.I.A. Soon afterward, the Mobutu era (1965-97) began.

Chapter One.

May 2007. Outside Fort Chaltin, Ngongo, 2007; Mindouli and Fort Chaltin, Ngongo, 1970-1986.

“May you meet with success, Pierre! Indeed, I trust that you shall, because I know how you love our people.”

He kept looking over his shoulder, which made me nervous, but not, perhaps, as nervous as he must have been. “He” was Major Oscar Odhon’g. (The name means “fist.”) Currently a member of the Executive of the Cadre Pour La Liberation d’ Ngongo (CPLN), the Major had formerly been a Commandant in La Force NKN, our country’s dreaded secret police. The price on his head was 5,000 francs, ngongiens.

Major Odhon’g’s face and neck were slick with perspiration, and he shivered in the cool night air. Our meeting was taking place on the outskirts of the forest camp of Odhon’g’s brigade, a few kilometers outside Fort Chaltin, the capital. The camp was silent, presumably because the comrades were either sleeping, or away on missions. Although I did not belong to this particular brigade, I was present tonight because M. Odhon’g had summoned me, via the CPLN “Net.”

We — he, mostly—had been speaking (in French and our other shared language, Acholi, with snatches of Swahili) for upwards of half an hour. From what I had heard about the Major, it might take him anywhere from ten more minutes to another full hour to finish beating about the bush. I was not certain of this cunning man’s motives for his lengthy preamble, but I did not find it reassuring. In fact, with each passing compliment or inanity, I expected that what he would finally ask me to do would prove more and more difficult, until it verged upon the impossible.

By now, the time must be well after midnight. The small campfire was beginning to have a soporific effect on me. After all, on each of several nights, as I traversed the country on my way to this meeting, I had not slept for more than two hours.

Like myself, my interlocutor was of the Luo physical type. That is, we were both tall and thin, with aquiline features. Given the Nilotic origin of the Luo, these characteristics were unsurprising. What was surprising was that Major Odhon’g stood more than two meters tall, ten centimeters taller than I. Of course, we were both now squatting, but I had noted his great height when he first stepped forward from the shadows to greet me.

“Well, then, Pierre, what I am about to ask of you is no small thing. But, as our elders say, ‘Hunger pushes the hippopotamus out of the water.’”

“Uh, oh!” I thought. “When a radical somebody like Odhon’g starts quoting proverbs at you, watch out! Or else, you will find yourself (to match proverb with proverb) trying to cross the river on the crocodile’s back.”

Of course, I did not say this aloud. Instead, I nodded my head in a way that was meant to convey that I might, or might not, be open to assuming the heavy burden he was about to drop on me. After a few more compliments and diversions, he did drop it, but even then, the command was prefaced by yet another proverb.

“As our comrades in the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic used to say, ‘The fish stinks from the head down.’ ”

I resisted the urge to correct him by repeating a fellow-student in CapeTown’s attribution, years before, of this hackneyed proverb to a Greek document rediscovered by Erasmus of Rotterdam. What would have been the point of delaying the inevitable, and of possibly irritating the Major, to boot?

He finally reached his terrifying peroration. “Yes, we could continue our campaign of killing NKN cadre forever, but hitherto, as fast as we can do so, they are replaced. The time has now arrived to cut off the head. We must assassinate the Dictator.”

My mouth was too dry for me to swallow the acidic gob of fear that jumped from my stomach to my throat. Since respect made me hesitate to spit the gob out, for a few moments it stayed where it was, causing me such pain that I could bear it no longer. So I turned my back on the fire, and on Major Odhon’g, and muttering an apology, spat far into the bushes.

He did not miss a beat. “Of course, you are frightened, my young comrade, but you should also feel honored. For the Council has determined that our best hope for accomplishing this momentous deed lies with you.”

Frozen with dread, my throat still stinging from the bile, I managed to squeak out a one-word reply. “How?”

“We will utilize a bomb.” He told me the details.

Some minutes later, as I trudged back through the moonlit forest, my first thought was that, whether or not the assassination succeeded, I might live to tell the tale. For one thing, unlike that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the assassination of General Festus Nkwema would not start a world war. More likely, it would only be noticed, if at all, for a single reason. Those erstwhile cold-war antagonists, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R, as well as China and the European Union, would take pains to insure that Nkwema’s successors would honor his dishonorable contracts. The flow of minerals — the coltan, cobalt and copper for which every rich nation pretended to be Ngongo’s best friend — must continue uninterrupted.

Then, I thought of an irony, which triggered a bark of laughter to join the buzzing, humming, shrieking, and other night sounds of the forest. As Major Odhon’g had explained, although I would be the one to perform the dangerous task of putting the bomb in place, it would be detonated remotely by means of a computer, the components of which might include a small quantity of the coltan sold to Silicon Valley by the General, himself! Hamlet’s phrase, “hoist with his own petard,” would never be more apt!

Then, I realized I was laughing in the dark, and the realization caused any further laughter to stick in my throat. I trudged on in silence. When I saw the first lights from the twin skyscrapers of Fort Chaltin’s Quartier Central, a new gob of stomach acid erupted from below. Careful not to soil myself, I hocked it into the bushes, and began my ascent to ward the plateau upon which sits our nation’s capital.

Major Oscar Odhon’g (1)

Have I made a huge mistake? Is this comrade Pierre too much of a weakling to be entrusted with the perilous task for which we have selected him? When he shows up for our next meeting, on 12 June, should I say that we, the members of the Executive, have had second thoughts, and fob him off with some excuse? If he shows up, that is: if the severe digestive problem which he could not conceal from me does not first bloom into a debilitating ulcer! How could I have missed this condition when I championed comrade Pierre at last month’s meeting? Oh, Lord, was it be cause, in years past, I, myself, suffered from a similar affliction? Actually, I think I was in my mid-thirties, then, about the same age as this Tshombe is now. Thank god for the miracles of modern medicine! And thank god I am still in possession of some of those tablets! But where have I left them?

By now, Reader, you must be wondering what tortuous pathways had carried me to that momentous midnight meeting in the forest, in the year 2007, C.E.

The eldest of three children, I, Pierre Bondeko Tshombe, was born on 12 June, 1970, in Mindouli, Ngongo’s second city, which is located in the heart of the copper belt. My father was a common laborer in the mines, and my mom supplemented the family income through the sale of petty goods in local markets. When my two younger siblings both succumbed to childhood illnesses that I later thought must have been either dysentery, or diseases carried by some parasitic worm, I became a pampered only child, an extreme rarity in 1970’s Ngongo. I never even caught nemo [“measles”].

As to how the schoolboy, P.B.Tshombe, became a bomb-throwing assassin (“bomb-placing,” really), my schoolboy years gave small indication. Suffice it to say that, in my first ten or twelve years of life, like most children in Ngongo, I was unaware of the extent to which my family’s poverty and other deprivation could be laid at the feet of our beloved leaders. Oh, yes, I heard my age mates and my parents and other adults grumbling (in quiet voices, and in places where they thought they could not be overheard), but to me, at least, grumbling was just what people did.

After attending a faith-based (Catholic) primary school for four years (1977-80), I matriculated at Mindouli’s ecole primaire superiore. Without intending to boast, my acceptance into the eps system proved, at least, that I was a very good test-taker. At the end of the two-year program at eps, I took another test, this one for secondary school. The results were similar, so my name was entered, and I moved on to the capital, Fort Chaltin. There, I lived with my maternal uncle, Alphonse Saint-Louis, like his sister a small-scale entrepreneur (and later a hotelier). In F.C., from 1982-86, I attended L’institut Pedagoque, which was then Ngongo’s only free secondary school. Since there were not yet any universities in the country, four years later, my next choice was either to pursue a career, probably as a clerk, or to at tempt to embark upon post-secondary education, either in a neighboring country, such as Zaire (formerly the DRC), or even farther afield.

If the reader wonders what part politics played in these, my first years of life, the short answer is “None.” Not that the mis-governance of Ngongo was miraculously in abeyance during that period. Nor were reasons lacking for a less apolitical outlook.

When I was two or three years old, my father was killed in what the family always assumed was a mining accident. At any rate, his body was not made available for the Keto Gangu burial ritual, which omission my uncles regarded as extremely unpropitious for the future of the clan. Fur thermore, without explanation, the concessionaire, L’Union Miniere d’Ngon go, denied his survivors so much as a single sou in compensation. The company’s failure to explain the cause of my father’s death was perhaps even worse than their refusal to compensate us. For, to an Acholi, no death comes as a matter of course. Ten years later, I was to revisit this question in a totally unexpected way.

How, then, did I pass my childhood as an apolitical somebody? All I can say is that, especially after the death of my father and my two siblings, I must have developed tunnel vision, magically thinking that, if I excelled in school, it would somehow bring them all back to life —or, at least, that I would grow up to earn as much money as the three of them, combined, could have earned, had they lived. When I “reached man’s estate, I put away [such] childish things.”

In my defense, I can perhaps add that what is called le cultur ngongien was, and is, characterized by fatalism. From the colonial period on into the era of Independence, most people (including the ones around me) tended to attribute our nation’s heavy yoke to such causes as inadequate obeisance to the ancestors. I must say that even those of my age mates who were also my schoolmates were encumbered by such atavistic views. If they happen to read this narrative, many would attribute my ill fortune later in life to my skepticism.

To Be Continued...