The Governor of the Northern Province (27 page)

The roads were absolutely emptied of traffic save military escorts and diplomat plates. There was none of its daily thickness of overcrowded pickups and horn-bleating taxis and lane-snaking, curse-making, double-backed scooters. Nor were there any chunky transports wheezing to the side, sick from all the downshifting en route from the outer provinces into capital-city traffic and so squatting, useless, on the shoulder while their drivers perfunctorily called out to the gambolling girls trying to sell their fathers' fruit from stands set up around exit signs. Instead of all this, there was only an onslaught of billboards advertising the eternal health and well-being of monogamy and the ruling party. This blocked any views for visitors beyond the fresh-paved road and the gleaming white stalks of new hotels and business centres ahead of them. So Jennifer and Madame GG further missed out on the daily wear and tears of Middle Africa: the crumbling Caucasoid statuary, the erupted sidewalks leading to and from buildings the colour, shape and purpose of crushed cigarette butts, the high clumped mounds of garbage smoking with half-burned tires and a few cooking fires, the successive sets of model new apartment buildings for the people's collective and united future—barely more livable than Baltimore tenements or guest-worker housing in Frankfurt.

In this particular Democratic Republic, residents of the capital city had been lined up for hot-plate handouts in advance of the government's hosting this year's international and All-Africa trade and aid conference. A proclamation was provided along with a gift. There was to be a patriots' vacation week, during which time citizens were expected to not be on the main streets but instead devoting themselves to their family lives and tending to their new hot plates. Those who did venture out would be vacationed elsewhere.

Not that all stripes of African colour weren't on offer for the very important visitors. In fact, they never had to venture outside the parapets of the conference site to get it. In addition to bulging Mandela-faced swag bags, the authentic glories of Africa were on offer nightly. Two shows, at eight and ten o'clock. There were Bushmen cookery demonstrations, native dance and hunting troupes, pantomime re-enactments of creation myths and colonial follies, and, always the favourite, a combination spelling/geography bee by top local students, the topic being capital cities and beloved leaders from around the world.

Of course, a few of the observer-status delegates at the conference and some of the younger aides with the major donor contingents had watched enough documentaries and read enough leaked reports not to buy any of these confections as representative. They snuck out from the conference at night and accepted rides from dangerous-looking unmarked cars waiting across the street, just outside the guard booth's range. When enough money was offered, the drivers agreed to take their fares on hush-hush tours of the
real Africa
, as the request was invariably expressed. The drivers warned their riders in advance that they were going to see things that might shock them and received in response steely-eyed and earnest assurances that
that
was exactly what was wanted.

A nearby and rundown district of the city was chosen for these rough-guide glances, where a pregnant woman was seen standing and smiling ambiguously at a street corner; where a gnarled European aid worker was met who went on in cynical gnomic grandeur about the forces that really ran Africa; where pant-less children were called after in vain as they played at toy guns in vacant lots. After which the cars came upon an unexpected security checkpoint on the way back to the conference. The drivers panicked and swerved and saved themselves and their families, not to mention their riders, from untold sufferings in unmarked prisons. These tours happened nightly, and viral marketing in the buffet lines ensured their continued popularity.

Back at the conference, the enlightened congregated at the twenty-four-hour hotel bar, where they shared with each other how shaken and stirred they'd been by what they'd seen. Confirmations of their worst expectations. They planned to start up defiant blogs full of indignation and little-known statistics. They promised to link to each other's to get the word out about the horrors and resiliencies of the real Africa.

The government had arranged the tours. The drivers were off-duty busmen who knew the right routes to take. Having exiled the documentary makers but failed to suppress the leaked reports, officialdom knew it would have crusading wall-climbers to deal with among the invited guests. It planned and paid out accordingly.

IV.

The speeches that opened the conference itself were a classic duet. Westerners declared that it was time the West finally recognized that it was time to do something about Africa. Africans announced this was not just another hand-wringing session but evidence of a new moment for an entire continent. Both sides agreed that history would no longer be a tragic guide or handouts wasted or promises mouthed, but hands would be joined and agreements would be reached and lives in need would be enriched. The beaming United Nations representative stepped to the podium after the last of these speeches and thanked everyone for their commitment to commitment. Then he announced into the shiny microphone, to great cheer and immediate hustling and bustling, “Let the dialoguing begin!”

The conference organizers adapted the principle of the sixty-second-date service in setting up the individual sessions between donor nations and would-be recipients. Delegations from African nations were assigned hotel suites with bottled water on ice and full audiovisual capabilities at their disposal. The best-prepared had short video presentations on offer, montage images of their nation's past horrors and present struggles and future prospects matched, respectively, to choired ululations and heavy-stringed orchestrals and upbeat synthesizers. So readied, they received Western representatives for short meetings that were a combination of flirtation and coyness and oft-repeated mutual agreements against playing head games. Pastimes and future plans came up, as did needs and offerings, the baggage of former relationships and family histories, health and fitness concerns about the body politic, and, above all else, the type of world they'd like someday for their children. Noncommittal promises were made for longer meetings later on. Phone numbers and awkward affections were exchanged— half handshake, half hug—and then each side, after breath fresheners and index card reminders for their next date, dried their palms and adjusted their lapel pins and moved on, nervous to have someone impressive to show the folks back home but wary of committing too much too fast.

By the time they reached their last matchup for the day, the Canadians were tired, though they'd been pleased with their success so far. In addition to the pink bracelets and accompanying rationale, they presented each of their African counterparts with a sheaf of e-mail addresses that Madame GG had collected from everyday Canadians enthusiastic about making contact with everyday Africans. These were received with gratitude and passed on and made use of. Jennifer and the Governor General's final meeting was with the brain truss of a tiny west central African nation, Atwenty. They had little information on the country even in the confidential prep materials that Madame GG had shared with Jennifer just before going in. A researcher had at least found a picture and brief article about the newly elected president, clipped from a Canadian newspaper from the previous April. He was smiling, en route to the People's Palace.

Atwenty was a postage stamp of a country historically criss-crossed by colonial powers and more recently done in by persisting internal conflicts, including a particularly bloody event that had occurred a year earlier in its northern province. Though never above the fold, reports had been published in a few Western newspapers and there had been dispatches from a BBC team based there. After an American intervention led by a junior senator from Texas with long-standing interests in the nation, a peace-bringing new president with control over the military had emerged, not to mention a slaw of investment in that troubled region and plans for a national reconciliation campaign.

After introductions, the actors took their seats and beamed back and forth and resettled themselves and fluttered their papers until one of them spoke. Jennifer had gone first last time, so it was Madame GG's turn. She went for dinner-party anthropology.

“Monsieur le Président, I'm curious about the name of your country, Atwenty. I know it's terrible to confess, but it's one of the few African nations whose current names evade me. Is it perhaps an ancient tribal designation for your lands and thus an act of cultural retrieval and reunification in the wake of the colonial departure?”

He laughed. A gold-toothed warm gurr.

“No, Madame, it is a joke.”

“Oh please, Monsieur, you must take pride in your nation, in its history, in its traditions! The people of Canada do, I can assure you of that, it's something we can teach the world, I believe.”

“Good for you, Madame, but the name Atwenty is literally a joke. You see, it was the idea of our first leader after independence. He was educated in England and upon his return, when the government was trying to come up with a name that reflected the nation more truthfully than any of the colonizers' New This's and That's, he proposed Atwenty. He explained that when he was living abroad, the only time he ever saw notice of his native land in a newspaper was a one-line reference on the first page with the direction to see A-20 for further details. So he thought this was the truest reflection of where his nation stood in the world. Atwenty sounded and looked African enough for people back then. It still does.”

The Governor General's face was a thin polite blank through all of this. She wasn't sure of how to read this president's tone, whether she should have been outraged or sympathetic or chuckled in solidarity, and so she had nothing to give in response. Except the feeling that she was being quietly laughed at, which was unacceptable personally and nationally. Jennifer was simply confused. With only Canadian high school geography to work with, she was expecting some poetically aboriginal explanation of Atwenty. It should have meant “mighty meeting lodge between two rivers” or something.

The President's first councillor, who was sitting next to him, whisper-reminded him that Canada was high on their wish list of donor nations, that it could offer them more than a couple of easily copied blue passports. The President nodded and changed his tactics with relative ease. He was an ex-army man.

“Madame, you can be assured that we have the very best people looking into how best to deal with this name legacy. I myself am only recently elected. Our beloved President-for-life, as you may know, decided that the recent butchery done to his tribe in our troubled Upriver region made it impossible for him to continue leading. With my support, sympathy and sadness at his departing, he has left the country to join a series of corporate boards. And so now, as the latest leader of this conflicted, impoverished land, I am faced with a series of challenges. They are too numerous to list in our short time together. But you can imagine. I can't do this alone, of course. It's an expensive task.”

The air was heavy with hint at these last statements, but the Canadians were ready for this. They'd heard the same lines at every meeting. Jennifer knew what was needed while Madame GG decided whether to open up her purse.

“Mr. President, I believe you and I have something in common—” Only Madame GG didn't want a stay this time. She wanted her hotel bed and decided she didn't care much for this president. He was the one too many of the newly elected reform-minded purse snatchers that she'd met that day.

“With apologies to my colleague, Monsieur le Président, you haven't convinced me that the Canadian people should support your efforts to improve your lands. To be quite honest”—she threw those
t
sounds at him as if they were little spears—“I have little confidence that your nation is capable of moving forward right now. Nothing you've told yet suggests any progress beyond, well, frankly, one big man replacing another.”

“I can understand your frustration, Madame, and I can assure you I won't be just another big man, as you say. I certainly don't plan to rule for life, as my predecessors did. I've already set a term limit for my rule and shall respect it, God and the People willing. But you want more immediate evidence of progress, as you call it. I shall give you that, and also show you some evidence of the demons that have plagued us. But first let me share one of my recent decisions. This was part of the agreement for reconciliation and power-sharing that our nation's great friend from Texas, Senator Jellyby, worked up for us last year. We were even on CNN for it. One of my first decisions afterwards was to name a woman to one of our most important positions. The one I chose wasn't my sister or my daughter or even some ex-dictator's widow, like you have when women get positions elsewhere, but her own man, as the saying says. She had previously worked as part of an NGO for women's concerns in our capital city. Before that, she was a sex trade worker in a small village. She managed to escape that life and then devoted herself to making a difference in the lives of others. And as a nation, we have recognized her efforts with this appointment. She's governor of the northern province. In which, as you may or may not know, is located the Upriver region so recently ravaged by a band of butchers. And I tell you, this governor is doing serious work, not ribbon cutting and the like. She has been commissioned to bring healing where it is needed, and also to lead an effort to bring the evildoers to account. And to support her, we have brought with us to this conference rare video footage of one of the nation's Most Wanted giving a speech, the so-called Grin Reaper. This is a smiling killing machine of a man, a leader of poor bendable boys known to have a tongue sweet like honey and sharp like a blade. As you will see. We have brought footage of this madman at his work to raise awareness about the governor's efforts, to give people like you a sense of who, of what type of evil, she's struggling to defeat. Because she's not having an easy time of it and hasn't brought justice to anyone yet. And I'm sure I needn't tell you,” he moved in for the kill, “Madame, or you either, young lady, how difficult it is to be a woman in governance, especially one with ideals. So when you make your decision whether to extend us funding, think not of this”—here he ran his fingers down his medal-encrusted bright suit—“but of her.”