African Psycho was published in 2003. It was written by Alain Mabanckou, Congo Brazzaville’s accomplished novelist, poet, and professor of literature. Mabanckou’s novel invites us into the disturbed mind of Grégoire Nakobomayo, a low life mechanic living in the destitute parts of a fictionalised neighbourhood that goes by the odd name of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot. Although the title bears a resemblance to that of Bret Easton Ellis’s infamous book of a similar subject matter (American Psycho), Mabanckou’s African Psycho is far from just an Africanised version of Ellis’s tale. So instead of Patrick Bateman one should see African Psycho more along the lines of Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground. Mabanckou’s protagonist, Grégoire, has an odd obsession with a notorious serial killer known as Angoualima.
Grégoire aspires to be as ruthless and as premeditated as Angoualima. And having been tired of doing petty street crimes, Grégoire now seeks to join the higher ranks by committing actual murder. Under the auspices of Angoualima, his great idol and master, Grégoire conjures up the motivation to achieve this final goal of criminality. He decides on his first victim – a sex worker by the name of Germaine. The book opens with the line – ‘I have decided to kill Germaine on December 29.’ And it is this opening line that acts as the story’s catalyst. Mabanckou’s writing flies one through the story, yet with enough intention to add subtle commentary remarks that can be broached at length long after. African Psycho can best be described as an irreverent dark comedy, thanks to Mabanckou’s approach and style. But most important of all Mabanckou manages to say something about the human condition through his failed protagonist, including the contemporary culture of valorising men who commit such heinous acts.
Grégoire
The story is narrated in the first person by Grégoire himself. This first-person point of view fits neatly, particularly from an internal dialogue perspective. Mabanckou gets us into the thought patterns of his lead character. We get to see everything from his vantage point. Grégoire comes from a rough background. He grew up as an orphaned street child for much of his life, vagabonding and getting into all sorts of trouble. Added to this tough street life are the many unfortunate things that have happened to him. He doesn’t consider himself an attractive man and constantly attacks himself with such insults as rectangular head. The literal nature of this description appears to be more in service to his psychological state. The rectangular shape is connected to the image of a brick, a shape associated with stubbornness. Another part of his uncanny features are the size of his hands.
Grégoire says, ‘It’s always struck me that my large hands were made to kill, to wind individuals whose mugs I don’t like, those whose social position I envied and especially those who, in my book, were sullying the peace and quiet of my native corner with their dealings.’ Given these odd physical features and the realities borne to him for being one so unfortunate, Grégoire takes it as fate and aligns these aspects towards the purpose of becoming a notorious killer. But in light of all these ideas regarding his fate and destiny, Grégoire is terrible at being a criminal. He isn’t able to pull off minor crimes. He is always second guessing himself. He fails to act when the moment arises and instead chooses to psychologise the situation. When he does come close to being successful at committing a crime, something ridiculous happens that prevents him from achieving his goals. For example there is a scene towards the middle of the book where Grégoire attempts to commit a crime against a woman on her way home. But even in this episode, where we would assume he is well within his capacity to pull this off, he fails again because he just can’t sober up. His excuse for the drunkenness is that the alcohol rush would have given him enough of an edge. But instead, it just makes him more volatile and unstable. She smells the alcohol on his breath and quickly deduces his intentions. In a scuffle she grabs her purse and swings it into his face.
Grégoire, now in a fit of embarrassment, gets caught up in the conversations happening in his head: ‘I am going to follow through with my plan, killing this girl who had the audacity to swing a purse in my face that may not have been a Chanel, that may not have been a Gucci, that may not have been a Vuitton, but certainly one of those bags in fake crocodile skin, fake lizard skin, fake anaconda skin that the Great Market’s shoemakers sell…’ and he tops it off with this funny remark, ‘… and I guarantee you that a fake bag like that, a bag for the non-bourgeois, always hurts your face really bad.’
Grégoire lives most of his life in the delusions of his mind. He overestimates himself and his capacity to do anything worthwhile in the world outside his own mind. And given that he’s lived most of his life as an orphaned street child, you would think that he would have had some friends, particularly amongst the abandoned street kids. But Grégoire is a lonesome figure. He has no friends or any meaningful relationships besides the ones that take up space in his mind. He has no social life outside of drinking and purchasing the services of sex workers, sex workers he hypocritically criticizes for ruining his society. And he refers to his society by this hyphenated term, He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot. He even hyphenates graves and other places throughout the novel. Could this place, this place he calls He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot, actually be a stand in metaphor for some specific area in Congo Brazzaville, where Mabanckou is from? We can only speculate.
But given Mabanckou's other prominent novel, Broken Glass, which centres on the patrons of a shanty town bar, the theme of a society ravaged by alcoholism is quite prevalent. So Mabanckou's intentions, when it comes to the town’s name of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot, becomes clear. Here he highlights the social problem of alcohol in contemporary African towns and villages, particularly in the context of his home country. Mabanckou himself, being the nephew of an owner of a bar or an African shebeen to be exact, would have been brought up in these environments, where alcoholism had become so normalised that drinking anything else besides it would have deemed one an idiot. Grégoire thinks about the implication of this odd town and its people’s attachment to alcohol, ‘The population swears by beer, red wine or, palm wine only. Drunkenness contests are held often. People empty a bottle of palm wine by holding it between their teeth, without the help of their hands. In these conditions, he who drinks water really is an idiot.’
Furthermore, Grégoire boils down all the social ills visited on his neighbourhood and the whole country on people who come from a specific neighbouring country. He refers to these people as, ‘those who come from that country over there.’ Here again we are not clear about the country he is talking about. Could it be Congo Kinshasa, or Angola, or even Equatorial Guinea to the north? It’s not clear. But what is clear is Grégoire’s xenophobic attitude in light of these remarks – ‘I am taking these people from the country over there at their word, and I am going to wipe out these hookers one after the other, and we will see if they are buried in our country or expatriated in their canoes to the country over there, their true country of origin, for the corpse, whore or no whore, must indeed return to its native ground, because the fruit must rot at the foot of the tree that bore it…’ And the idea of blaming one’s social ills on a neighboring African country is nothing new. We have seen this attitude rear its head in countries that have just gained some form of independence – the tensions between Nigerians and Ghanaians in the late sixties after the oil boom, is an example that comes to mind. And one need not go too far to find a recent example given the current climate brewing in South Africa against foreign nationals. Xenophobia, in the modern African political context, has become the successor par excellence of tribalism.
So Grégoire doesn’t have much that is working out for him. He’s unattractive, poor, and blames all his ills on other forces. And the only thing that seems to be keeping him from completely losing himself, to his delusional fantasies, is his daytime job as a mechanic. This is the only thing of normality that he does. It grounds him in some sort of way. But this life of being an ordinary man as a mechanic is not enough.
Grégoire wants to make a name for himself. He says this to reassure himself, ‘I know what I’m talking about. Inside my rectangular head is grey matter, not straw to burn.’ For Grégoire nothing will make him more fulfilled than the act of committing his first successful crime – ‘I want to conceive of everything from beginning to end and plant my foot upon my victim as a sign of satisfaction, like a hunter happy to have killed his first big game. My crime will be more beautiful than those of my idol.’ Grégoire’s obsession with successfully committing this murder is to do with his own failure to achieve anything meaningful in his troubled life. And so he becomes possessed with ideas, ideas that drive his condition further down the pit of darkness. And for Grégoire, like many such men who become bitter and feel like the world has gone against them, the easiest victims to pick on mostly turn out to be women. Although it might not be spoken of as much, but women are generally responsible for facilitating men’s social and familial bonds. We know of this troubled archetype, some might refer to it nowadays as ‘incel’ culture.
But literature is littered with such figures. Dostoyevsky’s lead in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, murders two women because he believes the world isn’t constituted properly for him. In American Psycho Patrick Bateman’s victims are women. These men kill women not only because they feel like they can, or that they want to exercise the fullest extent of their supposed power. Rather these men kill women because of what women represent. On the surface one might say men commit such crimes because they simply hate women or feel like their physical dominance gives them the right to do with women’s bodies as they please. But the violence itself points to the nihilistic nature of the perpetrators. God or life has delt them a bad hand, so their only recourse is to dish out as much damage as possible. And it is women who seem to remind them the most of their allotted place in this cosmic order.
But for someone like Grégoire, the intention necessary to carry out this violence happens to be missing, or somewhat hampered. A close reading of the text shows that Grégoire is trying to be someone he isn’t. He clearly isn’t a killer, nor does he have the courage to be one. With all things considered, he is just a man with a troubled mind. But what makes Grégoire dangerous is this very mind, a mind driven towards achieving something more in life, even if that means becoming a serial killer. And it is in the theatre of his mind that everything he does hinges on. At the helm of this idea sits the real murderous villain of the story, the real terroriser, the towns very own serial killer, Angoualima. Angoualima is everything Grégoire wishes he was. Angoualima is instinctual, carnal, brutal, and most of all, he is well known for his notorious crimes.
There is no one else at the top, no one else to look up to besides Angoualima. And it is for this reason that Grégoire evokes his spirit and follows him like a disciple, saying to himself: ‘Now I get up every day and whisper Angoualima. I go to bed every night and whisper Angoualima. He hears me, I know. He has become the father I have not known and haven’t tried to know, for fear of forever losing my identity.’ And herein lies one of the key struggles presented by the novel – the crisis of identity. Grégoire is a broken vessel at best, but at worst he is an empty shell that is waiting to be filled by a true African psycho. His loss of self and total assumption of Angoualima will later on tie into the key idea that rests at the heart of this book, being that of the importance of social bonding and cultivating meaningful relationships with others.
Angoualima
If there is any doubt about who the real African psycho is, then Angoualima is undoubtedly the figure that rests that debate. We first come across this phantom like-persona at a cemetery. He is visited by Grégoire. And in one of these visitations we soon learn that Angoualima has been dead for some time. Yet somehow Grégoire is able to conjure up his spirit and speak to him as if he was really there. He says that, ‘from time to time, to give thanks for his genius, to keep him informed of what I am doing, or even just for the pleasure of talking to him, I make my way to the cemetery… and kneel in front of his grave. And there as if by magic, I swear, the Great Master of crime appears before me, as charismatic as in his glory days.’
Upon first encounter, one might wonder if this is another trick played by Grégoire’s troubled mind. But the further the chapter develops the more the scenario rings true enough for it to have real world consequences. Most of what we know about Angoualima comes from Grégoire’s unreliable musings. Angoualima is a mysterious figure. In his heydays he was an elusive criminal, always being a step ahead of everyone, especially the police. His ghost like demeanour allowed him to commit the most audacious crimes but with such ease. It was all a game for him – the murders, the rapes, and burglaries – a game he played with society, because to him the structures that upheld social bonding were nothing more than a thing to be played with. Grégoire believes that part of Angoualima’s power had come from black magic. The serial killer would perform these magic rituals before engaging in a crime, and the outcome would be guaranteed success. This is what gave him the edge and set him apart from the rest. Angoualima’s notoriety grew to such an extent that any crime committed would have him reported as its prime suspect. It is this sense of notoriety that really impresses Grégoire. But what impresses Grégoire the most is something more than just the crimes or Angoualima’s invincibility. What impresses him more is the idealization of this figure, the gradual mythicization of Angoualima that sees him move from killer to idol to literal god. In his own words this is what Grégoire has to say about his master, ‘this mythical character, this charismatic character is none other than my own God.’
Grégoire’s obsession over Angoualima morphs into a theological possession. Angoualima takes the place of god in this story. In fact, there aren’t any other religious connotations made as boldly as the one Grégoire makes about Angoualima. The cemetery where his master is buried constitutes the parish and Grégoire himself makes up the congregation that completes this black mass. To cap it all off, Grégoire makes a bold theological statement about Angoualima’s return from the dead. He states, ‘It’s not by chance that Angoualima was buried at the other end of the cemetery, he had to be isolated at all costs, he had to be watched over from afar, because his resurrection is expected.’ In Grégoire’s mind the seat of the saviour has already been occupied. Angoualima’s burial site is the tomb of the promised messiah.
And now, all Grégoire has to do is be as patient and as persistent as the women who rose in the early morning and stood by the tomb of Christ. Added to Angoualima’s godlike status is also the idea of celebrityhood. Angoualima’s crimes get a lot of media coverage. He is a guaranteed hit piece for prime-time news. But he doesn’t always capture the imaginations of the society, usually it’s his victims that do. So murder becomes a battle of who can get the media’s attention the most, who can seep their image of violence into the heart of the country – the victim or the perpetrator. Grégoire in his cheapish and sarcastic tone opines on this very idea, ‘When I think that people like me sweat blood to do their jobs and take risks, and then no one gives us the least bit of play in the media! The victim always gets the lion’s share, and that’s unfair!’
Even murderers fear a little bit of irrelevancy. There is an interview that Grégoire recalls mid-way through the novel. The interview involves a journalist and a person who claims that they have seen the mysterious Angoualima and can testify to his devious acts. The interview is reminiscent of actual footage of serial killers being interviewed. There is the interviewer, who poses as the fascinated figure that has been tasked with psychoanalyzing the killer, getting down to the heart of his intentions. And then there is the other side, that tries to reveal the human hidden beneath the monster. And so the interview follows this format. There’s a back and forth between them, many questions are asked, and many things are left unanswered.
But the point of these interviews, so it seems, is to demystify these men that commit such crimes. But the opposite effect is achieved. Instead of demystifying them, the mythicization only increases. This becomes an opportunity for these men to add method to the madness of their actions and in turn gain silent sympathizers. Some of these interviews even turn these murderers into celebrity figures – with women obsessing over them and at times even addressing them with love letters, whereas men pine over the supposed ‘intellectual’ nature of these troubled individuals. Mabanckou here is obviously picking fun at how western media deals with or even portrays its serial killers.
By placing the interview midway through the novel and having it played out in the most ridiculous fashion, Mabanckou serves this as a blatant criticism against the valorization and celebrityhood of such people. But more than that it stands as an unwavering critique against those societies that find no problem in providing these men with a platform to voice their motivations. And the dead and their families are left in silence. In the end the interview gains nothing and solves nothing. For the spectators it becomes just another sneak peek into the life and acts of this ghost of a person, adding to the obsession. And that is what drives people towards these stories. And this is the same psychology that plagues Grégoire. He is a fanboy, a groupie waiting at the end of the line to receive an autograph from his idol. A similar theme is investigated in Satoshi Kon’s animated masterpiece, Perfect Blue (1997). We could even add Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) to this collage. Grégoire, having had no other positive influences throughout his life, follows this logic, this idol-worship-celebrity-myth-making logic to its logical conclusion. And the idea of trying to understand what goes on in the mind of a serial killer opens up the possibilities of being swallowed up in that dark world too.
Grégoire falls into the maze of Angoualima’s persona and loses himself. And in order for him to reach the top, to sit where his master sits, and do unto others as his master had done, he will have to emulate the spirit of a killer and commit a murder of his own. And the victim that rests on his mind is none other than the easy target of an unsuspecting woman. As we draw to the third act of this morbid tale we recall the opening line of the novel, ‘I have decided to kill Germaine on December 29.’
Germaine
Grégoire sets his eyes on a sex worker by the name of Germaine. Given his past failures Grégoire comes up with an alternative approach. He plans on befriending Germaine and wishes to make her feel comfortable around him. And when her guard is finally let down he will seize the opportunity to take her life. He says this, ‘What Germaine doesn’t know is that the day I first took her into my house, I was wishing precisely that she settle in as soon as possible, that she build up trust, so I could fatten her up like you fatten a chicken to be eaten during a holiday dinner.’ Germaine moves in with Grégoire and settles down with him. Strangely enough Grégoire does not kill Germaine.
He puts off every impulse he gets and makes excuses like this: ‘I had seen to it that the decision to live with me came from her. That’s where she was headed and me, playing my part well, I told her that her work as a whore didn’t disturb me, that it wasn’t an obstacle, that my mother was a whore too, that whores were the kindest women on earth, that without whores, my God, the world would not be what it is today… she kissed me on the mouth and told me again that I was a kind man, a generous man, a magnanimous man, an altruistic man, and so on and so forth.’ Although not spoken outrightly, Grégoire is enamoured by Germaine. She addresses him as a man that is generous, altruistic and kind, words he probably never heard from any one before.
Germaine becomes the only person that gives Grégoire positive affirmation, a polar opposite to the way Angoualima addresses him. Grégoire’s actions speak louder than the voices that run in his mind. He says words like killing Germaine will make him acceptable in the eyes of his master, or that Germaine is simply a chicken being fattened for a feast to come. But these violent and inhumane intentions do not correlate to the way he treats her, like this scenario for instance: ‘She arrived late at night, found me in front of the television, put her purse on a shelf near the entrance and sat down on the sofa-bed while waiting for me to bring her a Heineken.’ It is quite clear that Grégoire enjoys Germaine’s company, that he probably never felt like this about anyone. And even though his mind is boiling with ways to achieve his mandate, his actions tell a different story. Germaine’s inclusion into Grégoire’s life somehow tempers down his insidious ideas. By simple acts such as making his workshop more homely and providing him with aspects of her feminine touch, Germaine unwittingly humanises this lost soul of a man. What he deemed would be a trap set for her, a trap that would end in him taking her life, turns out to have an opposite effect on him, as if undoing the tangled and coiled roots of Angoualima’s dark fantasy.
To those familiar with Russian literature, one will recognise the theme of the woman who revives the destitute man in works such as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In that story the psychological tension that the protagonist suffers is tied between two extremes represented by two characters. Raskolnikov, the protagonist is burdened by the actions of his crime, and two paths are opened to him – the faith-based path of restitution through a prostitute named Sonia, or the nihilistic death driven path of the sadistic landowner Svidrigailov. African Psycho too presents such a dilemma in its protagonist. Germaine just like Dostoyevsky’s Sonia represents life and redemption. Whereas Angoualima represents that dark destructive masculine power that drives everything to death and suicide. Ultimately, the story rests on these two people, Germaine and Angoualima.
Grégoire soon becomes so infatuated with Germaine, that her presence begins to shift his mentality and the way he perceives himself. He says, ‘I have noticed that people like us are usually kind because they find it easy to reconcile extreme human feelings. They can become monstrous but also demonstrate a sweetness that would surprise more than a few. I’m like that.’ And it is because of Germaine that Grégoire is able to come to such a place emotionally, to reconcile extreme human feelings. So balance is the key term here. Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung gave much attention to the shadow elements of the human psyche.
He believed that these dark attributes were not something to be supressed or even ignored, for fear that they might mount up in pressure and at some point explode into violence. Rather what he suggested was shadow integration, which involved a concerted effort of incorporating repressed aspects of yourself into conscious awareness in order to achieve wholeness. Ultimately shadow integration, which is what Grégoire is beginning to experience with Germaine through osmosis, is what could effectively reduce his anxiety, address his internal conflicts, help regulate his emotions, and most important of all foster authentic relationships. At the heart of it all is Grégoire’s inability to build genuine relationships with other people. From a holistic point this theme is central to the story. Mabanckou is getting to the heart of the matter through men who commit violent crimes, those involved in gender-based violence, and those who find pleasure in harming others.
And at the root of this cause is the inability to connect, relationally with other people. It is the Mephistophelian spirit that drives these types of people to sever themselves, through vile reason and pigeonholed logic, from genuinely experiencing healthy connections with other people. Angoualima bears the spirit of death and it is his carnal appetite for a total destruction that brews in the solitude of feeble minds. He makes the unthinkable possible and even pleasurable, borderlining an orgasmic feel when given the chance to take the lives of others. He is the never-ending spiral that oscillates into nihilism. Is there any hope for Grégoire? Can Germaine’s light plug some hope into his hopeless situation? These are the questions that remain long after the last page has been turned.
Mabankcou Today
African Psycho confronts us with a number of questions, some of them being: Why do we find serial killers or murderers fascinating? What role does the psychology of these men (and at times women) play in the make up of modern African society? And like our very own protagonist Grégoire, is there a little bit of killer inside each of us, preventing us from fully experiencing authentic relationships? Written now almost twenty-two years ago the novel is still relevant for a continent that has seen a growing number of cases to do with gender-based violence and the use of rape as a weapon to destroy families or even whole communities. There are many Grégoires, but even more worrying is that there are many more Angoualimas. The Grégoires are men who can be redeemed.
Unfortunately some have crossed the threshold over to the shadow and have embraced death itself. And the problem with Grégoire is not that he is mentally incapable of freeing himself. The problem with figures like him is that they are unable to shake off the mimicry of pathology. Tendayi Sithole, a South African professor teaching in the social sciences, wrote an article reviewing Mabanckou's African Psycho. In it he touches on the character of Grégoire, mainly his psychological condition that leaves him prisoner to the figure of Angoualima. He states that: ‘The act of mimicry renders him lacking, someone who is fraught with pathological discourses which are overwhelming and overbearing, and delusions, lies and incongruences that do not allow for an authentic disclosure of being a subject.’
Essentially, Grégoire becomes an incomplete person, one who ‘is trapped in the shadow of an idealised Other.’ The one who muses over or better yet mimics the life, actions, and motivations of another is not himself a thing but a copy, one which is unable to render any authenticity unto itself or the world. Grégoire by being a slave to the master logic of Angoualima has forfeited his own life. But the silver lining is found in his inability to act upon his thoughts. It is his inability to carry out his fantasies, to let go of himself and fully devote to the extreme that allows him to partially escape this dark world of Angoulima. And this is not intentional, Grégoire shouldn’t be seen as some anti-hero who escapes the clutches of hell through some virtuous act of holding back his most compulsive desires.
No, Grégoire is a fearful, anxiety filled wannabe serial killer, who masks the traumas of his life in dark humour and murder fantasies. Once again Tendayi Sithole makes this important observation: ‘While the psychic desire is to imitate his idol, what seems clear in the narrative is the failure to engage in the deeds of his idol. The sadistic impulses do not materialise, they merely actualise themselves on the psychic level and they materialise into failure itself and, of course, a failure to kill.’ Ultimately it is his failures that prevent him from becoming the monster he wished he was. But it is also his failure to fully devote himself to Germaine, his only figure of life, that prevents him from being something more. But regardless of Grégoire’s fate and the outcomes of his inactions, this novel highlights a salient reality that has been plaguing many African societies – that we are living in the midst of a femicide, which many of us aren’t even aware of.
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Reference
Tendayi Sithole. 2014. The one who is not and cannot in Alain Mabanckou’s African Psycho. Imbizo. vol. 1. (5). pp 82– 96. Unisa Press.
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