Nkasi was sitting on the edge of his bed. His head hung down. With his old fingers he was trying to do up the final buttons of his shirt. He had only just awoken. I approached and greeted him. He looked up. His glasses were attached to his head with a rubber band. Behind the thick and badly scratched lenses I made out a pair of watery eyes. He let go of his shirt and took my hand in both of his. A striking amount of strength still in those fingers.
“Mundele,” he murmured, “mundele!” He sounded moved, as though we hadn’t seen each other in years. “White man.” His voice was like a rusty gear slowly creaking into motion. A Belgian in his home … after all these years … That he would live to see this.
“Papa Nkasi,” I spoke into the semidarkness, “I am very honored to meet you.” He was still holding onto my hand, but gestured to me to sit down. I located a plastic garden chair. “How are you?”
“Aaah,” he moaned from behind his lenses, so scored with scratches that you could hardly see his eyes, “I’m afraid my demi-vieillesse is acting up again.” Beside the bed was a little bowl that obviously served as spittoon. On the grimy mattress lay an enema syringe. Its rubber bulb looked chapped and brittle. Here and there I saw a piece of foil of the kind used to package pills. Then he had to laugh at his own joke.
So how old was that anyway, that middle-old age? He definitely looked like the oldest Congolese I had ever met.
He didn’t have to think about it long. “Je suis né en mille-huit cent quatre-vingt-deux.”
Eighteen eighty-two? Dates are a relative thing in Congo. I have had informants tell me, when I asked how long ago something had happened: “A long time ago, yes, a long, long time ago, at least six years, or no, wait, let’s say: eighteen months ago.” My desire to provide a Congolese perspective would never meet with complete success: I myself am much too fond of dates. And some informants are fonder of an answer than they are of a correct answer. On the other hand, though, I had often been struck by the precision with which they were able to recall facts from their own lives. In addition to the year, they were also frequently able to name the month and the day. “I moved to Kinshasa on April 12, 1963.” Or: “On March 24, 1943, the ship set sail.” It has taught me, above all, to be very careful with dates.
Eighteen eighty-two? Let’s see, that would mean we were talking about Henry Morton Stanley’s day, the establishment of Congo Free State, the arrival of the first missionaries. That was even before the Berlin Conference, the famous meeting in 1885 during which the European powers determined the future of Africa. Could I really be face-to-face with someone who not only remembered colonialism, but was in fact born in the precolonial era? Someone born in the same year as James Joyce, Igor Stravinsky, and Virginia Woolf? It was almost impossible to believe. That would mean the man was 126 years old! And that would make him not only the oldest man in the world, but also one of the oldest people ever. In Congo, no less. Three times the country’s average life expectancy!
And so I did what I would have done in any other situation: check and double check. In this case, that meant digging up the past, little by little, with endless patience. Sometimes that worked promptly, at other moments not at all. Never before had I spoken like this with such a distant past, never before had it felt so fragile. Often, I was unable to understand him. Often, he began a sentence and stopped halfway, with the surprised look of someone who goes to fetch something from the cupboard and suddenly no longer knows what he was looking for. It was a struggle against forgetfulness, but Nkasi not only forgot the past, he also forgot to forget. The gaps that arose healed over immediately. He was unaware of having lost anything. I, on the other hand, was doing my best to bail out an ocean steamer with a tin can.
Finally, however, I came to the conclusion that his year of birth just very well might be correct. He talked about events in the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century that he could only have known about firsthand. Nkasi had not attended school, but he knew historical facts of which other elderly Congolese from his region were entirely ignorant. He came from Bas-Congo, the area between Kinshasa and the Atlantic Ocean where the Western presence had first made itself known. If the map of Congo looks like a balloon, Bas-Congo is the neck through which everything passes. His memories, therefore, I could check against well-documented events. He spoke with great precision about the first missionaries, Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had settled in his homeland. They had, indeed, begun their evangelism around 1880. He mentioned the names of missionaries who, as it turned out, had come to the area in the 1890s and had moved to a nearby mission post around 1900. He spoke of Simon Kimbangu, a man from a neighboring village who we know was born in 1889 and started his own religion in the 1920s. And he talked above all about how he, as a child, had watched them build the railway between Matadi and Kinshasa. That took place between 1890 and 1898. The construction in his part of Congo began in 1895. “I was twelve, fifteen at the time,” he said.
“Papa Nkasi …”
“Oui?” Whenever I addressed him he would look up, slightly distracted, as though he had forgotten there was a visitor in the room. He made no effort to convince me of his advanced age. He talked about what he still knew, and seemed amazed at my amazement. He was clearly less impressed by his age than I, who wrote down an entire notebook full.
“How is it that you know the year when you were born, anyway? There was no registrar’s office back then, was there?”
“Joseph Zinga told me about it.”
“Who?”
“Joseph Zinga. My father’s youngest brother.” And from that there followed the story of the uncle who had gone with a British missionary to the mission post at Palabala and attended catechism classes himself, during which he learned about the Christian calendar. “He told me I was born in 1882.”
“But then, did you know Stanley?” Never, in all my life, had I thought I would ask someone that question in earnest.
“Stanlei?” he said. He spoke the name in the French way. “No, I never met him, but I heard about him. He came to Lukunga first, and then to Kintambo.” The chronology, in any case, jibed with the journey Stanley had made between 1879 and 1884. “I did know Lutunu, though, one of his boys. He was from Gombe-Matadi, not far from us. He never wore trousers.”
The name Lutunu rang a bell. I remembered that he was one of the first Congolese to serve the white men as a “boy.” Later, the colonizer would make him an inland chief. But he had lived until the 1950s: Nkasi could have met him much later as well. That, however, definitely did not apply to Simon Kimbangu.
“I knew Kimbangu back in the 1800s,” he said emphatically. It was the only time, with the exception of his year of birth, that he referred directly to the nineteenth century. They had lived in neighboring villages. And, he added: “We were more or less the same age. Simon Kimbangu was greater than me in pouvoir de Dieu, but I was greater in years.” During later visits as well, he confirmed time and again that he was a few years older than Kimbangu, a man born in 1889.
IN THE WEEKS AFTER my initial visit, I went by to see Nkasi several times. At the house where I was staying in Kinshasa I would run back through my notes, put together the pieces of the puzzle and search for gaps in his story. Each visit lasted no more than a couple of hours. Nkasi indicated when he was growing tired or when his memory was failing him. The conversations always took place in his bedroom. Sometimes he would sit on the edge of his bed, sometimes on the only other piece of furniture: a worn-out car seat that stood on the floor. Once I was able to talk with him while he was shaving. Without a mirror, without shaving cream, without water, only a disposable razor that he never disposed of. He ran his fingers over his chin, made a whole host of strange faces and scraped the white plastic razor across his weathered skin. After a few hesitant scrapes he would knock out the tiny hairs against the edge of his bedstead. The white stubble floated to the darkened floor.
In one corner of the room was a pile of odds and ends: what remained of his belongings. A broken