The Afterlife of
Victor Kamara

Victor Kamara, Grand Mare and Paris   1997

When we reached the river I wanted to prostrate myself on the ground.  The words of school chapel were in my head.   Deliver us from evil.  Deliver us from Evil.  Deliver us....

            I had longed for home, but nothing was the same.  Even the school was not a refuge.  The thought made me want to cry.  Perhaps the school had always been both more and less than we imagined.  The Lundo School was a crucible where centuries converged on well-kept lawns, where Latin incantations flew from the mouths of chiefs’s sons, Marmoream relinquo, quam latericiam accepi, that canard repeated over the generations by our grandfathers, our great-uncles, our fine, fine natives.  Dreams rose from our iron cots, restless as oceans: nationhood, tribalism, revolution, algebraic equations and French verb conjugations, proverbs and prayers, deep, divergent renderings of truth someone, somewhere, considered absolute.  We played cricket and football, we kept our schoolboy secrets and our tribal secrets, too, those of us who had been initiated separate from those who had not, chosen ones, but in reality mere pawns in this backwater of a country that was always a minor eddy in someone’s else’s Great Game, whether Portugal, England, France, or, centuries before, the empires of Ghana, of Mali.  Too small a nation, created on a Lark, force fed the history of others, our pathetic classrooms reeking of mold and dry rot, our dormitories turned to slums, our fine, fine African headmaster’s faux Tudor mansion a ruin as blood welled up through the green blades of cricket fields. 

            The war was everywhere; suffering my country’s lingua franca.  In a war, there are always losses, and there would be more. 

            I never saw or heard of Samuel again after that journey.  I don’t know if he was killed, or left the country.  Perhaps he simply avoided me.  So many of my people believe in magic.  My mother’s mirror was enough to frighten him, an Eagle Scout who earned two silver palms and one gold.

            A soul of an African can never truly be at rest until it is laid to rest in African soil.  My mother warned me.  Not even then, I wanted to tell her.  Boarding the plane in Guinea, I could have sworn that you could pass your hand through me.  I had not merely resigned the presidency but died in the traces, and I was buried.  Buried in my country.  In Africa.  And yet my spirit wandered, unquiet.

            We managed to get to the Conakry airport in time for a flight to Brussels.  We called Johnny’s man and he gave me another false passport.  He said that Johnny Gabriel was still in prison.  A breakout had failed, but it was only a matter of time. 

            Fifteen minutes after I mounted the steps to my flat in Gentilly, exhausted, depressed, there was a pounding at the door.  I was on the bed.  I got up with a groan.  I think this was the first time I was truly afraid, because I had nowhere to run. 

            Guillaume walked into the apartment.  He did not sit in his usual chair but stood staring out the window.  Clouds sailed across the rooftops.  In the distance, the beacon at the top of the Eiffel Tower flickered. 

            “The window, it is like a painting,” he said softly.  “You remember your French?”

            “Une fenêtre,” I recited.  “The view is very special.  It makes this place feel like home.”

            “You don’t miss your country?” he asked, without turning.

            “That man is dead,” I said. 

            Seeing that he hadn’t heard me, I repeated the words.