1929 June 25 | Sunrays on a School in Fizi

Now – Sunrays in the dust 

Here, the Sun hunts you running into the shadows: it cannot be bothered to create some for you. You ever walk alone. You sidle along arcades, sneak along five-foot ways to escape its searing light. It hides but a few feet away, watching, waiting in ambush: the only warning a smouldering line on the ground. Beyond it, the floor is lava.

This light bleaches to ash any memory you don’t stow away. Death. 

Its light is a crucible where colours are born, blinding. Life.

The Sun above is just brutally honest here, watching you all day, every day. 

~ 

There, the part-time Sun hangs limply on the horizon, winking at you, never bothered to burn you, lounging among clouds and rain. Its shadows follow you diligently. A friend, it is, its sickly yellow light shows. Come out and play, it says. Accommodating, inclusive. 

It is as pasted on the sky, an after-thought inclusion, a finger painted creation by someone who has been told about the Sun. 

Colours, there, are just a hint, evocative yet never true: blood is not red, the sea not blue, nor the woods green, all but shades of brown and grey. 

Oh, the Sun there is courageous, he gives it a go every year in Spring. And fails. 

And so it just wakes, yawns, stretches a lazy ray or two, and just hangs out, the light of a netherworld.

A Morlock’s Sun, pale, mediocre, gaslighting.

Then – Fizi, a few days after the 20^th June 1929

The Sun is up, searing. Suzanne strolls on her way back to the school, with a few vegetables for tonight. She woke up a few hours ago; François is already up in the hills with his team. He always leaves early, when the Sun is not yet a murderous welding torchlight. She lists the day’s tasks. Her short heels sink into the dust. So what?

“Suffer to look good”, La Fontaine would have said. And proper, she adds. 

Barefoot was a more pragmatic local solution, she always felt. Everyone else in the village did. Even the Force Publique veteran, lounging with the chief on wonky rattan seats. Their fly-swatters swish in unison, metronomes of propriety. Both gaze sternly into the distance, wise and intent. They just ooze age and authority. 

In her wake, the dust shimmers and sparkles with youth and promise. 

The school is over there, one side of the main square. In the middle of it, the village women prepare the manioc roots. They laugh and pound, pound and laugh, marking the tempo to their chants with two-handed pestles in large mortars. The beat of joy. The primal sound of industry, ancestral and universal. 

An outpost at the Eastern-most edge of Congo: Fizi.

Individual voices rise and fade. Suzanne finds herself smiling at jokes she cannot understand, just for the warmth they conjure. The sticks keep on rising and falling; punchlines sparkle, witty enough to sprinkle everything with crystal laughter. The air itself sways to the beat. Someone is getting a ribbing; matrons’ eternal privilege. Binding, gelling everyone. A unique social identity. Anywhere, anytime. She files this. 

She crosses the square, gives a curt nod to the chief, then the elder women. Thank you, hello. The younger women keep pounding. 

Chicken scatter by her feet, some into her, squawking their confusion. The pig stops rooting about, snorts to protest her invasion of his personal space and dramatically plops on its side. His eyes chase her and briefly sparkle: I belong here, you? She just glares back. I am here, so, I do. 

A step and she is in the castle they have been lent for the week. 

She sits and checks her watch. 

09h00 am. 

What would she have been doing in Soissons? Ah yes. 09h00 AM, be bored. Reality swings back. The chief told them to set up in the school this time, not some edge of a village. With school summer holidays, it stood empty for two months; all perfectly logical. Even the teacher agreed. And it was perfect to pitch… a tent… That one had puzzled the chief. Privacy is privacy, especially as newlyweds, they had both winked. And everyone else had laughed the universal knowing laugh. Truth was, canvas under the roof collected the shedding straw and the bilulu paradropping. The room was bright and breezy, and the Sun shone through large bays shaded by overhangs. 

A setup for the ages.

Time to go to work. She pulls the dust cover from the sewing machine and flips through the manual. She is already working the bobbins and needles like an expert seamstress: she is. A brand new Singer No 28, with golden Sphinx decal detailing: the future by anyone’s standard. She turns the wheel, and the noise of modern industry clanks and clatters the ancestral voices. 

Sorry, but I am not just a trailing wife.

Her darling dear François needs some cheering up, and he likes Anglo-Saxon culture so much. She unfolds the latest flapper dress patterns she “borrowed” on the ship. Even the wife of the previous engineer at the outpost, Mme Feron, is wearing a (poorly made) version of the latest fashion. No way she could let that pass. 

But first duty: mending bedsheets. 

She does not complain, she does not explain…but… Oh, come on, stop this complaining, you signed up for it. She leans into the machine. The school, the compacted earth at her feet. Her mind wanders off. Her father started off as a teacher in Dijon. She knows the pride, the mission, the sense of duty it means. An elite. The right hand man of Knowledge. Here. 

The school blackboard. A chalk caked eraser, forgotten on a ledge. Authority.

Here, now, they are the envoys of the UMHK, the Union Minière, no further words needed. To anyone, they are minor representatives of the Bula Matari, the Big Bosses. Just here, only just that. The thread breaks. 

Somewhere, someone draws a breath. 

She turns around, performing to the potential audience. 4 small faces watch in from their school windows, attracted by the outlandish noise, snared by the machine, captivated by her ability to operate it. Now rumbled, more faces try and squeeze in, to get a glimpse of the patterns, the advertisements’ models from New York, the trendy skirts and infinite possibilities. 

Turning around, theatrically sighing, she plays to the small crowd and ploughs on repairing the bedsheets. 

The teenagers comment, undeterred, louder even. On the patterns? On how to adjust their boubous to them? The only thing that is sure, they cover their mouth, laughing. At how the chief, their mother, would agree to it? Suzanne’s mother would not agree, that much was certain, she snickered. 

Suzanne sews along, her audience coming and going, until the light starts fading, at five. 

François will be here soon. 

---

You read part 8 of 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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