Alain Mabanckou - Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He was awarded the prestigious Grand Prix de Littrature Henri Gal for his body of work. He has also received the Subsaharan African Literature Prize for Blue-White-Red, and the Prix Renaudot for Memoirs of a Porcupine, which is published by Serpents Tail along with his other novels, Black Bazaar, Broken Glass and African Psycho.

In this country, a boss should always be bald and have a big belly. My uncle isnt bald, he hasnt got a big belly, and you dont realise, the first time you see him, that hes the actual boss of a big office in the centre of town. Hes an administrative and financial director. Maman Pauline says an administrative and financial director is someone who keeps all the companys money for himself and says: Ill hire you, I wont hire you, and Im sending you back to where you came from.

Uncle Ren works at the CFAO, the only company in Pointe-Noire that sells cars. He has a telephone and a television in his house. Maman Pauline thinks things like that cost too much for what they are, theres no point having them because people lived better lives without. Why put a telephone in your own home when you can go and make a call from the post office in the Grand March? Why have television when you can listen to the news on the radio? And anyway, the Lebanese down at the Grand March sell radios, you can beat them down on the price. You can also pay in instalments if youre a civil servant or an administrative and financial director, like my uncle.

I often think to myself that Uncle Ren is more powerful than the God people praise and worship every Sunday at the church of Saint-Jean-Bosco. No ones ever seen Him, but people are afraid of His mighty power, as though He might tell us off or give us a smack, when in fact He lives far far away, further than any Boeing can fly. If you want to speak to Him, you have to go to church and the priest will pass on a message to Him, which Hell read if he has a spare moment, because up there Hes run off his feet, morning, noon and night.

Uncle Ren is anti-church and is always saying to my mother: Religion is the opium of the people!

Maman Pauline told me, if anyone calls you opium of the people you should punch him straight off, because its a serious insult, and Uncle Ren wouldnt go using a complicated word like opium just for the fun of it. Since then, whenever I do something silly, Maman Pauline calls me opium of the people. And in the playground, if my friends really annoy me I call them opium of the people! and then we get into a fight over that.

My uncle says hes a communist. Usually communists are simple people, they dont have television, telephone, or electricity, hot water or air conditioning, and they dont change cars every six months like Uncle Ren. So now I know you can also be communist and rich.

I think the reason my uncle is tough with us is because the communists are strict about how things should be done, because of the capitalists stealing all the goods of the poor wretched of the Earth, including their means of production. How are the poor wretched of the Earth going to live off their labours if the capitalists own the means of production and refuse to share, eating up the profits, instead of splitting them fifty-fifty with the workers?

The thing that gets my Uncle Ren really angry is the capitalists, not the communists, who must unite because apparently the final struggle wont be long now. At least, thats what they teach us at the cole populaire in Moral studies. They tell us, for instance, that we are the future of the Congo, that its up to us to make sure that capitalism doesnt win the final struggle. We are the National Pioneer Movement. To start with we children belong to the National Pioneer Movement and later well belong to the Congolese Workers Party the CPT and maybe one day one of us will even become President of the Republic, who also runs the CPT.

Hearing me Michel use the words my uncle uses, you might think I was a true communist, but in fact Im not. Its just that he uses these strange, complicated words so often capital, profit, means of production, marxism, leninism, materialism, infrastructure, superstructure, bourgeoisie, class struggle, proletariat, etc., Ive ended up knowing them all, even if I do sometimes mix them up without meaning to and dont always understand them. For instance, when he talks about the wretched of the Earth, what he really means is the starving masses. The capitalists starve them, so theyll turn up to work the next day, even though theyre being exploited and they didnt eat yesterday. So before the hungry can win their struggle against the capitalists, they must do a tabula radar of the past and take their problems in hand, instead of waiting for someone else to come and liberate them. Otherwise theyre truly stuffed, theyll be forever hungry and eternally exploited.

When we sit down to eat at Uncle Rens house, I always get put in the worst seat, bang opposite the photo of an old white guy called Lenin, who wont take his eyes off me, even though I dont even know him, and he doesnt know me either. I dont like having an old white guy who doesnt even know me giving me nasty looks, so I look him straight back in the eye. I know its rude to look grown up people in the eye, thats why I do it in secret, or my uncle will get cross and tell me Im being disrespectful to Lenin who is admired the world over.

Then theres the photo of Karl Marx and Engels. It seems youre not meant to split these two old guys up, theyre like twins. Theyve both got big beards, they both think the same thing at the same time, and sometimes they write down both their thoughts in a big book together. Its thanks to them people now know what communism is. My uncle says it was Marx and Engels who showed that the history of the world was actually just the history of people in their different classes, for example, slaves and masters, landowners and landless peasants and so on. So, some people are on top in this world, and some are on the bottom and suffer because the ones on top exploit the ones at the bottom. But because things have changed a lot and the ones on top try to hide the fact that theyre exploiting the ones at the bottom, Karl Marx and Engels think we should all be quite clear that the differences still exist, and that nowadays there are two big classes at odds with each other, engaged in a ruthless struggle: the bourgeoisie and the proletariats. Its easy to tell them apart in the street: the bourgeois have big bellies because they eat what the proletarians produce and the proletarians or the starving masses are all skinny because the bourgeois only leave them crumbs to eat, just enough so they can come to work the next day. And Uncle Ren says this is what you call the exploitation of man by his fellow man.

My uncle has also hung on the wall a photo of our Immortal, comrade president Marien Ngouabi, and one of Victor Hugo, who wrote lots of poems that we recite at school.

Generally speaking, an Immortal is someone like Spiderman, Blek le Roc, Tintin or Superman, who never dies. I dont understand why we have to say that comrade president Marien Ngouabi is immortal when everyone knows hes dead, that hes buried in the cemetery at Etatolo, in the north of the country, a cemetery which is guarded seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, all because there are people who want to go and make their