Jiliac Podcast

A sixteen-year-old walks south out of the mountains with the money from his father's cow in his pocket — and no intention of ever going back to the field.

A young contractor stands in a country reduced to rubble and sees not ruin but the largest order book in the world.

A man carries a photograph of an empty beach to London and asks bankers to lend against the ships it does not yet hold.

The first Pony — plain as a workman's shoe — on an expressway built before the country had a car of its own to run on it.

A retired supertanker swung broadside across a tidal gap and deliberately sunk — used as a single colossal stone to stop the sea.

A construction man works a room of Olympic delegates the way he works a tender — and wins his country the Games its diplomats could not.

The richest man in Korea promises to run the nation the way he runs Hyundai — and the nation declines the offer.

A column of white trucks packed with cattle idles at Panmunjom, and an eighty-two-year-old man crosses the line on foot into the country he fled as a boy.

An old man with many sons and one empire, unable to perform the single act his whole life was arranged so he would never have to perform — letting go.

A dying founder dictates an order that fires all three of them — himself and both his warring sons — and a son refuses to obey it.

A twelfth-floor office window, and the favored son who inherited his father's grandest gesture and was destroyed by what it carried.

One empire becomes a half-dozen separate kingdoms, each ruled exactly as the father ruled and none ruling the others — the method reproducing itself in the act of breaking.

A routine car-export contract on the nephew’s desk, under a nameplate reading 현대 — the last fragment of the empire still openly called by the founder’s name.

Avril–septembre 2025 : d'Oyo à l'Élysée à Brazzaville, la géographie parisienne d'une fonction qui se déplace d'une dynastie à l'autre.

28 novembre 1967 : à la mort de Léon Mba, une succession constitutionnelle fabriquée à Paris pour un pays qui n'en sait rien.

Abidjan, 1971 : entre deux égaux de la Françafrique, pourquoi le récit suit Bongo et non Houphouët — la tête pensante d'un côté, le maître d'œuvre qui dure de l'autre.

De 1967 à 1996 : comment l'argent reçu en fonction d'État se transforme, acte après acte, en levier sur la France — du quémandeur au comptable.

Mai 1990 : la mort de Joseph Rendjambé reconstituée par la trace, et l'opération Réquin — la France défend Bongo les armes à la main face à la rue gabonaise.

Remonter le tuyau derrière une plainte de 2007 : du protocole Guillaumat aux abonnements au baril, de la FIBA à la BGFI — un canal resté élyséen de Foccart à Sarkozy, jusqu'à l'arrêt du 9 novembre 2010.

Le dépositaire meurt à Barcelone, hors de portée de ses juges : parada cardíaca officielle contre cancer murmuré, et une succession orchestrée par Pascaline avant de revenir à Ali.

Septembre 2009 : Ali proclamé à 41,73 % pendant que brûle le consulat de Port-Gentil ; la Cour valide, et le frère André Mba Obame rompt — puis meurt en exil.

Août 2016 : une seule province natale, créditée de 99,93 % de participation, couvre à elle seule le déficit national — ce que le père obtenait du pays entier, le fils doit le fabriquer dans une case du tableau.

L'autre moitié de la plomberie : le franc CFA et la garantie de Paris, mesurés à l'écart entre la « rupture historique » d'Abidjan en 2019 et un dispositif resté entier en zone CEMAC.

24 octobre 2018 : le dernier chef d'État debout dans un sommet déserté tombe à Riyad ; l'incapacité tenue secrète, puis rationnée en images, devient le régime d'un cercle qui signe au nom d'un absent.

30 août 2023 : la Garde républicaine prend le palais et place Ali Bongo en résidence surveillée — et l'homme qui annonce la chute est son cousin maternel, ancien aide de camp d'Omar.

10–18 novembre 2025 : la Cour criminelle spécialisée de Libreville juge douze personnes, le procureur parle de « braquage de la République », et le verdict tombe — vingt ans par contumace contre l'épouse et le fils, jugés absents.

9 novembre 1999 : un sénateur américain lit en séance publique ce que la presse française ne publiera qu'en 2007 — une même matière saisie ensuite par trois ordres juridiques, où chaque date française arrive après son écho étranger.

Novembre 2025 : sortie du palais par le coup, chiffrée par le procès, la fonction qu'Omar Bongo avait construite se redistribue — conservée à Brazzaville, repliée sur le cousin à Libreville, le sponsor français réattaché par l'Élysée. Ce n'était pas une famille ; c'était une fonction.

20 janvier 2023, hôtel Drouot : le mobilier saisi d'un voisin, Teodorin Obiang, est vendu au marteau, premier argent rendu au pays spolié. Le marteau est le dernier geste, non le premier : il n'arrive qu'une fois la culpabilité tranchée.

A monsoon storm drives a merchant ship onto the shallows off Quanzhou. Thrown clear by his father, the young heir crawls ashore — and hears, across the water, the salvagers begin to count the cargo while the crew still cries out.

An assessor of the maritime trade office is woken before dawn to seal a wreck’s salvage by lantern-light — and understands that the wrong hour exists precisely to outrun the daylight witnesses who would keep the count honest.

Starving for days on the docks of a city whose language he cannot speak, the castaway is found — or lets himself be found — by a man with salvage boats, and takes the first step of a debt he means to repay in full.

The castaway walks up into the foreign quarter to the blank granite face of a great merchant house — stone that says both “we are not of you” and “we have learned to live behind your sky” — and reads in its weathered courses a fortune already going soft at the joints.

A merchant’s daughter sends the only legitimate move her house has left walking out of the yard on an old woman’s feet — a carefully worded plea to kin for a loan to carry her father across the monsoon turn, before the note falls due.

Summoned after dark to a door he has never been let through, the lowest hand in the house is shown the thing the whole night was arranged to ask of him. No one sends for the lowest hand after dark with good news.

Sent to the frayed edge of the quarter to persuade a small creditor to let his note lie quietly past the deadline, the house’s new hand makes the first sealed move in two seasons the man strangling it cannot see — and, leaving, marks the watcher who has begun to mark him.

In the quiet of the trade office, the assessor who sealed the wreck is handed orders that need nothing written down: stall the cornered house’s cargo, and find the unseen hand moving its money along no thread the net can read.

Carrying a contract only he can read true, the conduit lifts a chandler’s note that would have collapsed the house a week early — then goes down to the docks to watch the won week land, where the strangler’s count-men are waiting to learn his face.

With the house now drawing its breath through a stray’s lungs, the daughter takes down the old book of names and shows him the empty ruled line where a man who saves a house earns his place — and the exact distance still between him and it.

To free the share the house needs before the turn, the conduit turns his one clean gift — reading the seam between scripts — to writing a lie in it, and quietly ruins the decent man who once trusted him in the dark. The first step on the road that ends where his enemy began.

From inside the office, the strangler’s counter assembles before the house knows it is coming — a won week primed to come apart, a deadline winched closer by the form’s honest slownesses, and a shape in the column narrowing, one cup of wine at a time, toward a single stray’s name.

The midpoint. The bankable week is clawed back from the wrong end, the soul-cost rebounds on the hand that paid it, and a quiet game of unseen moves flips into open war.

After forty days of desert, a young faqih walks into Cairo and asks where a traveller puts his name down for the pilgrim caravan. It left a month ago. The two years he swore to his dying father have already begun to spend themselves.

At the gate of the Maghribi lodge, a recited chain of dead teachers buys what money cannot: a mat, a daily barley loaf, and a place at the very back of the ring — known by every door in the civilized world, and let through none of them to the front.

Forty days a widow, Sitt Maryam weighs three men and finds two of them for sale. Her dead husband’s partner moves on the boy’s inheritance unafraid of anyone — which tells her exactly how heavy the hand above him must be.

Hungry enough at last, Idris takes up his father’s own trade at a notary’s bench off the Qasaba — and on the fourth day a storage receipt crosses it dated three days wrong, and he learns what his name is worth.

A dead merchant’s endowment takes two days to copy true. When the household it feeds arrives at the bench behind four litter-bearers, the foreign copyist reads the deed better than her own clerks — and is noticed for it.

From the horse-grounds below the Citadel, an emir names a dead man’s revenue the measure of his men. The order travels down to a bought judge who knows exactly whose hand should sign: a green foreigner with no patron, no faction — and a caravan to catch.