Mount Pleasant (31 page)

 

NJOYA AND MOSE

 

For one may rise, and fall the other may.

—Dante,
The Divine Comedy
, Paradise, Canto XIII (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

 

1

In History's Chattering Poor Neighborhoods

While Sara went on with her story about the whipping, I noticed for the first time that her face was beginning to show her age. Her eyes were wan. Her hands and feet trembled. Her voice grew difficult to hear, a whisper. It was as if her throat had been eaten up by the story, by her own story. Or maybe, having spoken for so long without interruption, she was just losing her voice. But it was also because she felt each of Nebu's lashes on her own body. Yes, it was as if the whips of the Congolese
tirailleurs
tore into her legs, flowed through her veins, and brought her heart to a stop with a strangled cry; as if her own forgotten past had come back to life, horrific blows tearing into her flesh. Reliving the life of that boy she had agreed to become when she was offered Bertha's swollen breasts to suckle, she had unleashed the hell of the matron's life in Foumban.

There was a cost for opening herself up to the artist's fate. Nebu's lacerated body had left Sara without a voice—suffocating from his torment. She finally understood the pain of a mother's bleeding heart. Had she been a mother herself, she also would have wished to give birth once more, just to alter his fate, to invent another, better life for him, because life in a colony is cursed, as we all know. Yet Sara followed another path. She accepted Nebu so that the mother would come back to life and smile at her once again.

“She never hit me,” Sara said, her lips still trembling with emotion under the weight of her silent cry, her eyes red with pain. “She never hit me. Never.”

“Now I know why,” I answered. “How long were you her son?”

Her reply was slow to come.

“For as long as she shaved my head.”

I took her hands. Her palm was covered in sweat. She shivered again.

“Do you want to do my hair?” I asked.

My question didn't surprise her, even if she opened her eyes wide, as if I were joking. Far from it. It seemed to me that any distraction would be welcome, would help her to find her way back to life after that painful tale.

“Careful,” she added. “I'm not a hairdresser.”

“I know.”

“I'm just an old-fashioned woman,” she warned me, smiling now. “Just an old woman.”

“I've straightened my hair, dyed it, cut it short, had bangs and everything else you can buy. Today I can tell you that I've become a fan of old-fashioned hair.”

Sara burst out laughing and wiped her nose with a corner of her
kaba
.

“But,” she added, “how would I know that?”

I sat between her legs, putting my head into her hands. I felt her warm hands smoothing each part of my hair. She hadn't asked me how I wanted the braids. If truth be told, I hadn't just given her my head to do; I also wanted her to reshape my soul.

“I'd prefer braids,” I suggested anyway.

“At your service, Madame,” she replied in French.

“Why not the style of 1932?” I suggested jokingly.

“Okay,” she replied seriously. “Style 1932.”

“Easy to remember?”

“Let's wait and see.”

While Sara had been talking, the crowd around us had grown bigger and bigger. My friends from Nsimeyong who dreamed only of New York and whose days dragged under the weight of boredom seemed interested by the hidden history of their neighborhood, by the life of this girl dressed as a boy, the girl hidden in the old lady, and the boy taken in hand by the women of a spice market. They made numerous trips to the National Archives for me, photocopying the texts I needed to figure out Sara's story. Their diligence left me speechless time and time again. Even the birds from the Internet café broke off their searches on husband.com and joined in our hunt for stories; Google became their favorite site. Often they came back angry, telling me that an essential manuscript written in Lewa characters, a register of capital crimes, an important circular, or an indispensable report had been abandoned in a dusty file, half eaten by rats, or drowned in the waters of idiocy. What my dear friends really couldn't understand was why the ruins of Mount Pleasant, which they now gazed upon hungrily, had been left to rot. By uncovering layer after layer of the House of Stories buried under Nsimeyong, Sara had turned their limping lives into limitless fountains of potential. Their future had been stolen, and they learned that their past had been as well. They didn't hold back their blame. “Can't the state do anything right?”

It was Arouna who asked that question. He had naturally become the leader of the group, always the most passionate, the most energetic, far smarter than his swagger of a wannabe gangster from the Bronx would suggest. I told him that the Cameroonian state, although built on a foundation of negligence, incompetence, and much more (corruption, nepotism, dictatorship, and everything else that a banana republic can come up with to sink its future), was the offspring of the historic betrayal that produced Njoya's violent nightmare: the betrayal of the association of chiefs that the sultan had refused to join in 1914, which he had exposed to his friend the missionary Göhring, thereby causing the death of Manga Bell, Samba Martin, and Ngosso Din.

I suggested to Arouna that the aborted nationalist roots of the Cameroonian state might be what were haunting the sultan, provoking the nightmares that were the true source of his suffering.

“He had a different vision of our country.”

“What vision?” Arouna asked.

Perhaps, I explained, Njoya wanted the sultanate to become a state within the state, because the very strange history of the Bamum had always run counter to what we would today call “the Cameroonian national identity.”

“So Njoya really was just a collaborator?” asked a provocative voice.

“Collaborator” raced through the electrified crowd like a red-hot bullet.

Arouna seemed to be waiting for it. “Isn't resistance another form of collaboration?” he asked everyone.

“You're joking!”

“If you resist, you've already accepted the premises of a battle,” he continued. “It's not the same as ignoring it, right?”

“Go on.”

“Which means, you get swallowed up…”

“By what?”

“By a battle that's not your own.”

“And then?”

“You get pulled into a war you didn't start.”

“What do you think?”

“No one can win that kind of war, my brother, that's what I think.”

“What do you mean?”

“The winner is the one who sets the rules,” Arouna concluded. “The others are just collaborators.”

He seemed to have grasped the logic behind Njoya's chaotic life; for him, the sultan was, you might say, a precursor, a Cameroonian before the letter. He met the irritated faces of his buddies, none of whom could muster arguments strong enough to shut him up. I felt a silent nationalism boiling up all around, the heartbeats of an elemental force. I didn't come to Arouna's defense. How could I? He didn't let anyone else speak anyhow. Yet, I wanted to ask him, wasn't Mount Pleasant—in a way—the realization of a new consciousness, since the voices heard there came from all corners of the earth to create the sultan's memoirs? Maybe it was Njoya's fate to be uprooted from Bamum land so he could give birth to a different country, a different Cameroon there in the capital of the country that had banished him. I told my dear friends from Nsimeyong that their buddy's argument held water. Njoya never would have wanted to be consumed by greater forces—not race, nation, continent, or the First World War. Arouna and I were bombarded with a thousand questions.

“What are you talking about?” one voice called out. “Wasn't Njoya Cameroonian too?”

“An African?”

“A black man…”

“Yes or no? If yes, then he had to…”

“Then he couldn't…”

“Then how did he dare…”

I was smothered by all these obligations that define an authentic black woman, a true African man, a good Cameroonian. I would have liked to ask my friends: okay, what if Njoya didn't want to be covered in any of that shit? But I also didn't want to offend them. They lived in a world of superficial evidence, when to my mind, the sultan was all about listening, doubting, searching.

“The books tell me that he was Bamum,” I answered. “That's all.”

Njoya knew that, I added, from the genealogy transmitted to him by the many voices of his people; he wrote down those tales and compiled them in his book, the
Saa'ngam
, so that everyone would know and none would forget. “Your country, not mine,” he might have said to my self-styled nationalists.

“Listen,” I shot out, “what do you want? The man gave his eldest daughter, who was Muslim, a Christian first name: Margaretha—the same name as Göhring's wife, no less. And he even called the missionary ‘his brother'! If the English had stayed in his territory after they'd arrived in 1915, the sultanate would have been administered with Nigeria. Would that have made any difference to him?”

Some of the young people thought it would have made a big difference because it would have been to his advantage. And they didn't stop there: they said Njoya wouldn't have died so soon had the English been in charge in Cameroon! I was dumbstruck. My impassioned interlocutors had discovered in the archives that the Germans had been chased from Yaoundé not by the French, but by the English, who captured Ongola on January 1, 1916. So, they asked, shouldn't we, as Cameroonians, be concerned with such details?

“What contract did the English and French sign behind our backs allowing the French army to occupy a land it hadn't conquered?” one boy asked.

I couldn't answer that. Arouna, who had surprisingly switched camps and joined his friends, also asked, “What made the Western states put Yaoundé and the rest of Cameroon under the wrong mandate?”

Looking at his friends, he stressed “wrong mandate,” and I realized he was still trying to see which way the wind was blowing. His words unified the group in a shared sense of indignation.

“Why didn't the League of Nations ask us which side we wanted to join?” an indignant voice inquired.

“With the English or the French?” another boy clarified.

“Which would have been better?” I asked him.

He couldn't reply. In fact, Arouna didn't give him time to.

“So why didn't the League of Nations ask us whose colony we wanted to be?” he asked.

And then he added, “What if we wanted an entirely new system, like the Germans after the war?”

“Why wasn't the Cameroonian diaspora, people like Mandenga, invited to send in their suggestions?”

A thousand questions! My friends from Nsimeyong looked at me, they looked at Sara and waited for us to reply. Whoever tells a story is responsible for it, that's what I learned that day. I told them what Njoya himself had declared when the English soldiers entered his defeated city: “Their war, not ours.”

Arouna jumped. “Didn't I already say that?”

“Yes, my son,” Sara conceded, “but then you changed sides.”

I burst out laughing despite myself.

“I'm always on Cameroon's side,” he answered irritably, turning back to his friends.

“The sultan's position was clear,” the old lady explained. “Njoya always needed to be the one holding the reins of his own story, that's all.” His story—from the depths of Foumban to the palace of the German governor, Ebermaier, to the English occupation and the somber years of the Franco-English contract, right through his exile to Mount Pleasant in Yaoundé—it all shaped Cameroon. He had never really traveled, only a few kilometers, but the triangle formed by his steps had grown into a country, a unit. The whole universe had barged into his bedchamber, bringing its conflicts and its lunacy. That's how he perceived life; he tried to make sense of the discord and madness and give it meaning in the many books he wrote.

“So, was he an egotist?” Arouna demanded. “A tribalist?”

“A free man,” Sara replied.

“Free?”

“A free mind imprisoned in a black body.”

The young folks of Nsimeyong didn't understand what it meant to be free when you were caged up, when you lived in a colony, when you obeyed French orders, when you lived in a world that escaped you.

“Yes, free to make the wrong decisions,” the old mama said, “but responsible enough to pay for those choices with his life.”

“He wanted to own the world,” Arouna asked, “without being owned by it?”

“To speak of the world…”

“… without being spoken for by it.”