Mount Pleasant (19 page)

Arabesques of Times Gone By

I broke off my story about Joseph Ngono because Sara had begun to draw in the dirt. I hadn't noticed sooner, I was so caught up in her father's story. She was tracing small figures with her fingers. I felt an unfamiliar sense of self-doubt. Was it the self-doubt of the historian before the eyewitness? That was my daily fare. Or maybe the old lady didn't want to listen to my story any longer.

Sara had her own way of interrupting my story, and I knew, yes, I knew that she'd never fail to tell me what kind of father she preferred. I watched her trembling hands and read:

Which means,
Now I see my father.

I tried to be circumspect. It was as if, by some sublime necromancer's trick, Sara had turned the father I had discovered under a pile of papers into the child she said she'd never had. Her maternal need to protect that child in his darkest hours had burst forth from her belly in arabesques of love she traced on the ground. As much as her assertion, the way she wrote it left me speechless. It was Lewa writing, Njoya's very first alphabet, invented by the sultan between 1895 and 1896, before the whites set foot in his territory.

I looked at Sara in surprise, for it had taken me a lot of work and five years to learn to read these pictograms that no other Cameroonian still understood. It was an American friend who taught me, a professor in New York who was researching precolonial writing systems—“those that aren't just oral literature,” as he put it.

And there we were, half-illiterate me sitting in the dirt in front of the remains of Mount Pleasant while the doyenne scribbled on the ground signs that would have remained cabalistic were it not for my American friend! Happiness lit up our faces. I was certain that we had reached the chthonic knot of this jumble of disparate stories that bound us together. Tears rolled down our cheeks. Sara reached out to me and I clasped her hands. She was trembling. For a moment we were both the happiest, most transparent people on earth.

“He survived,” Sara murmured, “after all.”

“He survived,” I said in turn, but I was thinking of Njoya.

Sara understood and told me how the sultan had regained the use of his hands and taught her to write.

“Step by step,” she insisted.

I could see the monarch waking up from his death, lying in his bed, a visitor behind him telling a story to keep him from falling back asleep. Njoya opened his eyes in surprise, and greedily entering this miraculous world, he let the story flow into his ear and flood through his body; he opened his mouth the better to eat it up. Little by little he regained his strength; little by little he built up the strength in his hands so he could write down what he wanted to remember on the slate Nji Mama had brought him, as if his slate were the memory of a long-lost butterfly. Njoya wrote, without knowing that behind him a silhouette watched every move of his fingers, committing them to memory!

Ah, memory is an archive!

“It's too bad he didn't write during all those storytelling sessions,” Sara said, sighing. “Then I would have learned even more.”

I imagined Njoya struggling to follow the stories that came out of his translators' mouths, our country's two hundred (and more) languages bursting out in an unending shower of tales. Wasn't he disgusted, since he had in fact combined the languages spoken in his kingdom—Shüpamum, Fufulde, Haoussa, Bali, along with elements borrowed from French, German, and English—to invent a new language, Shümum, that was spoken in his palace? He who had wanted a language that incorporated all the earth's languages, a truly global language—how could he not be disgusted by this backsliding, despite his lifelong efforts?

Sara recalled that day long ago when he had sent his principal master artists, Nji Mama, Ibrahim, Nji Kpumie, to the home of that polyglot teacher Fräulein Wuhrmann, to “steal the white man's words,” as he put it. His advisers described for him how the woman pronounced such words as “
schwimmen
,” “rainbow,” “flour,” “mission,” and “
Ordnung
,” among others. “It was as if she owned these words,” Nji Mama said.

How surprised the lady was when they returned two days later, accompanied by Njoya, to show her the first “Bamfranglais” dictionary, as they called it, where Njoya had given new meanings to the colonialist teacher's words!

“‘Mission'?” she asked.

“In Shümum,” Njoya explained with a smile, “that means ‘to see.'”

“And ‘flour'?”

“We say
farinsi
, which means ‘to spend the night.'”

“‘To have'?”

“
Awar
, or ‘full.'”

“‘Kommst du'
?
”

“‘Tree.'”

Miss Wuhrmann seemed disoriented. Njoya went on, “‘
Links'
means ‘children.'”

She couldn't believe her ears. The sultan had turned her universe upside down, just to suit himself. He had made parallels between her words and his own understanding of the universe. He thought it was funny.

That's when he gave her back a letter she had written to him that he had reinterpreted in ways she never could have imagined. Ah, our Wuhrmann!

And what about the day Njoya read her pages from the Bible, which he had rewritten using words from the Koran so that it fit the religion he wanted. What a scandal! The missionary's face made it clear that as far as she was concerned, there was a Christian limit to this kind of language game. She turned for support to Nji Kpumie Penu, who was sitting next to the sultan. Nji Kpumie Penu didn't have a chance to open his mouth.

“In Shümum, his name is Monlipèr,” Njoya stated simply.

“Which means?”

This time Monlipèr answered, “Professor.”

Old Monlipèr was proud of this name, you could see it in his face, and from then on he asked everyone to call him just that. Fräulein Wuhrmann turned to another artist, the carpenter Nji Shua.

“Laponte,” Njoya said.

When she looked at Nji Mama, Njoya announced, “He is still Mama.”

The woman was almost disappointed.

“Why?”

Yes, why not continue the game? But our Wuhrmann didn't suspect Nji Mama's rebellion.

“And what about me?” she asked. “What is my new name?”

Njoya had thought about that, yes. How to forget the shock on our dear Wuhrmann's face when he replied, “Fräulein Wuhrmann, your name is Lasisvenère Pristenawaskopus.”

“A little long, don't you think?”

Later she'd shorten it to Lasisvener.

This took place in 1911. That's what Njoya did when he was still young and agile. Was it now up to him, there in the bedroom of his exile, to combine all the protectorate's languages and come up with Camfranglais? Or all the languages of Africa and of the world, just so he could understand the madness of the universe that the storytellers had laid out before him? It was a daunting task, especially since he was sick.

 

NEBU AND NGUNGURE

 

But the truth is so dear to me,
trying
to
create something true
 …

—Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo, February 12, 1890 (translated by Sue Dyson)

 

1

The Artist Revealed

There was a time in Foumban when princes, freemen, and, of course, the nobles who served the court—the Mbansi, palace pages—had the right to take whatever they wanted from the back of a slave. Walking up the Artists' Alley dressed in his black European suit coat, a handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket, a top hat on his head—all of which he had purchased from Herr Habisch—Nebu caused a bit of a stir, and he knew it. Still, not one noble moved a muscle. Only their amused eyes followed him as he went by. One of the sultan's magistrates would soon place limits on the greed of the Bamum ruling class, but on that day, what mattered was a young boy provoking whispers as he passed and staying the nobles' hungry hands. Murmurings followed him to the end of the alley, where he entered the darkness of a blacksmith's shop.

“I want to become an artist,” he said with determination.

He emphasized “artist.”

The master blacksmith stared at Nebu, noting that he was dressed just like his father, that madman who until recently was begging for death in the city's streets. He smiled. Nebu removed his hat respectfully, as a Bamum child was expected to do.

“Are you trying to blind me, son?” Monlipèr teased.

Monlipèr's smile revealed teeth reddened by kola nuts. Behind him, dozens of boys working with gold and bronze lifted their burning eyes to stare at Nebu and whispered jokes to one another. He seemed to have come straight from the moon.

But on that day it just so happened that Monlipèr needed day labor to fill a number of pressing orders. Besides, a master craftsman would never have sent a young man so eager to learn the trade away from the Artists' Alley.

“To become an artist,” the old engineer began, “it does no good to dress like a Christian … Just be faithful to your own truth.”

When Nebu undressed in front of Monlipèr, the old man understood the wild stories that circulated about him in the city. Bertha's son was a handsome young man, well shaped, with impressive muscles, virile, but with a hint of femininity because of his thick hair, his beardless face, and his smooth chest. Oh yes, he was handsome. The old man, whose hands knew how to create beauty, was not mistaken. Nebu had the body of a clever wrestler, an imaginative hunter, a spiritual soldier. The top hat, still perched on his head, made the apprentices burst out laughing.

“Take off that damned hat,” Monlipèr ordered.

“Peasant…”

Nebu heard this coming from the furnaces, but he just closed his ears.

He was transformed when he put on the blue pants and the flowing boubou worn by artists, but the boy was still better dressed than the master, who styled himself with the respectable carelessness of a sage.

Before setting off down the Artists' Alley, Nebu had thought about joining Njoya's army or his police. He had even considered signing up for the German army, yes, of becoming an
askari
. The
askaris
were the only ones who could wander through Foumban's streets and not be stripped bare by the nobles. Nebu had watched their entrance into Foumban, following behind the whites, dressed in beige uniforms, with red
chechias
on their heads and menacing weapons on their backs. Enough to make any adolescent go pale with envy. Many slaves had joined their ranks, moved by dreams of taking revenge against the nobles.

His mother alone had made him change his mind. Bertha threatened to slit her wrists if her son got mixed up with those “guys in poop-colored uniforms.” Nebu understood that the
askaris
went wherever the whites told them to go to kill their enemies. But he also decided against it because he had heard the accusations of rape that followed the soldiers, like flies chasing a boy who's just taken a crap. No one in Foumban really liked the
askaris
. People sneered at them, especially the women, who called them “cockroaches.” They were all slaves, mostly from Dahomey. Nebu had suffered enough when his father's saga had made him the target of all kinds of gossip. So he had hidden when the palace called out for a hundred volunteers to accompany a German prospector who was heading north “to meet the emperor of the Sokoto.” He had hidden in the bush and hadn't come out until a week after the white man with the hippopotamus-tail whip had left.

Choosing the Artists' Alley relieved him of the fear of conscription. A special order from Göhring had put Njoya's artists under protection, keeping the hundreds of young men who worked there safe from the rapacious colonial administration. But Nebu didn't know that yet. He had come straight from the fields, where his hands had never produced anything but yams. He had occasionally met artists, whom everyone admired. How could he have believed he would have a talent for producing anything other than muscular yams? But he didn't want to spend his life working the earth, that's for sure. He was horrified at the idea of ending up on one of the coffee, cocoa, or banana plantations that the Germans were setting up all over. The earth was the wealth of the Bamum, but Nebu despised peasants.