Suzanne’s Laager

This is a society that existed but no one remembers.

This is a society that existed but no one wants to remember.

This is a society that was already forgotten even when it existed.

This is a society between societies, a time between times, a world between worlds.

They were my family, they lived there, they lived then.

They went to Africa. And came back.

I had heard about it. Of course I did. How could I not have? Sometimes reluctantly, sometimes unwillingly, often unwittingly. Every time the three daughters and their mother met, they conjured up a world of names, places, colours, words, voices and tones; a world that only existed anymore in these conversations. Such a better world it was. To anyone else, it was at best a collection of stuttering, clattering movies; to anyone else than them a random collection of sequences.

The Africa in “when we were in Africa” was somewhere else, a nebula of indistinct memories, images and projections, in a fraying narrative.

In 2024, I started lifting the lid and unpack the boxes, literally, of my own heritage: century old letters, movies, photos, artefacts. In trunks lying around in the frozen instant my grandparents set foot from Congo to a small village hiding on top of a hill, in the South of France, just around the next bend of a twisty road.

Take these scattered shards, lay them out in some timeline, mix a bit of research, some memories and not a little reverie, and conjure up a lost world; the dust of a world my mother, my grandparents never truly left. The faerie world they brought back in stories and rituals.

Once an aspiration, a reality, now forever a regret.

They never really left their Africa; it was just branded in their mind. They never emptied the suitcases and trunks, who knows, maybe… They hid the photo albums at the back of cupboards, until they would look at them again. Someday soon. They crammed the heaps of pictures in boxes, stacked the dozens of letters and bundled them with twine; they shoved horns, crockery, lace gowns, books and tools in trunks. Then they shut the door.

And left it to rest in dust for the next 50 years.

Congo. Katanga.

Just say the word, and it all springs to life: textures, colours, heat, smells…

Adventure. Future. Or simply the time they were all young?

Suzanne, François, Anne, Claude, Françoise and Colette, a family living in Katanga.

There was ever only one truth: the Laager.

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Suzanne’s Laager is the intro to Transvaal Blue Skies: the true story of how, early last century, Suzanne moved to Africa and built her laager. This is a series of loose dots weaved in a chronological thread, wrapped into a story to be plucked and observed, heard and remembered, recognised and judged. Suzanne Dulière was my grandmother.  

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