Black Moses

THE BLACK MOSES

by Alain Mabanckou

 

Nominations: Aspen Words Longlist 2018, Booker Longlist 2017, PEN/Translation Finalist 2018

 

Date Read: November 28, 2023

 

Bearing the unwieldy name of Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko, whose rough translation is: “Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors,” the hero of this story is trying to build a life in an evolving Congo. As an orphan who has never met his parents, Moses doesn’t have the best beginnings.

 

Moses has survived the brutality of an orphanage which is used as a hot-spot for revolutionizing all the orphan’s thinking. He has endured fights among the kids, the director’s corrupt rule and illnesses until he is able to escape at the age of 13. He agonizingly leaves behind his dear friend Bonaventure who he cannot convince to go with him. Not having known any other life than the one at the orphanage, his newfound freedom comes as a surprise.

 

Moses immediately falls into a life of petty crime alongside the twins he escaped with. And, no shocker, they are just as corrupt as the institution he left behind. In fact, the wider world is far more corrupt than the orphanage. Being unsure of his place in this world, and still only 13, Moses grows up quickly on the streets in Congo.

 

Many things haunt him in his later mental spiral, but two particularly stand out: One, is that he watched a black cat being trapped and then cooked for food, which he ate. Two, is that he befriends Mama Alfa Romeo 500, a hooker who leads about 10 other hookers in her brothel. During a nationwide sweep against prostitution, she is either deported back to Zaire or killed. These women had become a pseudo family for Moses and the loss of them devastates him.

 

As Moses descends into madness, he reluctantly sees two doctors who claim they can cure him. And when they can’t, they accuse him of malingering. They call him a fraud. And his mental illness causes him to end up in a criminal asylum. And his new roommate? Bonaventure, the friend where it all began.

 

“When the Whites arrived in Africa, we had land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed; when we opened them again, we found the Whites had the land and we had the Bible.”

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