Part 2 – The part of me that is Africa
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I have always lived in Africa. I realise I never truly left it because it is woven in my own narrative since I am born. But it is not a geography. Africa is a founding family myth. To understand how it works, you have to wrap yourself into the same pointillist stories as I did.
Let’s try.
The gravity centre of the Family was the house in the Var, Claviers. Aka La Clarté, which means both The Light and The Clarity. Ever so fitting.
And so, each year, every year, we would prepare to go and pay respects to our own penates, our family ancestors and spirits. As many of the Family as possible would try and convene there. After due negotiations about which weeks and what rooms, every year, on the dot, we would start the Great Trek. At 0500, we would stash the bags and suitcases, load the cat boxes, fit the birds cages, and finally ram the remaining crates. Into the car! Forward for 13 hours of traffic jam. Towards the South, toward the Sun – on roads jammed with columns which looked like June 1940 refugees – to arrive, exhausted, haggard, at 1800. After all, school holidays are not supposed to be all fun, are they?
Why endure each year the same ordeal? Because, in our matriarchy, Claviers was the spiritual Home of the Family. So, we were only driving back home!
You see, the house in the South never was only the cinderblocks cube woven within the outer ramparts of the village. It was always spoken of in reverent tones more appropriate for a mansion. From now on, I will call it the Mansion, so that you get the right tone of the remembered conversations.
The Family actually lived in the Mansion, as if just off the boat from Congo. Even 10 years later.
In the French Deep South, skies are Transvaal-blue, hills undulate towards the horizon, the Sun blazes and silence is only broken by cicadas. Mental, sensorial, social isolation. There the Family can forever be foreigners in their own country. Like colonials. There, there is no distraction, no competition, we have to stick together in the tent. The Mansion itself is barely larger than a tent: 4 rooms packed with the random flotsam of repatriations, moves and inheritance. All treasured memories no-one remembers.
A collection of stories never finished, a pile of hints at stories never told.
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The Mansion looks fittingly like something the Mad Hatter came up with. High walls looming over your head, all weird angles, overhead curves and impossible geometries. Tiling that flows and breaks like waves. Colours splashed on plastered walls in plumes of fading pastel yellows, blues and pinks. The house looks outside through gigantic floor to ceiling wooden persiennes, their gigantic louvers collapsed in forlorn Vs. The transient glitz and bling of colonial money just before its fallen grandeur. No, we did not build it, my grandparents bought it. It was there, as was, and fitted instantly into our family story like a glove.
Here the narrative can only be kept indoors, the sun baking it into the stones, melting days away.
That is why the Mansion is Africa to me.
In the Family, Africa was never truly discussed, as in formally talked about. It was not truly remembered. It just was. All around us, everywhere you looked. Visit the Colosseum, and you are soaked in the history without need for words or commentary. That is as far as it will get you.
Africa was some pictures on the wall, on the desk. A box of mapping instruments. A chunk of malachite. Scattered memento mori. But each year we had the ceremony: The Films. A handful of movies shot over there and brought back here, randomly parsing 20 years. No photo album, no chronology, just a baffling collection of moving images. Charlie Chaplin movies with no gags, no funny person, no laughter, just the car of Tintin in Congo. But without drama or pathos either. A detached view and viewing without smiles, laughter nor tears to our fallen memories. It was the running commentary during these films that brought them to a semblance of life. A memories competition, a race for names dropping: “oh, that is Isko … that was our car, probably … This was the boat to Antwerp…” And when no-one could remember what that sequence, person or place was or where, just too bad, who cares? It’s gone now.
The ceremony was not to bring back memories, it was to put them to rest.
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After all, we were living in it anyway.
Next door was the Tower. Formerly a part of the town ramparts, it was melded into the Mansion, after decades of disuse. It was now part overspill accomodation, part teetering piles of perishable memories. The ones not treasured enough or too painful to make it to the main rooms. Gun racks, framed pictures of hunts, of guides, furniture. Fleeting memories of important events. All stored in the Tower, a locked door away. Always present, never seen.
And in the basement, the Cave, still piled as they had been just off the boat, 3 layers of travel trunks and suitcases, numbered, labelled, padlocked, packed. Ready to go. Never opened until 20 years later. Ready to go for 50 years.
A colonial Africa Pompei.
And the people? Well, the Family was all there: all Matriarchy present and accounted for. The others never truly counted. Even my grandfather, dead only a few months before my birth, could have died in a previous life or another novel for all it seemed. Was he missed? Maybe, I will never really know. It felt as if the jury was still out there. Until I realised later, listening to people around me talking about their grandparents, that, for my family, it just meant that he simply never had truly died. He had just left the tent as he had done every weekend to go hunting.
But he left the tent, left us alone, like Congo did.
The real, material Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, was never discussed. It was supposed to be the veldt, the flora and fauna, kiswahili, and should have stuck to that. The true Congo for the family was never copper, uranium or diamonds, salaries and pensions. It was not the Jadotville club house or the bungalows. Congo was Africa, and Africa was a yearning.
Africa had left 8 years prior, never to come back.
It was not even truly Congo in the first place, it was Africa we were using as a word. And even then, always ever alluded to, never talked through. Infinite, fascinating. Nature. Majestic elephants. Many types of graceful antelopes you could shoot. Buffaloes you could shoot too, to eat. Chimps, friendly until you had to shoot them too because they grow jealous of your kids. We spoke kiswahili.
Blue skies, but admittedly, with some splashes of blood.
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And so I spent holidays swimming in half-heard memories, half-spoken stories, turning into souvenirs I never had, reconstructed from hints and allusions. People I heard of and sometimes met but only knew through this reconstructed narrative: Iskovici, Bruylandt, Cotton, Hamptine, … What did you do in the evening? Piano and books? Radio? What was your daily routine during the war?
No idea. Until this slow, patchy, one-sided reconstruction.
This is the challenge.
Part of me is an Africa that was never far away mentally, physically, neither real nor fake. A pointillist, ever evolving, never sharpening, family memory.
Stay tuned for more.
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