Mount Pleasant (36 page)

Who didn't know that it was he, Charles Atangana, whom the French used to introduce cocoa into Southern Cameroon, to replace the peanuts that until then had been the region's real source of revenue? All that was needed was to look out the window and see the immense cocoa plantation he'd created “to set an example.” The French had quickly forgotten the German friendships of the man who'd hidden German officers in his compound in Yaoundé until 1916, when the English arrived in the city. The French had quickly forgotten, as well, that the chief had followed his German friends to Guinea, to Fernão do Pó; that he had defended them before numerous European tribunals long after they had lost the war. Ah, but
the people
knew all the details of Charles Atangana's life, and there was even this song:

Charles Atangana, the war is over.

Hey, Charles Atangana, the war is done!

The cannons will fire no more.

So run away fast! Why do you stay?

All of you, Ewondo, come run away!

Come run away fast, dear brothers!

Who didn't know this song summarizing his position during the war? The French high commissioner had turned a blind eye to the chief's “little mistakes” because he used the “impressive strength of his voice” to convince the Ewondo to cultivate cocoa, as the colonial administration encouraged them to do. Atangana, who had been looking for a chance to regain the power he had begun to taste under the Germans, didn't pass up this chance to return to his city, Yaoundé, riding in a carriage. Yes, people knew the source of his present wealth—and its cost. They knew that Charles Atangana employed hundreds of workers from his own ethnic group on his plantations, imposing harsher work conditions than those found on colonial plantations, forcing them to work like slaves. They knew that sometimes his men whipped those who hadn't paid their taxes, hunting them down in the bush when they ran to hide and bringing them back to the city in chains. They also knew that all this zeal was his way of making the colonizers forget about his German sympathies. Besides, hadn't he been chosen by them because he was the most vulnerable?

On that wedding day, it was evident to everyone that despite the history shared by Charles Atangana and Joseph Ngono, their lives crashed into each other with a violence rarely witnessed in history, scattering bits of their shameful past around the living room. Suddenly they were no longer friends, and even less brothers-in-law. Their honesty was limitless, and the only real tragedy was that they had chosen to bare their souls on such an occasion.

Juliana Ngono intervened once more, but not even she could stop her brother from saying what was on his mind.

“
Anti Zamba ouam
, my God, why don't you men just drop it?” she shouted. “Do you want to kill each other?”

Behind her, voices rose up in support.

“Yes, drop it.”

“Come have a drink.”

“Yes, some wine!”

“Red or white?”

“A beer!”

“Two bottles of beer.”

“Isn't there any palm wine?”

“Real palm wine?”

“No raffia wine?”

“What about my beer?”

“We've got beer.”

“Corn beer?”

“Banana beer?”

“What about
arki
?”

“My beer, you bastard!”

“
Arki
is illegal.”

“Forbidden.”

“By who?”

“Why?”

“
Akié
, ah, my brother, do you want to drink or fight about politics?”

Even drinks weren't exempt from the battle!

Juliana Ngono called to her husband once more. “Charles, come, let's dance.”

She walked out through the unending circle of voices. But the chief didn't follow her. The quarrel between Ngono and Atangana wasn't the kind that dissolved into banter. It needed to go on to the bitter end, even if that meant one of the fighters would end up losing his head.

“As for me,” Ngono went on slowly in order to give more weight to his words, “the day I was born, I was Cameroonian.”

“How do you know?” Charles Atangana cut in.

That answer sent a ripple through the crowd. The chief went on, weighing each of his words, suggesting that Ngono might be taken for a fascist.

Why fascist? Ngono wondered.

Ngono was flustered by Charles Atangana's choice of words. In the insult he read the threat of a denunciation. News of Mussolini's march on Rome had reached the protectorate, making the French officials with whom his friend spent his days feel uneasy. The French were afraid it would give ideas to the colonized, especially those who read the newspapers, ideas of “unifying the black race.” That's what they meant by “fascists.” For Ngono, on the other hand, it was the tumultuous years he had spent in Berlin that inspired what might have been the proclamation of the Republic of Cameroon.

Had Charles Atangana asked his friend on which side he stood when Germany twice proclaimed its republic (an event that had clearly inspired Ngono), that would have been a reasonable question. But a “fascist”? Ngono remembered heated discussions in Berlin, in the House of Exile, with friends of all stripes, surrounded by kids playing, laughing, and crying. He recalled how Mandenga, who never stopped dreaming of getting off the boat back in Cameroon with his whole family, was ready “to do something.” And Ngono recalled the question so often put to him: “But to do what?” Ngono also recalled the day when, in a moment of real despair, possessed by the contagious bad mood that losing the war had provoked in the Germans' minds, he had cried out, “We were defeated!”

The Landlord had looked him straight in the eyes and replied, “We haven't even begun our own war, my son, so how could we have been defeated? Look at a map of our continent,” he said, pulling him over to a large map. “The only names you'll find there are also over here in Europe. Look, here you have the French Sudan, the Belgian Congo, German Kamerun, or rather, the French and English Cameroons, as they now say, Portuguese Mozambique. Look, there's even a little Spanish Guinea! The only thing we're missing is a Swiss Nubia! And where are we Africans in all of that? Do you believe that we have stopped existing because of it? You see, the colonizers' mistake is that they always imagine Africa without Africans, like on this map. Don't make the same mistake, for the day will come when we Africans reinvent our continent! And on that day the world will awake to the sound of our proud children's cannons!”

That's how Mandenga the Landlord talked. His eyes aglow with the vision of a colonial apocalypse and an African future.

“But why count on others?” he added. “It's up to us to defend ourselves!”

These distant memories echoed in Ngono's mind while, in the country to which he'd returned, he heard Charles Atangana talking about a French Republic that included “us,” and it was as if this time Atangana were saying “We are defeated.”

Ngono looked at his friend, who, after tagging along behind his German companions, today claimed French citizenship. Ngono smothered a laugh that had suddenly gripped his chest. He can't understand me, he realized.

Several people had gathered around these two verbal combatants. No one dared to jump into the breach, and even Juliana Ngono had shrugged her shoulders, signaling her defeat, for her husband had turned to her only to ask for another glass of wine. This time it was Ngono who announced he was thirsty and asked if Charles Atangana wanted to have a drink with him. When each man had a drink in hand, the man of the day rose, turned toward his friend Joseph Ngono, and said, “My brother.”

“So where were we?” Atangana asked, taking a big puff on his cigar.

To his great surprise, Joseph Ngono replied, “Go dance with your wife. It's not worth continuing.”

Charles Atangana couldn't have agreed more. The sounds of a cakewalk pulled him from his seat. Soon he was waddling around the living room, his exaggerated duck steps entertaining the crowd. People knew, though, that the spirited discussion was only deferred. One or two voices called out to Joseph Ngono as he passed, “Congratulations, my brother.” But his mind was elsewhere. Whose wasn't? Maybe the people who were congratulating Joseph Ngono were doing so because he had really pulled something off by marrying his sister to the most flamboyant and unpredictable man in the protectorate.

For everyone there, the future was more of an opening than a battlefield. Never had Ngono longed so much to be by himself and smoke a cigarette. He didn't slam the door behind him when he left the happy crowd.

 

8

Judgment Day

December 1932. There are stories that need to be told—for the one who's listening, and only for the one who's listening. Everyone could see how Mount Pleasant's thousands of stories had transformed the sultan. He had regained weight, looked good, and was asking for more. His face glowed as he hungrily breathed in, like an exotic perfume, the things people told him, and the sparkle of his wit cheered his visitors. This was especially true when he listened to a story he had already heard a week or a month before. Njoya enjoyed it best when he knew the story's ending. Some people were surprised by this need for repetition, but others took his good humor as a sign. He had been imprisoned in his apartments for two years. The monarch's ears had drunk down the many voices that had come from all around Cameroon, all around Africa, yes, from all over the world to bring him the firsthand accounts of their lives. The strength of his voice had quickly returned, but not the precision of his hand. His fingers still lacked the dexterity they had before his illness. Njoya did his best to offset his failing health, to escape from his soul's traps. For example, he demanded more and more from his memory. And so, in addition to the spicy stories inscribed in his Book of Time, he also reconstructed his body's own genealogy. Writing was his best medicine, letters the real components of his health. A slate would decide the outcome of his final battle with his body, and Ibrahim, the master calligrapher, was sure he would win that battle as well.

Njoya began writing to overcome his apoplexy, but writing soon took on a different meaning. The shapes, the letters, and the silhouettes—which he first scribbled absentmindedly, then out of boredom—soon became systematic studies. They became images, faces. Because memories return to us through a filter, he soon discovered the limitations of his visitors. He realized that they told each other their stories and, short on inspiration, often returned to those they had already told. They rehearsed before telling them to him and often chose those he'd enjoy the most. Maybe the masters had edited out the more licentious ones that they didn't want told to him. What Njoya quickly understood was that his entourage wasn't worried about his salvation. What they wanted, quite simply, was his health. So when Father Vogt suggested that he had perhaps heard all the world's stories, but not yet the Story of Stories, it goes without saying that the excited sultan lent his ear, his curiosity piqued by the voice with which the priest had made his promise.

“It's a story that contains all the stories you have already heard,” the prelate said, smiling and scratching his head. “Then it brings them to their logical conclusion, for it's the story of salvation.”

Njoya was surprised that Father Vogt had waited so long to tell him this story. Wasn't salvation what he had always been looking for? But Njoya wasn't the only one who'd been waiting for this conclusion, the moment of its realization. The bearded priest had long been waiting as well. The next day he washed and ironed his cassock. It gave him an air of respectability that the city's dust had always conspired to deny him. His nuns followed behind him, carrying the tools required for the sacrament, ready to collect the fruits of what would clearly be a lengthy confession. Twenty young boys walked behind them, singing. There was no sign of mirth on the faces of those children dressed in white: their priest and his Church had so often postponed Judgment Day that they were truly ready for its arrival. Each choreographed step was taken with the gravity of a scene prepared long before.

“Judgment Day?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” Sara replied.

All of Mount Pleasant, all its ears, had gathered together. If anyone had looked into the courtyards, the houses, the kitchens, and the beds, no living soul would have been found. Everyone was there, men, women, children, and animals; all eyes and ears were washed, rinsed, and open to hear the words that would come out of the mouth of the miracle-making priest. Hadn't Father Vogt made, right before everyone's eyes, a rolling throne that had been nothing but a blessing? Ah, the high commissioner had made his excuses, using the pretext of some pressing work, but in Mount Pleasant, no one really expected him to come. Father Vogt alone was a bit disappointed, but, oh well! He snapped at his nuns, using a tone that here only husbands use to talk to their wives. But in any event, everyone thought of the nuns as his wives.

“Give me the Gospels,” he said.

It was a huge book, bigger than the one the missionary Göhring had used in Foumban, its pages red with the dust of Nsimeyong, or perhaps from being read too often. When the priest raised his right hand, the catechumens stopped the song that had accompanied each of the priest's gestures up to then and immediately intoned the Ave Maria, their faces frozen and their hands clasped in front of them. It wasn't just about the sultan, no; the fate of all of Cameroon would be decided that day, in this courtyard where a hundred had gathered to witness the ceremony in silence. Sometimes Father Vogt opened an eye to assess the effect of the scene on the pagan congregation, knowing that the smallest things can bring unexpected results. He knew that Göhring had worked to save the souls of all these people; he had read the Old Testament to them, to Njoya in particular, and the sultan had had most of the stories of that book translated into Shümum—to add to his own library, it must be said. Father Vogt knew how well the story of Moses had been received among the Bamum slaves, although no one had told him the real reasons behind the rather surprising choice of that story. It was easy, he imagined, to make a patriarch like Njoya appreciate the flavor of myths.