African Bob

 

Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu stopped on Akomolafe Street to buy a Star Lager in one of the tin-roofed shacks that lined the dirt road. The weather was slightly overcast, humid, hot. Damini didn't want to fall and stain his pants. He crossed with apprehension the few rickety planks, which served as a bridge over a dried-up, smelly sewer, to pay the young woman who ran the stand. She smiled and winked at him. She was sure she knew this old man. The magnificent Innoson G8000 he had just come out of confirmed to her that this grandfather was rich. 

Damini did not take up the invitation. He knew that he represented a tiny opportunity to live a dream life for all the girls from poor families in these suburbs. He had taken advantage of those hopes more than once. Now he was old. He was tired of the bullshit.

Damini had been a celebrity throughout the continent. After many years as a Nigerian music star, Damini Ogulu had left show business for politics. He was one of the main promoters of Oyo, a coalition kingdom between the Yoruba, Edo, Ibo, Ijaw, and Efik-Ibibio ethnic groups grouped around the coastal oil fields in the south of the country. 

From the outset, the Abuja regime denounced this secession, which deprived Nigeria not only of the wealth of the southern oil fields, but of almost all its maritime outlets. The civil war that followed was a decade-long bloodbath. Millions of Nigerians lost their lives on the banks of the Niger and Benue rivers, on the border that separated the Oyo kingdom from the Hausa, Fulani, Gwari and Chamba territories in the north. 

The fragile Oyo kingdom had survived for a few years, with the help of thousands of Russian mercenaries, before being torn apart by internal struggles. The various oil companies had seen no interest in sharing the wealth they generated with the populations of the surrounding territories. They had therefore abandoned the kingdom and its representatives. The central regime in Abuja could not, however, recover the oil wells and the country sank into anarchy.

Damini had endured all those years of uncertainty and suffering. He had been a prominent figure, briefly appointed Minister of Education, and had spent years in prison. Several influential Nigerian families had taken a dim view of the emergence of this popular artist in Nigerian politics. Entering the political arena in Africa meant getting close to the national wealth, which meant taking a share of the money that all these families had been embezzling for generations. 

So, Damini Ogulu was dismissed.

He had been very lucky to stay alive, despite countless assaults by men paid to kill him, even if he could not escape the painful humiliation of rape. He had spent years in overcrowded prisons, sometimes without food for days on end, alone, in fear. He had almost died of a thousand diseases. The man who had emerged had lost his arrogance and had lost a lot of weight. But he had gained in cruelty. He was a survivor of hell.

From the moment he was released, which he had obtained by bribing a judge and a whole chain of guards, Damini had known where to take refuge. Before he was imprisoned, he had put all of his wealth into a small family oil operation on the Otulu side. By the time he was released from prison, his personal fortune had grown. Oil was no longer an energy source for vehicles in Europe and Asia. But in Africa and much of the Middle East, all cars still ran on gasoline. Oil exploitation was still largely profitable there, especially since the large oil fields in Port Harcourt and Lagos had been almost completely destroyed by the wars.

The friends who operated the oil field with his investment had sought to get rid of Damini. He had reacted brutally: all of them had been eliminated, including their children. There was no question of anyone dispossessing Damini of his freedom and the little time he had left to live. 

Usually, he was always accompanied by his henchmen, especially his personal bodyguard, Usman, a mountain of muscle he had met in prison and who owed him his life. But today, Damini had a private visit to make. He had taken the risk of going out alone. After all, he had been able to keep a low profile, and there was no longer a price on his head from people of influence. The only risk came from the gangs of armed people who took over the neighborhoods and set up a thousand roadblocks. On a misunderstanding, one could perfectly well be kidnapped, even killed.

It was a game of intimidation. The technique was always the same. If you knew you were powerful enough, you would break through the roadblocks, without even giving them a look. Most of the time, the neighborhood wankers didn't insist, not wanting to see big guys armed to the teeth who would make them pay for their audacity in blood. Damini had therefore passed several roadblocks without stopping. The tinted windows of his big SUV didn't let you see anything from inside, the vehicle was armored. It could withstand a few shots.

He was going to see his daughter, the only daughter he recognized. He had kids all over the place, kids he'd had from several passing girls, girls he couldn't remember. He received messages from dozens of young people who claimed to be his children. The letters piled up in his desk drawer, with genetic tests that proved the parentage of these kids to him. He never answered. He didn't give a damn about those kids. Their mothers hadn't even been able to get the attention of his Dom Juan cock back then.

His daughter's mother hadn't been a great partner either, but at least she came from a great family. She had been killed in the war, raped and had her throat slit from what he had heard. His daughter had survived, and he had reconnected with her almost as soon as she was released from prison. More exactly, one of the girl's aunts had visited him, with a small army, to remind him of his duties. He didn't know why he had responded favorably, aside from the obvious threat posed by the cantankerous aunt's henchmen. 

The young woman who was his daughter didn't even like him, that was obvious. She shunned him. But he had decided that she was his child. He played the responsible father, even though it was starting to piss him off terribly.

That's what Damini was thinking about when a 9-millimeter bullet pierced his temple. A group of robbers were using the roadside stalls to hold people to ransom. The guy with the gun recognized Damini. He hated him, of course, as a corrupt politician, but his daughter's rapist could not escape his vengeance.

This good man occasionally worked as a brigand, when his cousins called him for help. Usually he worked quietly in one of the businesses of Bob, the German who lived in the bush.

Bob was rich, yes, fucking rich. To become a millionaire, he had given more than twenty years of his life to Central Africa; twenty years he had spent roaming the mosquito-infested rainforests of the Congo Basin; twenty years wearing out his health to find rocks to sell on every continent. He had worked on his own, visiting the most remote villages, populated by people living like animals. Sometimes, when it was possible, he created small clandestine mines deep in the rainforests. Everything remained to be done, the local populations seemed unable to appreciate the value of their soil. However, as soon as something was started, they looted everything. Bob's activities had always been carried out under the close control of local uniformed thugs, who were easy to corrupt but dangerous. Too often, these fools ruined projects through greed and treachery. As soon as the money started flowing, they would take over and ruin the business. Bob had too often had to flee the crackling of machine guns.

A white man couldn't trust many people in Africa. But he had a few good guys, like the "Captain" or Koffi, guys Bob had recruited in Bangui. These men would have followed him to his death. In those shitty countries, there were people like that, spontaneous, generous. They were the ones who introduced him to Lingala Rumba, Afrobeat, Mbalax, and all the music that made the evenings in Central Africa so special. "Captain" was also a computer genius, a guy who could tinker with old PCs, salvage graphics cards and processors and turn them into machines more powerful than a Corsair One i164. There were all these abilities in Africa, great mechanics, high-flying intellectuals, poets who filled the gaps in the system with their initiatives.

And then there were the worst bastards on the planet, often the leaders, presidents, ministers, chiefs. This was true everywhere, but it was almost funny in Africa.

Bob had traveled millions of miles of dirt roads, had endured the feigned tenderness of the prostitutes he met in the seedy bars of Bangui, Yaoundé or Libreville. He had dealt with dangerous "friends"; all to give himself a chance to become something other than an unemployed man from Chemnitz, his hometown in Saxony. He had spent all these years enduring the heat of tropical Africa, its violence and the bullshit of the bureaucracy, to give himself a chance not to die poor.

To do this, he had always stayed on the front lines, taking few precautions, drinking local sodas, eating cassava or "bicycle chicken" on the side of the dirt roads. He had survived bouts of malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, cholera, rabies, bilharzia, intestinal parasites, dengue fever, O'Nyong-Nyong virus, and all the local crap. If he used condoms to fuck the local women, it was because he couldn't do otherwise. HIV affected more than ten percent of the population and almost all the prostitutes.

Bob had experienced the touch of a gun to his head or kidneys dozens of times. Civil war, banditry and riots were the favorite sports events of these morons. Often, what had taken him months to earn had been snatched away in minutes. He had been injured several times, but had so far managed to escape a violent death.

But it was there, somewhere between the 15th parallel north and south, that a cursed Glossina palpalis, one of those cursed tsetse flies, recognizable by the rustle of its wings, had managed to infect him with a Trypanosoma gambiense, a fucking single-celled parasite.

He had gone through the different phases of sleeping sickness, months of more or less uninterrupted fever accompanied by spleen and liver disorders. Large red and purple spots had appeared on his body.

He had been treated with pentamidine, injected intramuscularly, only after he had reached Yaoundé after several days of a painful journey during which he had thought a thousand times of staying there.

He had stayed for several days in a dispensary that was cruelly lacking in means. Koffi, "Captain" and the others had run around the city in vain. There was no medicine.

So he gave up, deciding to return to Europe to die. The German embassy was closed in Yaoundé. He didn't understand, having rarely heard from the European world in years. He had had to hire a plane to Italy, then hire the services of a couple of grubby barbouzes, two kinds of Moldavian bodyguards, who promised to take him to Dresden.

What he saw in Europe surprised him. There was an atmosphere of the end of the world, with many regions ravaged by civil war. Islam was taking over entire cities, where Turkish and African immigrants had settled since the 20th century. The anarchy that reigned had forced Bob's drivers to bypass a thousand roadblocks and drive through disturbing no-man's lands. Of course, he didn't realize all this until he came out of his comatose state. He could hear the bangs, the ambulance sirens, the bombings. He had wondered why his bodyguards had not left him there, on the side of a road cluttered with burnt-out cars or in the rubble of a destroyed village. Of course, they could give up on going back to Central Africa if Bob didn't give his friends back there any news. But this was something else, these guys had given their word that they would bring him to Dresden.

When he arrived in Dresden, he was immediately admitted to a private clinic. While watching television in his room, he realized how the country was plunged into anarchy, as were the neighboring countries. Civil war was tearing Western Europe apart and breaking up the states.

When he was discharged from the hospital, he was a little better. He had understood the decline of his homeland without return. His childhood neighborhood had changed irrevocably. He couldn't go there because of the daily riots. His childhood friends were gone or unreachable.

So he had decided to leave Germany and move to a suite in the Rixos Libertas hotel in Dubrovnik to try to recover or at least die peacefully. Croatia was exactly what he needed; there were no nasty, noisy tsetse flies that had given him trypanosomiasis, the parasitic disease that was slowly killing him.

Bob was barely past fifty, but he was exhausted from his African years. He wondered if he had much longer to live. He had studied his illness, he knew that the next stages of his ordeal would be an ever increasing weight loss, headaches and then insanity before sinking into a state of torpor before death.

The Dresden clinic where he had been treated had, however, claimed that his condition would improve, thanks in particular to the treatment derived from miltefosine, already used in the treatment of leishmaniasis. He had doubted it, although he had noticed an improvement of his libido, which he hastened to celebrate with the Bulgarian prostitutes of the hotel bar.

In any case, he was not afraid to die. He felt that he had lived a difficult but fulfilling life. Although he had suffered from his isolation in the heart of the dark continent, he recognized that his life there had been more exciting than the gloomy suburbs of West Saxony promised.

He didn't know what to think anymore. He had hated the dirt, the ignorance, the violence and the corruption at every turn. From Cameroon in the west to Chad in the north, from Sudan in the east to the Congo in the south, he had had to put up with stupid superstitions and a pervasive race complex that prohibited sincere friendship with many locals. He had tasted African women, their spicy smell, the shades of their skin, their lips, their big asses. He had systematically rejected the girls who were looking for a husband, preferring to have sex for a fee, officially interested.

In Dubrovnik, he had enjoyed, especially in the beginning, the baroque churches and Renaissance palaces, the last testimonies of a European Christian civilization that no longer existed in the 21st century. It was an illusion, but he enjoyed it for a while.

On his return to Europe, he had seen the ravages of immigration and the cultural sodomy that had been imposed on Europeans, especially those in the West. This did not surprise him. All this had been predictable since his childhood, when the first hundreds of thousands of migrants had come to populate the area where he had grown up, in Chemnitz, East Germany. He had observed these poor people, mostly Muslims, gradually imposing their ignorance and misery on the working-class suburbs that did not want them. He had seen halal stores, Turkish cafes and hijabs change the appearance and atmosphere of the streets. The suburbs of Chemnitz had never been very beautiful, but the newcomers had not made anything better. There was no one to blame but the political and economic elites who had organized this invasion. Bob knew there was nothing he could do about it. So, as soon as he came of age, he headed south, taking the opposite route from the invaders. He had nothing to lose, his future was over in Europe.

His wanderings southward had stopped in the middle of the African continent. Africa was as he had imagined it: dirty, messy, anarchic and corrupt; but full of opportunities too. Africa was violent. He had experienced countless scenes of slaughter and pillage. Each time, corpses lay on the ground. State forces, the "legitimate" armies, were often more dangerous than the rebels.

Bob didn't care about their mess, just did his business quietly. But it had been complicated, especially at first, when he didn't know anyone. He had to go through crooks of all shapes and sizes before he could get close to the really influential people, in the direct entourage of the rulers. And there, it was even more risky because of the sums involved and the insatiable greed of the rotten people who governed these countries.

It had to be said that Bob's job was particularly dangerous, arousing the envy of many people in these countries where the plundering of resources was a national sport. Bob had tried to navigate the political coups, the kidnappings and murders, the murky waters of the spies that swarmed these rich soil regions. Everywhere, it was misery and abandonment, when the richness of the subsoil could have made the populations rich and prosperous. How could he have loved and respected customs that produced so much misery?

Bob had recovered, to his great surprise. He had some after-effects, but he had undeniably recovered.

Croatia, for all its charms, had not kept Bob. He made a trip to Europe, just to convince himself that there was no place to hold him, before leaving for Africa for good.

He had settled in Point Kilomètre 5, the Muslim district of Bangui. Africa, he had finally understood, had given him more than he had thought. Europe, culturally disintegrated, was also in the grip of civil war. There seemed to be no way out. America had been destroyed since the great earthquake, and he couldn't see himself living in one of those millionaire camps guarded by militiamen somewhere in Colorado or Maine.

The sound of tanks echoed around the world. Bob didn't want to wait for the next big global massacre.

He found himself longing for the people he had left behind. Africa, though coveted for its mineral wealth, was out of the picture in the vast war plan that was agitating the great nations. Clan wars broke out regularly in Africa, drought displaced the population, Islam masked the banditry that reigned everywhere, and order was maintained only in the capitals. But Bob had his bearings there. He would, if necessary, cross the borders, according to the coups d'état and the political upheavals. Above all, he would find a freedom that the Western world could not offer him.

All he had done was to gather his men, "Capitaine", Koffi and their large families, buy some weapons, a few houses and a little land to be able to eat as much as he wanted of manioc, taro and "chicken-bicycle", sheltered behind the walls of his property.

The tropical climate favored the growth of all the fruit trees one could wish for. All it took was a little agricultural organization to ensure the self-sufficiency of his clan. For Bob had created his clan, the "white negro" clan, avoiding politics, trying to live with everyone in good harmony.

Within his clan, he had organized a school and set up a medical dispensary. He had imposed strict sanitary rules and basic prophylactic measures to clean his property daily.

Many people came to the "white negro" for advice or medical treatment. Bob had tried to set up a few businesses as soon as he had gathered enough armed men to keep the uniformed pests away who wanted to impose their protection. He knew he was allowed to do this as long as he didn't seek power, remained politically and religiously neutral. After all, this region had brought him fortune, he was only giving back a little of what he had been given.

This had lasted for several years, punctuated by political tensions, crises and negotiations with the armed bands that came to test him regularly. That was Africa.

Bob's problem was the mob of poor people who came to him for protection from the bastards who raped, tortured and killed them. Bob couldn't feed the whole area and he had to avoid conflict with the local kingpins.

He tried to keep a low profile, with his clan forming a barrier around him. But this had always been complicated.

Bob had died one day, from a machete blow that he could not foresee. He had died like an "African", infested and happy.