Kaveena Read online

  KAVEENA

  Global African Voices

  DOMINIC THOMAS, EDITOR

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  Translated by Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi and Victoria Offredi Poletto

  The Shameful State: A Novel

  Sony Labou Tansi

  Translated by Dominic Thomas

  Foreword by Alain Mabanckou

  KAVEENA

  BOUBACAR BORIS DIOP

  Translated by

  Bhakti Shringarpure & Sara C. Hanaburgh

  Foreword by Ayo A. Coly

  This book is a publication of

  Indiana University Press

  Office of Scholarly Publishing

  Herman B Wells Library 350

  1320 East 10th Street

  Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

  iupress.indiana.edu

  Original publication in French

  © 2006 Editions Philippe Rey

  English translation

  © 2016 by Indiana University Press

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Diop, Boubacar Boris, 1946– | Shringarpure, Bhakti, translator. | Hanaburgh, Sara, translator.

  Title: Kaveena / Boubacar Boris Diop ; translated by Bhakti Shringarpure and Sara C. Hanaburgh ; foreword by Ayo A. Coly.

  Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2016. | Series: Global African voices

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015033962| ISBN 9780253020437 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253020482 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253020567 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Africa, West—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ 3989.2.D553 K3813 2016 | DDC 843/.914—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015033962

  1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16

  To Koulsy Lamko, the Obstinate Hopeful

  For Adja Bâ and Bintou Ndiaye

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD / Ayo A. Coly

  KAVEENA

  FOREWORD

  The Cameroonian writer Mongo Beti (1932–2001), one of the foremost African writers of the twentieth century and a virulent, often caustically opinionated, critic of African literatures, wrote the preface to Boubacar Boris Diop’s first novel. Beti lauded Le temps de Tamango (1981) for its audacious aesthetic experimentations and political savvy about postindependence governance in Africa. The acclaimed novel set the tone for Diop’s rich plays, short stories, and dynamic corpus; he is a prolific author whose output includes novels, screenplays, and collections of essays on writing and the role of literature, neoliberalism and globalization. His sought-out opinion pieces on current events have secured his standing as a noted public intellectual and one of the most incisive commentators on African affairs and global geopolitics. In his works of both fiction and nonfiction, Diop exerts a dexterous intellectual vigilance that has roots in a sociocultural and political background that spans colonial and postindependence Senegal.

  Boubacar Boris Diop was born in 1946 in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, a country that gained its independence from France fourteen years after Diop’s birth. Diop first taught literature and philosophy, and later contributed in significant ways to the development of an independent press in Senegal through his activities as a journalist. He launched his literary career with Le temps de Tamango and went on to publish several award-winning novels, including the highly acclaimed Murambi: Le livre des ossements (2000; Murambi, The Book of Bones, IUP 2006), about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and Doomi Golo (2003), a novel written in his native Wolof as a political act. Diop’s writing is unflinchingly political in its relentless critique of African totalitarian regimes, its meticulous unraveling of official history, and its minute attention to the politics of cultural and collective memory. His novels may intimidate the more pedestrian reader because of their intricate narrative composition characterized by an incessant deferment of meaning and a stubborn inconclusiveness and refusal of narrative closure. Indeed, Diop tasks readers with seeking out meaning for themselves. Compelling them to assume responsibility in this way, never letting them off the hook, and holding them accountable for their elucidation of the problematic posed by the novel are functions of Diop’s appropriation of the oral tradition of storytelling. In that tradition, the storyteller and audience collaborate in the process of producing meaning.

  It is therefore fitting that Diop selected the genre of the detective novel as the narrative framework for Kaveena (2006), a political fable which lays the postcolonial situation in the form of an intricate and aberrant puzzle for the reader to figure out. The novel clearly exposes the travesty of political independence and denounces postcolonial African dictatorial regimes. The candid admission, in the very first sentence of the novel, that the narrator has missed out on crucial information, appropriates the oral storytelling technique of seeking complicity with the audience. In fact, the narrator is relying on letters left behind by a deceased African president. And, simultaneously with the reader, the narrator is trying to make sense of the letters. The narrator often engages in suppositions and speculations as he combs his way through the archival maze of documents. Diop’s choice to incorporate at full length and reproduce in italics some of the letters for the eyes of his readers is clearly an invitation to the latter to formulate their own independent interpretations and possibly reach different conclusions than the more tentative narrator. The device of the non-omniscient narrator thus mobilizes competent readers of the novel and entrusts them to fill in the narrative gaps and sort out the complex lay of the postcolonial situation. Furthermore, the implication of the narrator in the political matters he is recounting renders him unreliable. Diop deliberately leaves readers on their own, inciting them to seek a self-transformative reading of the novel. This plotted reading experience clearly underpins a pedagogy of critical thinking conducive to the creation of an aware reader-citizen of the postcolonial nation.

  Kaveena is set in an unnamed African nation. By all indications, this nation is a former French colony. That it could be any former French colony in Africa speaks to the particular form of French
neocolonialism known as Françafrique, which has been a constant target of Diop’s novels, essays, and journalistic writings. Françafrique is an economic and political structure that France engineered in 1960, in the immediate aftermath of the independence of France’s former African colonies. This setup was the brainchild of Jacques Foccart, an established businessman and influential advisor to French presidents Charles de Gaulle, George Pompidou, and Jacques Chirac. Foccart, whose identity is barely disguised in Kaveena, was the architect of gangster-style French policies in Africa between 1960 and 1995 that resulted in the overthrow of recalcitrant presidents and the rescue of embattled presidents, as well as numerous rigged elections aimed at installing friendly dictators. This hands-on approach allowed France to continue funneling resources out of its former colonies.

  Discussions of France’s neocolonial interventionism in Africa are still very much alive today under the presidency of François Hollande. In 2013, France launched military interventions in Mali to liberate the country from Al Qaeda–linked Islamists. France also intervened in the Central African Republic to stop sectarian conflict. Two years earlier, in 2011, France helped oust Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo when he refused to surrender the presidency to his democratically elected rival. France still maintains important military bases in Senegal, Gabon, and Djibouti, and in January 2014 announced plans to increase its military presence in order to more effectively fight terrorism. Perhaps the most damning evidence of neocolonial practices exposed by Kaveena concerns the fact that former French colonies in Africa have yet to achieve monetary sovereignty. The Franc CFA currency used by Francophone African countries is no more than a derivative currency controlled by the French treasury. Kaveena is thus a timely and crucial novel exploring the unfolding neocolonial present in Africa in the broader context of globalization and shifting geopolitical alignments.

  Ayo A. Coly, Dartmouth College

  KAVEENA

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT HIS LAST WORDS WERE.

  He twitched his lips when he saw me come in. The movement was very brief, almost imperceptible. Maybe he was just asking me to shut the door or get him a drink. I’m sure it must have been something very banal. The man, whom I knew well, was not the type to come up with famous sayings that would resonate from generation to generation. He didn’t care about that sort of thing. I also don’t think he recognized me. He had most likely lost consciousness several weeks earlier. Later I learned that by then he didn’t remember anything anymore. Not even the fact that he had been a powerful man, and that the mere mention of his name would make hearts stop with fear.

  I wanted to close his eyes, but my natural reflex as a policeman held me back. A woven loincloth covered the lower section of his body, and a short faso danfani tunic in pale yellow with wide gray vertical stripes left his skinny, wrinkly flank exposed. His arms lay scattered on the bed. They looked useless, as if they’d been separated from his torso. A black metal square stuck out from under the pillow. It was an automatic pistol. A 7.65. I used a handkerchief to pick it up. As I’d suspected, it was loaded but hadn’t been discharged.

  I backed up a little to get a look at the entire corpse. The man was spread out lengthwise on the living room couch, his feet slightly parted and pointed toward the street. I say street, but it’s really the end of a small path wedged between acacia and mango trees, so narrow it first looks like a cul-de-sac. It is a small, discreet bit of Jinkoré, a fairly calm neighborhood. During the civil war, which ended less than four months ago, the district had been fiercely disputed territory. The leaders of armed factions—there were so many—were convinced that seizing control of Jinkoré was enough to take over the capital, and thus the rest of the country. This is the reason why fighting here was particularly violent and so many atrocities occurred.

  At first it might seem unfathomable that N’Zo Nikiema would decide to take refuge in this place. If his enemies knew, they would say he didn’t have a choice. I suppose he didn’t have the time to think it over when Pierre Castaneda’s militias seized the presidency. But I doubt the rumors are true that he disguised himself as a Red Cross aid worker in order to slip through the destruction as mortar shells rained over the palace. That would mean that he had not prepared himself for the situation. Nothing could be more false: Nikiema never found himself taken by surprise. The truth is that many of our fellow citizens still hate him. So much so that they need to believe that Nikiema, overcome with panic at the last minute, lost his arrogance and hightailed it like a rabbit, yelling in terror and calling out to his mother for help. I was a witness, thanks to my role as chief of the secret police during the final hours of Nikiema’s rule, and I can attest to the fact that that was not how things went down. Nikiema fooled us all by coming to stay in this small house in Jinkoré. At the same exact time we were securing the borders to impede him from joining his family in exile. He must have had a good laugh at that.

  The door at the back opened into a second room. On the wall to the right, a bogolan curtain, blackened with a mix of dust and smoke, caught my eye. The wide, dark opening between the two curtain panels revealed a very poorly lit place. I went toward it, and standing in the doorway I turned my head in every direction. The darkness was almost total. After a few seconds, I could almost make out the outline of a table stretched out lengthwise in the middle of the room. I thought maybe an armed man was lurking in the shadows, ready to discharge his weapon into my chest. Actually I was not afraid. The idea came to me by force of habit: the war is not completely over in our minds.

  I parted the bogolan and looked for the light switch. It made a click but the room remained dark. I remembered it would soon be ten days that the city had been without electricity. Luckily, I always have a flashlight with me. In its yellow light, I discovered a sort of storage room converted into a painting studio. Two of its walls were covered in paintings. One was still on an easel. On the long rough wooden table—or rather, the irregularly assembled planks—were several cans of colored paint, rolls of canvas, and a small toolbox.

  This quick inspection was sufficient for me. I promised myself I’d go over the house and its surroundings with a fine-tooth comb the next day. The dining room and the eat-in kitchen would perhaps reveal the secret of President Nikiema’s death. It wouldn’t be easy since I planned on doing everything myself. Under normal circumstances, I’d have called my men and joked, “This little bird is food for the worms.” Well, maybe I wouldn’t have said exactly that, but something of the sort. That’s our undercover cop humor. The work we do is very hard. Tracking people down and killing them—sometimes knowing they are innocent—is not an easy job. We need our jokes to convince ourselves that life is not such a serious thing and, in the end, to kill or be killed are one and the same. In any case, my guys would have turned up in Jinkoré without delay. Then our bosses would have joined the dance. For such a huge catch, Pierre Castaneda would have been the only one to have a say in the matter. I’m not supposed to concern myself with his emotional state, but I think he would be unhappy not to have gotten N’Zo Nikiema alive.

  He’ll be spared the upset since I want to play solo for a bit. Time to wait and see what happens. I fear Pierre Castaneda more and more. He has become very suspicious and might find it odd that I found the fugitive all by myself. It looks bad for me. And if one day Pierre Castaneda, looking straight into my eyes, says to me, “Between us, Colonel Kroma, do you think it’s possible to just chance upon the hiding place of a fleeing head of state? You know very well that’s absurd,” if one day he does ask me, I’ll leave the factual evidence aside and say this: “No, Mr. Minister of State, it is not possible. It makes no sense.”

  I can just see him raising his hands toward the sky, apparently sorry. “So then tell me what happened, my dear Asante.”

  From that moment on, there will be only one way out for me: to admit to crimes I did not commit—a strategy to carry out a coup d’état, or whatever else—in order to have the right to die in peace. I mean to die without being
tortured. These are the rules of the game and I know them well.

  Across from the bed on which N’Zo Nikiema lies, there is a wicker chair. I sit down on it, my arms crossed at my chest, my head slightly tilted to the left. My legs knock together lightly in spite of me, from my knees to my ankles. Those who know me well would easily guess how tense I am. Of course, to see this man so dreaded not long ago reduced to a small mass of inert flesh makes me think about the vanity of human passions. I don’t dwell on this, though. I am particularly concerned with what I am really going to be able to do with Nikiema’s body. I have no idea. I decide to proceed secretly with the investigation, for whatever purpose it will serve. I still want to know more about N’Zo Nikiema’s last months inside these four walls.

  That is most definitely a story worth telling. For the living? I suppose, but perhaps especially for the future. Fate has burdened me with this task. I’ll carry it out as best as I can. I am going to share this tale of young hooligans, femmes fatales, and those wounded by life with whoever wants to hear it. It’s funny. For once, I am going to tell stories instead of keeping them to myself. It’s a little intimidating for me too, I have to say.

  As I leave, I make sure that no one could have seen me. Once outside, I realize something that had escaped me at first: The door to the living room can be made invisible by an ingenious system that transforms the doorknob into a simple decoration. I disappear into the high grass, and when I believe I’m far enough away, I look back. The small house in Jinkoré is nothing more than a block of gray cement with metal spikes jutting out of its roof.

  Through the window, I can see clouds gathering in the sky over the Bastos II district. A bird with a red beak that’s too long for its tiny little body comes crashing into the window. It lets out a cry and then disappears. I turn to Ndumbe, whom I had called in a few minutes before. “Where have you been?”