Dancing with Assassins

 

Figure invested by the matrilineal ancestors of the Hemba-Tabwa chief Lusinga lwa Ng’ombe. Taken with his skull to Belgium as a prize of war by Émile Storms. 

I love A Dance of Assassins. There are dense informative books and there are beautiful heartbreaking books and every so often there are books that are both. Allen F. Roberts makes it look effortless, all the more stunning in a field where the writers aren't typically known for the elegance of their prose. Now that I've written the story below, I'm going to do a notes + review of the book very soon to contextualize it, but as a brief summary: Roberts draws on his expertise in Central African art history and explorations of precolonial Tabwa culture to provide new ways of looking at one particular event - the beheading of transcultural chieftain and nascent empire-builder Lusinga Iwa Ng'ombe (called a "sanguinary potentate" in the writings of at least one colonial observer) by Belgian officer Émile Storms. Storms (himself nicknamed Bwana Boma/Mister Fortress for his obsessive building practices) takes Lusinga's skull back to Belgium, where it was studied for years by phrenologists who wrote feverishly about how x ridge proves y degenerate trait and other insane nonsense. In the book, the assassination of Lusinga is used as a lens to study the often violent, sometimes apocalyptic transformations of East-Central African societies as they were hooked into global commercial networks of slaving, ivory hunting, etc and the early entrance of European colonists into this world.  

Quick content warning

The following story contains strong racially charged language. It's not purposeless - I hope - and I think it is necessary to confront as an aspect of the sources which inspired this but just to be crystal clear, I am a black man. There's also corpses and stuff. 

An Exsanguinary Potentate

"Perhaps the lieutenant had an inkling of a letter from Secretary General Maximilien Strauch of the IAC written at about that time but that he would not receive for some months, reminding Storms that he 'should not miss the opportunity to collect a few skulls of indigenous niggers if you can do so without offending the superstitious sentiments of your people...'" - Allen Roberts, A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo 

I

Lusinga decided it was time to visit when he heard that the Belgians had finally gotten around to enslaving his old rival’s soul.

 “Oho, the one who killed you is in some trouble!” the medical student from Kalemie called out cheerily as he picked up his kerosene in town. It may have been her idea of small talk.

He narrowed his eyes to see through the glare as she pushed a screen in his face. “Qui est le lieutenant-général Émile Storms, dont la statue a été démontée ce jeudi matin à Ixelles?” it breathlessly demanded. Lusinga only nodded in the wind-bowed manner peculiar to montagnards and continued up the road, walking his bicycle until he stopped to wait out a sudden storm. Sewing this last patch had taken a little longer than expected - he was the fifth Lusinga of the Clan Bushpig - but it couldn't be otherwise. The rain thinned to a mist and he pedaled on. He had preparations to make, hair to grow and braid. 

II

Paddling to Brussels from Sud-Kivu is not particularly hard if you're familiar with Tanganyika’s moods. Kill the engine and skirt the edges of her littoral islands until the sensation of walking on hands settles over the craft. Lake is kwànja, an unfolding. It’s a prehistoric trick, learned for canoeing across Mother of Broad Rocks, but one that works wherever the water is still mostly amniotic fluid. Lusinga’s little tilapia boat found itself at Ixelles Ponds within the hour and it was a short walk from there to the bare plinth. The soul had already been neatly packaged and carted off, bound for the same museum where they kept his own. 

The Luba hold a story about raw people. The earliest master of the Upemba Depression was a redling, a man who wasn't finished. His name was Nkongolo and the driver ants taught him war. Very soon he could march or kill like an ant, new skills just as effective on villages. He took his sisters to wife and ruled by terror; nobody yet knew that there were other ways. The first black man in this world, Mbidi Kiluwe, came to Upemba from the East-Beyond-East looking for his own sister’s hunting hound. One wife stumbled upon his camp by a pool and his beauty stole the woman from her own rawness. Oiled skin, filed teeth, his hair in buns, royalty enstooled in his lungs. The heat that rose up in her body as she stared cooked her. Luba beauty is artifice: self-invention and good manners. 

III

Kabwalala was the preferred charm for carving a refuge out of the night. Housebreakers and sneaking lovers in Lubanda still use it but not as well as the bushpigs do. They cast the spell on man to root and play in his gardens. Dogs of the spirits. Exhuming the grave was still a heavy effort, but he hadn't been disturbed at his labors. 

"The Bushoong paramounts thought you came from a rubber ball island." Lusinga swung his adze, a motion somewhere between shoveling and hoeing. "A fisherman king with a beard for catching sardines, losing his home to the waves. Pile up rubber, death in abeyance." He surveyed the coffin and pried it open, wedging the tool into a gap and leaning. 

"We understood, though, us homeless Luba of the east. We heard the world crack already. The Tabwa heard it. Once you feel the splintering under your feet, the curse is laid; blood coats your arms. Reaches back even before to daub all the faces of your ancestors. I saw it showering off my body the day I ran from the abattoir they made of my village." Lusinga's voice was like a door closing as he groped around, feeling for kizimu. 

"How did redlings come to know, Bwana Boma? Who carried your people screaming into need?” He picked up the skull and turned it in his hands wonderingly, checking the dimples for degenerate traits. Satisfied, he began to cut a disk out of the cranium with the adze’s iron edge.

Lusinga kept talking as he unfuneraled Storms, pausing repeatedly to apply putrefied meat from his practitioner's basket on what began looking like a severed head. The alternating sounds encouraged flesh to knit. 

“Mister Fortress who towered above nigger games and nigger superstitions still made sure to take my figure. The figure of my mothers. You gave it away then, really. That you could sense what mattered. I think it's why you were censured by your administration. Why your sardine king brought you back to this antiseptic house. They couldn't bear the thought of just one redling with meaning in his liver, even if he used the understanding as a weapon in their service." The boy chieftain scratched the bridge of his nose absently, right where a knifed-in cross marked the seat of dreams.

Bwana Boma only had enough strength in his jaws to parrot words back: “Gave it away. Gave it away."

Rugaruga: a kinless once-man, his only worth the violence he can do for a monster. A good one can share in the monster's aspect, borrow its fang and eye when working the mine of flesh beyond Tanganyika. The very best fuse with the monster entirely, becoming a semi-animate appendage of a vast beast with its heart in London or Brussels or Chicago. Its new tentacles may wear the flayed skins of chiefs and burble out orders in Tshilubà, but their jerky movements always give them away. They can never dance like men again.

IV

Death had granted him a solidity that he’d never quite managed to achieve in open sky. Émile I Storms, empereur du Tanganyika; the title was less comical with the weight of cavernous decades in him. Even the barkcloth band connecting his head to the body it operated looked stately. Kapata makolo, chief-stifler, laid across his lap with its matte barrel tiredly reflecting the moonlight. The old soldier wanted to deny the enemy this last victory but he could see the ray arcing from the hidden sun’s feasting table into the tall boy’s body, a sliver of ancestor sitting just behind the breastbone.

 “Reincarnate?” 

“An inelegant way to think about it. Everyone has a relative perched in their hearts. Kufufuka. Lusinga is title and ghost and god, my father was Lusinga until he died with -" This Lusinga didn’t finish. “If I had been a king when you had me beheaded, you’d have met with a woman now. We can’t seal kings into their headdresses. Only a woman can stand to grasp a dead king’s staff, or sit with his widows, or speak in his voice.” He looked at his sinewy arms, imagining feminine scars running down their length.

"I'm not sure." It almost hurt to admit; manhood lived inside decisiveness to Storms. "There is no retreating from the line tonight, Mister Fortress. We are the only dancers in the world and we bleed into each other."

The rocky shore of Tanganyika was hard for a dead body to walk on, so Lusinga held Storms around the waist in case he stumbled. He did, but only once. Refusing the seat on the boat offered to him, the general walked down the gentle slope to the water alone - his steps steadier on the packed, wet sand. When the cool green-blue touched his toes, he didn’t recoil the way most people do. He walked straight into the autumn waves until they crashed up to his shins, tugging him back and forth like a reed that had always been there, that already knew this life. Storms stayed planted in the water a long time, taking deep and shaky new breaths as the contents of the great lake rushed toward him and away from him, toward and away. The litter and fish and blood. Someone else’s history. Storms concentrated on the swirls of foam at his feet so he wouldn’t cry.

"I knew you were listening. When I grabbed your rotting head and tweaked your ears and sneered. I...heard the song they made of your death coming from the trunk our porters used to store your skull." The chieftain smiled broadly, pleased to see Bwana Boma's memory returning. "It's my song. I had the right." “Why all of this? Is it because I kept the statue? I built a shrine to you, after a fashion. Talk of the city.” Lusinga shook his head, the night's exertions finally apparent on his face in dawn's halflight. “I don't want the veneration of the dead souled. You ate covenant in Mpala. I was the guarantor. Some things have meanings.”