Letter from Switzerland #1
My dear Nsenga,
How are you? How are things in the old country? I hope all is well. I have just arrived here in Switzerland. The weather is nice; the country is well-organized. The people are friendly… but there are very few black people, it’s not like back home. Most of the population consists of men and women who bear a striking resemblance to the priests in our country and the women that they call sisters. Imagine a country populated entirely by priests and nuns! How horrifying, I hear you say! And yet, strangely enough, I saw children, and even a few pregnant sisters: it seems that these priests and nuns procreate! Which of course is strictly forbidden back home: our brothers and sisters have chosen to condemn themselves to a life of celibacy! There are other curious customs here. I will tell you about them in due course. But before I end this missive, permit me one last observation. Contrary to my expectations, the white children at the station did not offer to carry my bags in exchange for a little money. None of the boys came up to me! What’s more, I saw elderly people carrying heavy burdens and not once did a young person lend a helping hand! I’ve been told that’s how it is in the West.
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Letter from Switzerland #2
My dear Nsenga,
Before I tell you about what happened when I exited the Cornavin railway station, I should give you an account of my wonderful trip from Kigali to Geneva. You remember that I left Grégoire Kayibanda International Airport on the morning of October 12, 1987, bound for Geneva. I traveled with the Russian airline Aeroflot, along one of the most beautiful aerial routes on the planet: the airplane flew over the entire length of the Nile from Kigali to Cairo, via Kampala-Entebbe and Khartoum.
I was the same age as Jesus Christ when he died, as the Russian gate agent from Aeroflot remarked when he checked my papers. I have never forgotten this remark, which spurred me on during my studies in the West. Forgive me this digression on age and sacrifice; thoughts like this, when we hear them expressed by a good person, are among the words that we never forget.
Back to my wonderful trip: that morning, the morning I was lifted into the sky over my country by a Russian aircraft, remains very important to me. You remember, my dear Nsenga, how I always told you about my dream of studying in the land of the white man.
Having left Kigali that morning, we landed in Kampala-Entebbe with a delay of thirty-five minutes or so. Entebbe International Airport is situated on an enchanting spot near Lake Victoria—“Ô lac!,” as Lamartine would say, if his ghost could visit Kampala. During this brief stop in Entebbe, I was reminded of two events: the Entebbe raid by Israel in the 1970s, and the bombing of the airport by the NRA, the National Resistance Army of Uganda… The attacks on Amin Dada’s regime left him unscathed while tarnishing what had once been the jewel in Africa’s crown! The airport terminal still bears the scars of all this barbarity.
From Kampala we continued our journey to Khartoum. Here we weren’t even given the opportunity to disembark from the airplane; I only saw a few manual laborers and, off in the distance, a wide expanse of sand. I’m already in the desert, I thought, far from the Great Lakes… and paradise lost!
From Khartoum we were once again lifted into the sky by the Russian bird, this time bound for Cairo. God made the bed of the Nile stretch from Kigali to Cairo… and the Russian plane flew over the great river.
When we entered the sky above greater Sudan, my thoughts turned to Geneva, my final destination, when suddenly the plane vanished into the clouds, and then into the night. Indeed, we landed in Cairo at night. Here I wasn’t able to see anything, unfortunately, but I thought of the pyramids and the pharaohs, and the beautiful, plump thighs of the women of the Orient. We didn’t stay in Cairo for long, and it was still night when we left the capital of Egypt for Moscow, the capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Many hours later, how many I can no longer recall, we were greeted by some extremely cold weather in Moscow. Here too I unfortunately wasn’t able to see anything, but I thought of Ilyich Ulyanov, or Lenin, the October Revolution, the kolkhozy, and the sovkhozy.
My dear Nsenga, after a freezing cold night in Moscow, we left the USSR for Switzerland. I had always been eager to see Switzerland, like a man in love eager to see his lover. After I don’t know how many hours, we finally landed at the airport in Zurich.
I was in Switzerland! I thought of money and gold, milk and honey, the Red Cross, Protestantism, banks—in short, a country where poverty has been consigned to oblivion. As I was in Switzerland, I could now take the train to Geneva; the metallic snake passed through Lausanne.
In Lausanne, I remembered a conversation I once had with a graduate from the University of Lausanne, Aloys, who spoke to me at length about Switzerland, time, and transportation. White people, he said, always seem to need time: either they need to save time or spend it! It was this anxiety about time, which both is and isn’t the same thing as our time, that prompted Aloys, in his book Étincelles, to say about white people: “You don’t have enough time… We have eternity.” I would soon be confronted with the problem of time. Should I adhere to the logic of time or of eternity? It was in the evening that we finally arrived at Geneva Cornavin. But that wasn’t the end of the journey!
Translated by Louis Greenwood Lüthi
