4 ideas
Moses, known as Petit Piment, grows up in a Loango orphanage after Congo's Marxist-Leninist turn, where the kindly priest Papa Moupelo is banished and a politically connected director runs the place. As a teenager he escapes to Pointe-Noire, runs with a street gang, and is taken in by Maman Fiat 500 and her prostitutes, only to lose that household when the mayor's clean-up campaign expels them. He then slides into madness.
The regime's Marxist-Leninist language replaces religious instruction and communal ritual at the orphanage, but it does not replace favouritism. The director uses revolutionary loyalty as cover to hire his relatives and ethnic kin. The new ideology changes the vocabulary of power while the actual distribution of jobs and protection still runs through clan and personal connection.
For a child the state has failed, a brothel run by a madam works as a family: it provides food, protection, routine and affection. When authorities run a moral clean-up of the city, they see only vice to remove, not the care structure they are destroying. Seen this way, 'sanitizing' a city can mean dismantling the only support its most abandoned people have.
The protagonist is given a long Lingala name that carries a whole ancestral blessing. The institution and the street shorten it and then replace it with a nickname, Petit Piment, earned when he spikes bullies' food with chili. Each renaming records a new power that claims him, and his later madness shows up as confusion about who he is. A name works as a map of who has authority over a person.