My gf a Sex Worker Was Raped on the Job
My gf a Sex Worker Was Raped on the Job
It happens a lot more than you think.
I picked up on something in his text messages and emails — they were demanding, bossy, controlling and paternalistic. This was a client who had been attempting to contact me since BEF October, but I decided to ignore him. The client kept contacting me. He was persistent. I’m a sex worker, and as such, I confront decisions regarding safety and sanity and money on a fairly frequent basis. The client’s vibe was just too weird, even for me, a veteran in the field of absurdity, social outcasts, and patriarchs desperately reaching for the touch of a young girl. Unsure how to placate his aggressive energy, I finally told him that I had left the business.
But he found my advertisements online. “Everywhere,” he wrote to me in a text message three months later. “It’s clear that you’ve returned to the industry.” In the lull of the Christmas season, clients were feeling broke and weighing familial obligations — with the holiday season’s moralism, I was left with an empty schedule and a hungry wallet. I agreed to meet with him.
The man was very old. How old, I couldn’t tell. He had crow’s feet in his eyes and a potbelly that threatened to pop the buttons of the Ralph Lauren polo that lurched over his waistline. Fine white tufts receded into his hairline; dandruff coated the shoulders of his black blazer.
He wrapped his arms around my waist on the suede sofa in front of the TV and offered me a glass of wine; he ran his fingers covetously between the small slice of space between my stockings and a micro mini skirt, my naked upper thigh. As I drew closer to him, I smelled something somewhat, rancid. His musky underarms combined with the smell of feet, urine, cum, a day of hard work at the office, and g-d knows what else.
In a feeble, but valiant attempt to hold back my disgust, I traced the surface of his crinkled khakis. He took my small hand in his, kneading it like the soft limb of a Raggedy Anne doll, and explained to me that he was a dominant. That I should call him sir. But that before we began, he would like to know what my limits were. I told him I was extremely open, but for now the most important thing for him to know was that I needed him to use a condom when we had sex.
“Well, as we explore the world of BDSM together, we’ll see what your limits really are and if I can convince you otherwise.” A chill went up/down my spine, but I left the hotel room that day in one piece, with several hundred dollars extra in my pocket.
On St. Patrick’s Day, he contacted me again. I remembered how unpleasant he had been. I had just spent an obscene amount on advertising, and in my unrealistic state of financial mania, I agreed to meet with him, again. I had survived once. I had survived a lot. I had seen a lot. No one had fucked with me or fucked me yet. “You can handle this,” I told myself.
He sent me a text message with his room number, and when I arrived, I rapped my cold knuckle against the door cautiously. He led me back to the suede couch where he had sat on my face months prior and we chatted, I’m not sure what about. I asked him vague questions about his business trip and how he had been. I giggled at the right times and smiled at others, trying to hold eye contact without collapsing like a house of cards. He said he had been to Tokyo and London. He said none of that mattered now, that this was his last stop, and that he had been looking forward to seeing me for months. He was so happy to see me. I couldn’t say the same.
I swallowed hard, clinked my glass to his, and said, “Well, cheers to that,” and opened my painted lips like a broken toy doll. It was the only thing I could think of to say. I held my breath to avoid inhaling too much of the scent that my memory had done such a good job of suppressing until now. He pushed the hair out of my face and informed me that we were going to the bedroom. I tried to push away my nausea. I thought about the money at the other end of this, grabbed his hand, and with put-on girlish excitement, giggled and skipped to the bedroom, his sloth-like body in tow.
“Take off your clothes,” he said.
I quietly complied. Wordlessly I unbuckled the straps of my favorite sandals, shimmied out of my mini micro skirt, and took off my sweater. I paused when I got to my bra and panties. Staring like a hungry drooling wolf, he sat opposite me, wet circles of sweat swelling beneath the armpits of his dress shirt, upon existing stains. My eyes met his, his pupils dilated, his hairy arm snaked across the firm mattress, and with two stubby fingers he pushed my sternum backwards into the gilded extra soft Egyptian cotton.
As he fastened restraints onto my ankles and wrists, I inhaled deeply and meditated on all the possible violence that could occur at this moment. I made some jokes and made him laugh because I knew the show wasn’t anywhere near being over yet. He brought out a huge Hitachi magic wand and buzzed its circular surface up and down my pelvic bone, where he seemed to think my clit was located. I managed some soft whimpers and feigned arousal. “Oh, he’s getting excited now,” my client said, stroking the bulge buried in his gray boxer briefs.
Fair enough. Hopefully that meant we’d be done soon. I arched my back into the mattress and opened up my legs, scanning down my naked body to the bedside table, where I’d conveniently placed several condoms in varying sizes. He started humping me, holding my knees into my chest. I got breathy, hoping to eschew any opportunity to prolong the session. He thrust into me with all his force, balls deep. His Salami-sized dick slid up and down the lips of my tragically wet pussy. With increasing aggression, he throttled my pelvic region, finally sliding his uncovered penis inside me balls deep.
I placed my feet on his soft chest and, with all the force I could muster, kicked him backwards. He stumbled back a few steps before falling to the ground. “That is not okay,” I said, breaking with my script. “This cannot happen without a condom.” I spoke as if I was scolding a small child.
“This is not a joke. It’s my safety. There are condoms right there. If you would like to have sex with me, you need to wear one. I have absolutely no problem leaving.”
He looked at me, and then down at the floor, saying nothing. He looked back at me and kissed me. Pulling on the now loose canvas restraints that held my ankles to my wrists, he flipped me over onto my stomach. I tumbled onto a heap of butt plugs that he had bought just for the occasion. Then I felt him on top of me. The long, yellowing nails of his hobbit fingers gripped my waistline, pulling me closer to his body, dragging my back into his sweating, hog-like body in hollow claps of slapping flesh. I felt something in my asshole. Maybe a finger, dick or a butt plug. Something — I just wasn’t sure what.
Then I realized he was inside me. I realized he was anally raping me. I lay there looking at my nail polish, red like cherries in the spring on the white sheets. I stared beyond the ends of my long lashes and felt my nose crunch into the down pillow. I wondered if I was right — was he really inside me? Was this really happening? How could he be doing this when literally seconds prior, I had specified that under no circumstances was he to enter me without a condom?
I knew that if I wanted to, I could kick from behind. I knew I could get him on his back and even probably choke him if necessary. I had been taking kickboxing, martial arts and self-defense classes and knew that the right calculated slither from beneath him could foil the violent desire of his Salami-sized prick, but all-powerful, penis. Completely clearheaded, I envisioned the exact movement of my limbs that would render him powerless. I knew I could push him off the bed, choke him, and throw a fairly decent punch.
But if I resisted, I mused, what would happen? If I was going to get him off me, it might mean injuring him. What would happen to me, a young girl working in an illegal trade, if I hurt this man? Scratches or marks were courtroom collateral that could be held against me. If I fought, I would be leaving without compensation. If I fought, he could retaliate and rape again, or worse. If I fought and ran into the streets, soaked by green beer, I could be followed by civilians seeking to save me from sex-trafficking, or worse, vigilante justice seekers looking to avenge my John for his injuries.
If I fought, I could be arrested. New York state laws explicitly exclude prostitution from rape protection laws. I didn’t think today was a day I would lose my life, and had I been at real risk of being murdered, I thought to myself, the situation and the risks incurred by my potential resistance would carry a far different weight.
I remembered the expressions on the faces of the doormen as I entered. Everyone knows what it means when a beautiful young girl in a trench coat and red lips walks into an upscale hotel room for exactly one hour and then leaves. I remembered the silence of the middle-aged tourists in the elevator, how they had looked at me, the ambient tension brought to the surface by a whore’s presence.
I had no choice but to summon my most convincing performance of clueless high-school girl and as I emitted the perfectly crafted moans of fake pleasure, I prayed to whatever god does or does not exist that my client would cum quickly and that all of this would soon be over. It was only a few seconds before I felt his hot cum inside me. After his final gurgle of exhausted ecstasy, he rolled over beside me. The liquid trailed the inside of my ass, and slowly drizzled down my perineum.
Without pause I hopped off the bed and flew as quickly and gracefully as possible into the bathroom to wash myself off. “Wow, that felt great,” he exhaled into the comforter. I wondered if he was aware that he had just raped me. “I love fucking girls in the ass. It’s almost the same as the other way; it’s just a little bit tighter. I don’t have the right size dick that’s ideal for ass fucking, but I sure do love it.”
“Uh-huh. Yeah that felt really good,” I half yelled from the marble bathroom. I looked at my naked body in the mirror. What the fuck was happening? I didn’t have time to think about it. I only had time to make sure I came out of this alive. “Sweetie, can you bring me a hot towel, while you’re at it?” he called.
“Sure thing!” I pushed away his moldy bag of toiletries and turned the hot water on. I took a deep breath, putting the fluffy hand towel under the lukewarm water.
“Here you go,” I said, sweeping off the remaining cum from his crotch with the white linen. I smiled because I felt like I had no choice. I giggled girlishly when he asked me to lie down and snuggle. I looked at the digital clock on the bedside table. We still had 40 minutes left of session. I sighed and laid my head on his heaving body because I felt like that was what I had to do. I didn’t have anything to say and I wasn’t in a position to make pleasantries. I waited for him to speak. He pinched my nipples and told me about his wife. I tried to keep breathing.
He went off about how he likes to take girls to Atlantic City for long weekends. He told me he liked playing with me, and he would write a review of my services; he would take me out to dinner. “That sounds nice,” I said, sweetly, smiling and batting my eyelashes as if it was possible to speak to god through the performance of beauty and perceived feminine purity.
I have never felt so powerless as I did within this moment. I cannot explain to you how it feels to have all of your human rights and physical and emotional strength eclipsed by the existence of bureaucratic structures, which quite literally do not recognize your personhood. At some level, I’m not upset that this happened. I’m not fazed by the fact that sex workers get raped, and that this time, I was one of them. I know this happens. At some level, I expected it to happen to me at some point. For me as a sex worker, the prospect of rape is a fairly mundane factor in the extremely dangerous and illicit work I do.
I enter every room ready to be killed. I meet new clients and I imagine what they can do to me and how I am going to escape. I look at everything they do. I watch their grip on glasses of wine and the way their eyes flicker from my body to the bed. I think about every word they send me in text messages and emails. I look at the speed of their wrists when they unsnap my suspenders or unzip the flies on their pants. I listen to the tone they use when they answer the door and when they suggest that we “get more comfortable.”
I reach for their dicks when they are halfway inside me to make sure that they haven’t slipped the condom off. I do this even with my regulars who I see on a weekly basis. I do this with clients who have told me their whole life stories, who I know everything about, clients who I actually enjoy seeing. I want to trust them, but the sad reality is that, due to the systems in place, I can’t afford to relax into the illusion of trust and safety.
Sex workers are soldiers. We never, ever get to turn off. If you don’t understand this, then you are fundamentally misunderstanding what makes sex work “work” rather than play. Period.
I most certainly don’t show up to work thinking that I’m about to have a great time. I’m providing a service at my own risk. No one even has to say that to me for me to know it’s true that women get raped every second of every day, and that even those who aren’t sex workers have trouble achieving justice. From day one, women are told that there are good girls and bad girls, and bad girls have it coming to them. The parameters of our existence as femme-identified people and women are strictly policed with ambient threats of persistent violence.
Though I am emotionally equipped for the plausibility and total likelihood that I will be raped or even murdered at work, there is no amount of conviction, physical strength, or intuitive savvy that can protect me as a person who leads a criminalized existence. Because I am a sex worker, even though I am a fairly privileged sex worker, I do not have the basic rights that all human beings should. Yes, assault is assault and rape is rape, and the stakes are high for every single person who encounters abuse and assault. We can acknowledge that all women experience these things, but it’s simply not true that sex workers have the same experience with sexual violence that other women do.
The part of me that walks away from this rape scenario knowing that it was a matter of time is, yes, deeply fucked up. My stone-faced blasé-ness in the face of this violence is an internalized victim blaming. But more than that, it’s the result of systemic injustice that is applied to all victims of sexual violence, and especially to violence against sex workers.
I know too many women who have been hurt. There’s a serial killer who targets sex workers in Long Island, there’s a serial rapist who calls girls to his house in New Jersey to then rape them. I’ve heard stories of police actually laughing in the face of workers who report violence on the job. I’ve been to vigils full of crying women and trans people and LGBTQ providers, many of whom are acquaintances or friends of mine. This happens, and it happens fairly frequently. I see the stories in my email inbox, hear about it from my loved ones; I see it on the news. I know that it happens, but more importantly I know that, in the majority of cases, no one gives a fuck.
Why? Because we’re whores. Because everybody knows we had it coming. Because we could have chosen a less dangerous profession like a retail job or a waitress position in lieu of sex work. Because a whore is a woman who has plummeted from her celestial virgin state to the rock bottom, to the sewers of despicable human existence. A whore’s life is meaningless. She and the pain she carries are irrelevant, save for the moment when her soft lips cradle your hardening dick. These ideas are hundreds and hundreds of years old, and they need to change.
Serial rapists and murderers often target sex workers, with full knowledge that those workers are the most vulnerable due to their lack of protection under the law, before moving on to target other women. It’s almost impossible to get real statistics on the subject of sexual violence against workers due to the criminal nature of our work, but estimates say that those in the sex trade have a 45% to 75% chance of experiencing sexual violence on the job. There are numerous examples of murderers and rapists who target sex workers — but what’s troubling is that, more often than not, we don’t take this violence seriously when it is recounted by those who experience it first hand. What’s troubling is that we know this information and have known it for quite some time, yet the powers at large begrudgingly refuse to acknowledge that it is necessary for serious change to occur.
I don’t feel like I can afford to be silent. As a person with privilege, I worry about the hundreds and thousands of sex workers who will be murdered and raped in the remainder of 2016, and I know that we are very, very far from achieving justice — even if decriminalization happens, that does not compensate for the fact that I will be living with this for a long time.
I will be thinking about all the women I don’t know who will be meeting with this man. I will be wondering about all the other women he says he has met with and wondering if they were also raped. I will be wondering if he has killed anyone before. Even as I write this I wonder what the consequences are of speaking out — what happens when my mother googles my name and finds this? What happens if my rapist finds this? What happens if the police see this? What happens when I want to apply for some normal ass job and this article pops up? What happens when x y z?
I don’t have any answers or brilliant ideas. I can’t sit here and allow myself to get tangled in a web of criminal paranoia while other, less privileged members of my community get abused, threatened, killed, raped, and jailed. What I can do, however, is seek healing in telling you my story, and hope that within it, you see some refraction of humanity’s struggles and joys that are worth fighting for. I can hope that you will understand that I am a person whose pain is real, and that there are millions of others just like me, and that this will encourage you to re-examine your ideas about sex work and join us in the fight for our rights.
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Conscripted Into The Emperor’s Private Orchestra
What do a crew of talented musicians do when forced to serve at the pleasure of a notoriously cruel dictator? They play like their lives depend on it.
When the rebels stormed Charlie Perrière’s house, he was sure his days were about to come to a swift and bloody end. The night before, 66-year-old Perrière, fearing what was coming, knelt down on the floor of his home in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. He began to pray. “God, I have no weapons, no army, I’m not a fighter. Tomorrow, it seems like the Séléka will enter Bangui,” he whispered, referencing the brutal rebel group that was about to topple the government. “I put all my belongings in your hands … please protect me.”
Hiding out in his large house in a leafy part of Bangui, not far from high-walled ambassadorial residences, Perrière feared for his life. When the militants stormed the grounds, brandishing guns and demanding the keys to a neighbor’s car parked in his driveway, there was little he could do. He did not have the keys, he told them.
“It was as if I had just poured oil onto the fire,” Perrière tells me when I meet him in the same courtyard three years later. He describes how the group of young men grew furious at his response, even though he had already handed over the keys to his own car. They started shooting in the air and ganging up on the slender man standing alone in his yard.
That was until one member of the group — a scrawny street kid brandishing a rusty machete — peered closer at Perrière and, his eyes growing wider, whispered something to the leader. The man turned around to stare at Perrière with a strange expression on his face.
Perrière held his breath.
“Charlie Perrière, really? Is it really you?” the fighter asked after a few seconds.
Suddenly, he was warmly patting the older man on the back.
“And then he began apologizing, and telling me, ‘My mom is simply fanatical about your music, my brother!’” says Perrière, smiling at me with amused disbelief as he recalls the moment from a chair in his verdant garden.
The leader told the gangsters to give Perrière his car keys back, and told the youths that no one was allowed to return and pillage this particular house.
Most people in the West would struggle to pinpoint the Central African Republic on a map. Its international claim to fame is the dire poverty of its citizens and its terrifying, bloody, seemingly never-ending wars. The 2013 war reached a peak when a mostly Muslim faction, Séléka, swept into Bangui, staging a coup d’état and eventually forcing the president to flee. This provoked a violent backlash from mainly Christian and Animist groups known as “Anti-Balaka” militias. Hundreds of thousands of citizens ran from their homes. Those who did not manage to escape were slaughtered, their bodies thrown in the river or stuffed down water wells. Youths armed with machetes, their eyes glistening in a drugged haze, spiked decapitated heads as trophies on sticks and paraded them around the streets. Aid workers watched helplessly as armed thugs took over the towns and villages, stringing human intestines across the roads as barriers — a gruesome warning to others to proceed no further.
Here in Bangui, one of the ways of finding normalcy amid the chaotic years of cries and gunshots has been through another form of sound — the country’s rich music tradition. Whether the rhythmic drumming of the tam–tam, the strumming of the guitar, or the bubbling sounds of the balafon, a xylophone of wood and animal skins — music is a constant here. And Perrière is one of its undisputed kings. His fame probably saved his life.
Years earlier, he was the leader of the favorite orchestra of one of the most notorious, colorful and strange despots in history, Jean Bédel Bokassa. Today Perrière is still considered a national star — yet, like every story involving the feared Bokassa, Perrière’s path to celebrity was far from a conventional one.
It was the late 1960s, and Perrière, a talented but struggling teenage musician, was tired of surviving on a shoestring. As he made preparations to leave his native country for a new life in the Congo, he had an unexpected meeting that would change his life.
Perrière was a star singer in his church choir, and he had been performing with an orchestra that was invited to play in front of Bokassa. After the concert, when the players were invited to salute the great leader, Perrière was summoned to report directly to the man himself. The prospect was exciting — but also terrifying.
Bokassa is often caricatured as one of Africa’s most tyrannical dictators, a ruler who fed his opponents to crocodiles, adored diamonds and women, and crowned himself as emperor of Central Africa. The anecdotes from his time abound with absurdities, stretching from the beginning to the end of his reign. The night he seized power in a coup d’état on New Year’s Eve in December 1965, he brought his deposed predecessor (who happened to be his distant cousin) to the palace and wrapped him in a tight hug before dispatching him to prison, notes historian Brian Titley in his book Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa. Following Bokassa’s ouster in 1979, the French troops who drained the emperor’s alligator pond at Villa Kolongo discovered bone fragments belonging to some 30 victims, writes historian Martin Meredith in his book The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence. Mutilated bodies were also found in the residence’s refrigerator, while locals testified that others were regularly fed to the lions.
While these horror stories are well documented, few of the historical accounts of Bokassa pick up on one of the emperor’s greatest passions — music. A soldier who blitzed through the ranks to become the head of the Central African army, once he became president, Bokassa realized that military might would only take him so far. As he sought to consolidate and aggrandize his power and influence both at home and abroad, he believed music would be an effective tool.
“Bokassa tried to use radio and musical groups as part of his effort to create a cult of personality to support his rule,” writes Jacqueline Cassandra Woodfork in her book Culture and Customs of the Central African Republic. And he was determined to make Perrière a part of these efforts.
Bokassa had heard Perrière sing, and upon making inquiries he was disappointed to learn of the youngster’s plans to leave the country.
So that night at the presidential palace in central Bangui, the despotic leader addressed the terrified musician in a kindly but firm tone — and one that left little room for doubt.
“He told me: ‘As head of state, I can’t forbid you from going to Congo, but … as a father, I wish that you wouldn’t go,’” recounts Perrière. “After that meeting, my mother had advised me that I had better stay,” adds Perrière, who quickly agreed. “If I had run away to Congo, it would have been like treason.”
So he stayed. But it was a long time before he heard from the great leader again. Months rolled by with no news, and Perrière wondered if Bokassa had forgotten about him. Then, one day, a presidential security vehicle showed up unannounced on the doorstep of Perrière’s mother’s house, sirens blasting. The president — at that point he had not yet appointed himself emperor — was summoning Perrière for another meeting at the palace.
This time Bokassa actually congratulated Perrière for staying put. Perrière recalls that the leader was seated at a long table with ministers around him. “He turned to me and said, ‘My son, do you know why I sent for you?’ I said, ‘No, your Excellency.’ And then he said, ‘It was to thank you, because I gave you a piece of advice and you respected it. That means that you are a nationalist at heart.’”
Perrière continues his story: “He then asked me why I had wanted to go, and I told him, ‘My father is dead, my mother is raising my 10 brothers all on her own, I am the oldest of the family and I need to help my mother. We have no help here, we have no means of developing [our lives].” He told Bokassa that his band played on rented instruments, which swallowed up most of their earnings.
Bokassa turned to his ministers and ordered them to procure instruments for what would become Bokassa’s “Imperial Orchestra.” This marked the start of Perrière’s decades-long career making music as a private bandmaster for one of the world’s most feared and murderous despots.
Despite their radically different statuses, Bokassa may have seen something familiar in the young Perrière. Bokassa himself was an orphan; his father had been killed in a dispute when Bokassa was 6 years old, and his mother killed herself soon after. As a teenager, Bokassa was educated in missionary schools and had initially planned to study for the priesthood, before joining the French Army when World War II erupted. After he helped to establish the newly independent country’s national army, Bokassa formed a music band among the military, dubbing it Commando Jazz, writes Luke Fowlie in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture.
For Bokassa, music was a power-wielding political tool, so much so that he made his personal orchestra — called “Tropical Fiesta” — into a key tool of his global diplomacy, taking the musicians with him on state visits all over the world.
“He told me once: ‘Listen, Charlie, the young generation don’t understand the importance of music in a country. … It is the artists who enable others to get to know a country,’” recalls Perrière. “This was his goal: to introduce a country through its music.”
“He adored music,” says Aggas Zokoko, the orchestra’s lead singer and the band’s leader in recent decades. “I think the connection Bokassa had with musicians was unlike any other connection he had with others.”
Others have a more cynical take on the emperor’s personal orchestra. “He had what we call la folie de grandeur,” that is, megalomania, says Alex Ballu, a veteran radio star and cultural journalist in the Central African Republic. “He needed musicians to travel with him, to augment his presence, to sing his praises and so on.”
Such practices were also common in neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), under Mobutu Sese Seko, a bespectacled dictator known for his distinctive leopard skin hat as well as mass violence and corruption.
“Popular groups were required to literally sing the praises of their leader,” writes Fowlie. “Bangui’s chosen orchestras became emissaries for the Bokassa government, touring internationally throughout Central and West Africa as well as Europe.”
Though Bokassa saw music as a diplomatic tool, he also loved it with an all-consuming passion that was obvious to all.
“Once, we were traveling to Vakaga (in north Central African Republic) when the plane was struck by lightning mid-flight and we almost crashed,” recalls Zokoko. Upon landing, some of the musicians were so shaken by the experience that they ran away and hid, refusing to perform that night.
“And Bokassa noticed and said: ‘OK, lower the mic down a bit for me. I will sing with you.’ And he did!”
While Zokoko describes the singing as merely “not bad,” his eyes light up as he remembers the emperor getting more and more into the spirit, taking up a guitar and beginning to serenade one of his wives from the stage.
“It was a beautiful evening that I will never forget,” says Zokoko wistfully.
Bokassa also constructed the country’s first major recording studio in the grounds of Berengo, his palace near his home village and the place he envisioned as the future capital of the Central African empire. While some historians see the move as a cynical effort to win the love of the people through music, the country’s musicians benefited financially in a way that they have rarely done since.
“The first time I played for him it was in Berengo,” recalls Zokoko, who had been recruited by Perrière. He describes Bokassa sitting in the palace with his family, as the orchestra played purely for the leader’s personal pleasure.
“Sometimes we would just perform for him alone. He’d sit on the sofa. Afterward, he would say, ‘Thank you, my children.’”
Every aspect of each performance was meticulously planned, and the musicians, who had previously struggled to make ends meet, suddenly found themselves catapulted to stardom, traveling around the world, dressed to the nines.
“He would clad us in all the top fashions,” muses Zokoko. “We would play in front of all of these heads of states in beautiful suits.”
“He wanted all the artists to look good, to portray grandeur,” Ballu, the music journalist, says. “The ministers didn’t like the musicians much, as they would often be chatting up their wives,” he adds, laughing. “But Bokassa always defended them, and paid them good money.”
But it was far from all fun and games. “When you worked with the emperor, everything had to be done perfectly,” Perrière says. “By the book, just like in the army. … When the emperor loses his temper, everyone is in trouble,” he adds, recalling a bitter experience when he found this out for himself.
“Once, I sang a song that he didn’t like,” he recalls. “It was a song for his birthday.” Performed and broadcast live over the radio, the musicians hadn’t even had a chance to finish playing before “suddenly the curtains began closing in front of us. We turned around and there were armed security guards standing behind us, gun barrels pointing.” The next thing Perrière knew, he was being marched off to prison.
He spent one month behind bars, an experience which, shaking his head, he describes as “terrible.”
“My wife was traumatized. It was very difficult.”
Upon being let out, Bokassa summoned Perrière and explained to him the particular line in the song that he didn’t like, a lyric he deemed too insulting for Bokassa’s image as a strong man.
“You, the artists, everything you say or do, it’s heard by the whole world,” Bokassa told him. “You can build someone up or break someone easily. So the advice I’ve always given you is: ‘When you compose a song, make it go through a censor in order to avoid any problems.’”
From that point on, all of the songs went through a censor.
Perrière’s month in prison was far from a unique incident. Tropical Fiesta and other bands playing for the government had to comply with the emperor’s every wish. Fowlie writes that another orchestra, Centrafrican Jazz, was dissolved in 1975 at the height of its popularity, allegedly over a spat between Bokassa and his wife, who is said to have favored the group. (Some allege that the group became so popular — even with Bokassa’s mistresses — that the ruler split it up out of jealousy, according to an article by musician Sultan Zembellat.)
As Bokassa’s rule continued, he became more dictatorial and his eccentricities grew. He had maintained a historical admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte since his time as a young trainee in the French military, and during his reign this respect morphed into blind obsession, culminating with Bokassa crowning himself “Emperor of Central Africa” on December 4, 1977, the 173rd anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation.
Bokassa invited Pope Paul VI himself to crown him. Though the pope, along with a multitude of other state leaders, declined the invitation, preparations for the coronation progressed full steam. To emulate Napoleon, Bokassa dressed himself in a 30-foot-long scarlet mantle, designed by the same atelier that had prepared Napoleon’s. It was decorated with pearls, diamonds and rubies.
“The whole country was mobilized to take part in the coronation,” Perrière remembers. “There were white horses brought especially from France, all the gold-gilded carriages … it was extraordinary.” The total cost was an eye-popping $20 million USD — a bill footed entirely by France — while the population of the Central African Republic was mired in deep poverty.
Just before the coronation, musicians from all over the country were asked to compose songs. Perrière’s entry was chosen as one of the official songs for the ceremony. “I was stuck for one week trying to compose it. I turned it over and over in my head. And afterward, it simply came to me, just like that.”
The song, titled “Révérence à Nos Souverains” (“Reverence to Our Sovereigns”), became a hit, and it is still featured on compilation albums of African music.
Alongside the Imperial Orchestra, other renowned musicians were invited to attend, among them Manu Dibango, a star from neighboring Cameroon. The scenes that greeted him upon arriving at the presidential palace in Bangui surpassed his wildest expectations, Dibango wrote in his autobiography Three Kilos of Coffee.
“Money flowed like water,” Dibango wrote. “The church was sumptuously decorated.” But the night ended somberly. “That evening by moonlight, we were giving our concert when a violent storm suddenly erupted, the carriages were soaked, the projectors broke down, the musicians got drenched. The dignitaries thought only of hiding themselves in their Mercedeses.”
And, just like a sudden tropical storm, two years later, Bokassa’s swift downfall began.
The key event that triggered his dethroning came in 1979, when around 100 schoolchildren were massacred at Bangui’s central prison, following Bokassa’s orders to arrest them. The children had been taken while protesting an order that forced them to buy overpriced school uniforms made in a factory owned by one of Bokassa’s wives. An independent judicial inquiry subsequently concluded that the prison massacre was carried out “almost certainly” with the personal participation of the emperor, writes Meredith in The Fate of Africa.
The incident proved to be the final straw for the French, who had been bankrolling Bokassa and his government. In September 1979, while Bokassa was away on a state visit to Libya, French troops helped restore former president David Dacko (Bokassa’s cousin) to power. Bokassa fled by airplane into exile on the Ivory Coast. The Imperial Orchestra was disbanded, and some of its musicians, Perrière included, moved abroad.
Several years later, in 1986, Bokassa returned to the Central African Republic, hoping to be forgiven and welcomed back. Instead, the deposed emperor was arrested, marched off to jail and then put on trial.
Today, upon landing at Bangui M’Poko International Airport, the first glimpse any visitor catches of the Bokassa era are the small, toylike airplanes from the 1960s and ’70s, in faded yellow, red and white. For years, people have believed that the planes are haunted by the ghost of the emperor, since it was Bokassa, Titley writes, who established the national airline, and the small airplanes date back to that time. During the 2013 war, the planes gained an unexpected — if ill-fated — second life as shelters for people fleeing marauding gangs. The displaced have since been forced to leave the airport and return to rebuild their destroyed homes. More than 40 years after Bokassa’s lavish and garish coronation, the Central African Republic is one of the poorest countries in the world, ravaged by war and strife, the ongoing pillaging of natural wealth, and rampant corruption. The avenues Bokassa built are crumbling, the buildings gutted and reduced to skeletal remains, weeds growing in what used to serve as kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms. Life expectancy is just 52 years — the shortest anywhere on the planet, according to the World Bank.
“Bangui la Coquette” (“Bangui the Flirt”) was the city’s nickname back in the Bokassa era. It’s now “Bangui la Roquette” (“Bangui the Rocket”), the locals quip wryly, due to the brutal fighting that has destroyed many parts of the city.
Bokassa’s Berengo palace has been extensively pillaged. When Perrière was being held at gunpoint in his front yard, Berengo was already being used as a base by child soldiers fighting with a motley crew of armed gangs, answering to the highest–paying militia leader of the day. In recent years, Russian soldiers and mercenaries have descended on the former royal palace, setting up training camps for soldiers inside the grounds, according to a 2019 CNN report. In exchange, Russian companies reportedly “won” exploration rights at a number of sites to look for diamonds and gold.
And yet, when I visited Bangui on a reporting trip in January 2018 — my fourth one after meeting Perrière in 2016 — I could still feel Bokassa’s presence in the ruined city. Vintage French magazines like Paris Match with Bokassa on the cover were being sold on the streets, locals pointed out the sprawling boulevards and other structures built by the former ruler, while the music and songs of the Bokassa era rang out around the city.
And Tropical Fiesta is playing once again. One night, I went to a show. The venue was in a garden next to a ditch, off the main road in Bangui. Lit up sparsely by a few functioning street lamps, it was guarded by a half-broken gate.
A balafon player began striking a few notes. A drumbeat, a clash of cymbals, and then guitarists, singers, and dancers emerged onstage, clapping, smiling, and dancing to the complex beat of a Central African rumba.
As the music got started, more and more people began to arrive, many middle-aged, but also several youngsters, as well as children weaving in between the adults’ legs.
Clutching large bottles of beer, the older men looked up at the stage with a faraway gleam in their eyes. The women, wearing figure-hugging dresses made out of colorful cloth, shook their hips languidly.
Before long it became a party — families, friends sitting around plastic tables, chatting and waving away mosquitoes, while others invited friends and lovers to dance.
Zokoko, who now heads Tropical Fiesta, was there, getting ready to sing, surrounded by friends and fans. The violence in and around Bangui had died down, and the usual rhythm of life had slowly begun to resume. Just a few years earlier, during the fighting that swept through Bangui in 2013, live music had virtually stopped, Zokoko explains to me during a pause in his performance. It resumed slowly at first, with people dancing only until 8 or 9 p.m. and then going home because of the fear of attacks. “And we don’t make as much money as before,” he adds bitterly.
Yet the songs played on, people sang along, their eyes half-closed, smiling as if trying to spirit themselves back to a different era, before the country was riven by war and armed gangs.
Alongside the music, a certain nostalgia for the era of Bokassa had emerged. Several years ago, youth activists dug out the emperor’s throne, long stripped of its diamonds and rubies, from a dump behind the city’s main stadium. Painting it a bright yellow to represent the gold that once encrusted it, the youths decided to set the throne on a display on one of the capital’s busiest avenues.
“We were furious to find this object abandoned for decades” Heritier Doneng, a youth leader of Patriotes Centrafricains, a group that describes its aim as defending the country’s cultural values, tells me on my reporting trip in 2016.
“Yes, people speak of Bokassa because they’ve had enough of this suffering, of the misery without end that we are experiencing here in CAR,” he adds. “Bokassa serves as an example, a model of the economic revolution. In his time, we were the best in Central Africa, now we are the worst.”
Bokassa has earned a reputation as a “builder,” responsible for commissioning Bangui’s spacious boulevards, stadiums and many other buildings. “During the reign of His Majesty, the town of Bangui was more beautiful than Brazzaville, more beautiful than Libreville, than Yaoundé, Malabo and N’Djamena,” says Zokoko, naming neighboring capitals. “Today we are back to zero.”
“It seems that people have forgiven him a lot,” Perrière muses about his former boss. “Because all the regimes who came after couldn’t do what he did. Those rulers who came after brought a lot more suffering since.”
After a moment’s pause, Perrière adds quietly: “Bokassa was a dictator, he took decisions himself. Now it’s a democracy, things are moving slowly, and people are beginning to miss Bokassa.”
Rehabilitation of the reputation of a nation’s former authoritarian and brutal strongman is a familiar trend, seen everywhere from the enduring veneration of Stalin in Russia to the nostalgia for Brazil’s violent military dictatorship of the 1970s.
“Bokassa had his brutal side, particularly toward the end, but he was also the only of CAR’s presidents who had a vision for the country and built things,” says Yale University professor Louisa Lombard, who has published three books on the Central African Republic.
Lombard describes Bokassa’s reign as “a time of calm and hope in the country, in a region that had not yet turned to full-on civil war, and at a time when France was still providing a lot of support.” It is not surprising then, Lombard adds, that most people look back on the time with nostalgia, pinning the credit on Bokassa. “The country feels utterly humiliated. … There is an enormous desire for national solutions to the country’s problems.”
“Bokassa always used to say, ‘You can’t feed people with politics.’ But today, everything has become political,” Zokoko says. In the 2016 presidential election, there were 30 candidates, inspiring Zokoko to compose a song titled “My Beautiful Country, Where Everyone Wants to be President.”
Since Bokassa’s demise, numerous politicians have sought out Zokoko and other members of the former Imperial Orchestra, asking to have songs written for them. Sometimes those requests are impossible to turn down.
The same year that the Séléka descended upon Perrière’s front yard, they tried to storm a venue where Zokoko’s band was playing. “Someone from the Séléka came with 16 armed thugs and wanted to get inside. And I said, ‘No, no, it’s Mother’s Day celebrations there, you can’t go in.’ And so, they realized who I was, and asked me to compose a song for them!” Zokoko adds, explaining that even though he was only paid 5,000 XFA ($8.50) for it, he was relieved to get the armed group off his back.
“Some politicians still haven’t paid me,” he notes.
Today, the violence has subsided, and the atmosphere is more free, though the concert scene has not yet fully returned, and violence pops up sporadically, such as in November 2017, when a concert for peace by a local band playing was derailed by a grenade attack that killed four people and injured 20 others.
Today, the music of Bokassa’s band is heard everywhere: at weddings, birthdays, funerals and more, serving as a kind of social glue, a way to start repairing the splintered communities throughout the country.
“We sing about togetherness,” says Zokoko. “We sing the songs of yesterday, in Sango” — the primary language here — “and in French. We are not politicians, we are musicians, but we want to give this ambience of social cohesion, so that it comes back to us.”
Sipping a beer and laughing at the 2018 concert, Pascal, a beefy former director general of a security company with the look of a nightclub bouncer, says he comes to hear the band play whenever he can.
“Musicians are like philosophers,” he says wistfully. “They have the power to reunite everyone with their songs.” He describes the impact of the band’s diverse membership, which includes people from various religious groups, as well as some who are typically marginalized by society here, such as a musician with a disability. “Christians, Muslims, disabled — all united. We are brothers and sisters, it’s the politicians who wanted to divide us. God knows, the solidarity between us will return. Look around: Everyone is here,” he says, gesturing at the bustling compound.
Perrière, however, is not at the party. After Bokassa was deposed, Perrière emigrated to France in order to get treatment for his son who was sick. There, he worked a succession of different jobs, including in a coffee house, before later deciding to return home and resume his musical career. But he did not rejoin Tropical Fiesta; instead he returned to his religious music roots. He became a born-again evangelical Christian and turned to composing mostly religious songs — as well as to moonlighting as an occasional wedding singer, he tells me with a twinkle in his eye as he hands me a CD of songs he recently recorded for a local bride and groom. The studio in his house is named SDJ — “Studio of Jesus,” he tells me. Today, he divides his life between Paris and Bangui, living off of profits from his music career, as well as the money earned by a Bangui restaurant that he runs, which caters to the country’s elites.
As for Bokassa, despite being sentenced to death twice, first in absentia while he was abroad, and then in a courtroom in 1987, his sentence was gradually eroded in the ensuing years. In 1993, as part of a general amnesty, he was set free, having served just six years in prison. Perrière was among those waiting at the jail entrance for the former emperor, who had newly reestablished his own strong belief in God. Bokassa emerged from behind bars clad head to toe in a white robe and declaring, “I am the thirteenth apostle.”
Bokassa died in November 1996 of a heart attack at age 75, and he is survived by as many as 60 children, according to the New York Times’ obituary. In 2010, then-president François Bozizé officially rehabilitated Bokassa, and even went as far as to posthumously award him the state’s medal of honor, declaring that Bokassa has “given a great deal for humanity.”
For Perrière, his former boss remains somewhat of a mystery. He found Bokassa both paternal and petrifying.
“Everyone was scared of him. Everyone. It was standard,” says Perrière, while at the same time going on to describe how in his more tender moods the emperor would call him “my son,” and how in turn he and others would call Bokassa “Papa.”
Perrière speaks of his time with Bokassa with a sense of wonder, replaying scene by scene in his mind and then pausing to remember more.
As for Tropical Fiesta, Perrière is glad some of his songs continue to be sung and danced to throughout Bangui and beyond, and he stays in touch with his former bandmates. “I help them, I give them advice,” Perrière says, smiling. “They play old songs, but they also have a new repertoire.” The fact that the musicians of Tropical Fiesta did not put down their instruments, that they have continued this long and even play new songs, offers a glimmer of hope for the country.
“Many groups sing for reconciliation,” he adds quietly, after a moment’s reflection. “Whether it’s effective or not, everyone needs to make their contribution for peace.”
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