The Lights of Pointe-Noire
“Everyone had an explanation, except me. Just to be clear, I asked whether we were waiting for two more people, because there were already over thirty of us on the plot left by my mother. Looking embarrassed, a cousin whispered in my ear: ‘It’s your mother and father sitting on the two chairs. You think they are empty but in fact they are taken…’ And she explained that other members of the family were absent, at rest in the Mont-Kamba cemetery, the burial place for the common people, at the othe...r end of town… I walked round ‘Maman Pauline’s plot’, as they say here. There is a tiny hut tucked away in one corner of the property. Almost a blemish on this neighbourhood of solid buildings, with electricity. Every property in the Voungou neighbourhood has been carefully fenced in. Except ours, where the hut seems to have pointedly refused this practice, preferring the mode of the old communist regime, where we were told that everything belonged to ‘the people, and the people alone’.MoreLess
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