Mount Pleasant (43 page)

“The rats!”

Suddenly his eyes fell on Monlipèr's printing press. Instead of protecting his work, the old master had sought to calm Njoya. Let's forget the usual titles, the master said to himself. This time he called the sultan Nji Ma Yuam.

Njoya didn't respond.

“Mfumbaam.”

The old engineer knew that those two names that had been given to Njoya by his grandmother always made him smile. They were his own praise names. This time, however, they had no effect.

“Menkulashun.”

This was the name given to Njoya by his father, Nsangu. It did nothing to calm the sultan either. The master blacksmith tried proverbs.

“Fran Njoya,” he said, “even during rainy season, the river keeps its name.”

That didn't work either. So the old man moved on to stories.

“Menkulashun,” he began, “do you remember what the lion did when he was hit by an arrow?”

“What?”

The master began with a series of sentences, each repeated by the chorus of his colleagues, who rushed to join in, each adding his own bit: Nji Mama, Ibrahim, Nji Shua … It was a folktale.

“Shut up!” Njoya ordered.

The sultan spoke to them as if to apprentices, and his voice echoed through the silence of the whole palace. Who would have dared to say another word? An anger that has grown for as long as Njoya's, an anger as vast as the suffering of the Bamum couldn't be calmed by verbal tricks alone. It needed to re-create the destruction that the Bamum sultan had always refused to see “in hopes that common sense would prevail”; in order to be calmed, his anger needed to reinvent the chaos of life these past years in Foumban. It needed to find release in the crack of a thunderbolt, like the one that had struck the baobab that had stood for hundreds of years in the center of town. Yes, it needed to give voice to the silence of all the conscripts Njoya had torn from their families and given to his colonial friends for their
njokmassi
, their forced labor projects. Born of impotence, this supreme rage needed to be lived out fully. The masters cowered like children before his violence.

“Shut up!” Njoya shouted in their silence, again and again. “Shut up! Shut up!”

It was as if he were speaking to spirits, as if his crude and violent words, as well as his destructive cane, had all been roused by history, by the story of the three Bamum youths who had been under his orders and, by his fault, taken prisoner, suffering because of his bad judgment.

“Ngbatu! Muluam! Nebu!”

But also it was as if instead of their names, Njoya was calling “Samba! Ngosso! Manga!”

And then “Ngbatu! Nebu! Muluam!”

History doesn't lie. It just keeps repeating itself. The sultan's spare words were a hammer, a hammer raining down everywhere, as far as the eye could see: “Samba! Ngosso! Manga!

“Manga! Ngosso! Samba!”

Njoya's hammer broke everything in its path, everything. Soon it rose up over old Monlipèr's printing press. The machine had filled the master with immense pride, even if it hadn't yet produced the desired results. It was the fruit of several years of work by the best blacksmiths in the region. It was the precise, detailed work of a nearly blind master. This machine had undergone many changes, but Njoya's real vision, that the thousands of books in the Library of the Future would be produced by simply rearranging letters, had remained intact in the minds of all those who had worked to realize the project. The printing press was the pinnacle of the sultan's intellectual project, of his work as a writer. It was supposed to occupy a place of honor in the Palace of All Dreams, the grand salon; from there it would spread History, providing a new center of gravity and reproduction for all the world's tales. But now this limitless printing press was suddenly offered up for sacrifice, emptied of meaning.

At once, the machines Njoya had built, all his machines, appeared to him as the private ailment that had made his heart always accept compromises. Art became the umbrella of his unhappiness, the wall he had built around his existence to forestall his own death, and writing was transformed into a cowardly bargain. Writing—isn't it a way of fleeing from the complexity of life to hide in the aseptic realm of alphabets, in the magic of words? Letters draw us into a putrid dance: a dance with zombies! Writing compensates for life itself; it is disengagement, child's play. Njoya realized that his experiments with pictograms and phonemes, with syllabograms and words, with tales and histories, with lives and dreams—all those experiments that had led him from anecdotes to a printing press had been possible only because, from the very start, he had given up when confronted by History's forces. And these forces were now tightly clenched around his neck. He had abandoned his people and taken refuge in the workshops' promise of eternity.

Death was revealed to him in the form of the Invisible Book he had always been writing, and the printing press became the most vicious component of his own political resignation. It became the most visible sign of the factory of shame he was building within his Palace of All Dreams. Writing became Njoya's real nightmare and the printing press its foulest feature. So he lifted it up with all his strength, stood silent for a moment while all around him his master craftsmen, the master artists, and their apprentices were frozen in the sharpest of silences by the unexpected sight.

“Shit!” cried Njoya.

And he smashed the machine on the ground.

Metal pieces scattered around him by the thousands. He raced out of Nebu's workshop. It was as if this one definitive, determined, barbaric, inhuman act had wrung his anger dry. The stunned silence of all the artists was heard throughout the city, rushing through the alleys, into houses, and flowing into the Nshi River along with pieces of the word machine and the tears of Monlipèr, who had leaped toward his machine but had been unable to prevent its destruction. Now the old man collected bits of debris, and with his trembling hands he tried to put the lost printing press back together. The despair of the master craftsman could only flow into a larger river, the much larger river of tears Bertha shed for the son whose shattered bones he had previously tried to mend.

To the tears of the old man were added those of all the Bamum, beginning with the tears of all the artists who were unable to complete the phrase that would have expressed their suffering. Those men cried because their master was crying, and he cried because somewhere in the city a mother was crying for her dead son. “What a loss!” everyone said. “What a loss!”

For posterity's sake, this is how Madame Dugast described the suffering of old Monlipèr in her book,
L'Écriture des Bamum
: “He is now a man with a white beard, but he still cries when telling this tragic story.” I never understood why Njoya didn't come out of his palace to express his rage for everyone to see. For many people, his withdrawal was an enigma. There are those, however, like Nji Mama, who were convinced that Njoya was mourning his own loss. In truth, however, the sultan was mostly angry with himself for not having sufficiently defended the Bamum. He was drowning in guilt and in a heavy feeling of remorse that would surface again later in Yaoundé and knock on the doors of his soul.

Just a few months after these events the population of Foumban was again woken up by exclamations coming from the palace. People jumped out of bed and gathered in the main courtyard of the Palace of All Dreams.

“Wombo-o!”

“Again?” some said.

This time the city's inconsolable voices weren't mourning a virtuoso of the human form. Nor were they crying over the destruction of a mechanical marvel. On the contrary, it was the departure of a great man that left them aghast. Njoya's red pickup truck was parked in front of the palace gates, where the still-silent crowds had gathered. Besides the driver, there were seats for four others: the sultan; his favorite wife of the moment, Ndayie; and his collaborators, Nji Mama and Ibrahim. Nji Shua, Nji Moluh, Ngutane, and the other children were sitting with the servants in the back, where bunches of bananas were usually piled. The Nguri followed on foot. That day, the pickup truck and its convoy weren't yet leading Njoya and his entourage to Yaoundé. First they made a stop, a very long stop, at the sultan's residence in Mantoum, for this was only the beginning of a ten-year exile that eventually, in 1931, would strand the sultan on the green hills of Nsimeyong, in Mount Pleasant.

What Ripert had once uttered as a threat had in the end become an administrative decree. But that was nothing special—at least not in a colonial territory.

 

16

The Smoker's Conversations with His Solitary Cigarette

In 1922 Foumban struggled to maintain an illusion of peace; Yaoundé as well. Leaving the wedding of his sister earlier than any brother-in-law would have, Joseph Ngono was drunk. He was so drunk that he fell down several times as he was walking off. What's happening to me? he wondered.

So he hit his head with his hand, trying to wake himself up. Then he heard a voice say, “You are lost too!”

“Me?”

“Yes, you too.”

It was his shadow speaking to him. He had come back to Cameroon to realize that a dominated country can never be the home of a free man, that he couldn't call his country a French possession. He had realized, much to his horror, that the only place where he had really been free was wartime Germany. And that Cameroon under French occupation didn't deserve to be at peace with itself. This country needed to be shaken up! That night in the capital, on that road devoid of people, empty of life, he felt his heart beat for the House of Exile back in Berlin. There, he believed, everyone would have understood.

Yet that thought frightened him.

“Where is your home?” his shadow asked.

Ngono knew he was being ridiculous, yet still he shouted,
“Ilang!”

In his borrowed, badly fitting tuxedo, with his bow tie undone and his talking shadow, he was the perfect target for the colony's first police squad—he knew that. It would have been the high point of his disgrace, the real fall of an obscure angel—to be arrested in the streets of Yaoundé for public drunkenness and convicted by the colonial police. Yes, his brother-in-law, Charles Atangana, would have slipped a word to his friends (why not to the prison director himself, Monsieur Poubelle, with whom he was on very good terms?), but at what price? Joseph Ngono then thought about Dr. Mult, who had always supported him in Germany. Rather than keeping silent like that kindly professor, Charles Atangana would have taken the place of Joseph Ngono's argumentative shadow and asked, “What were you thinking? Where do you think you are?”

Joseph Ngono wouldn't have answered, because he already knew at least one thing: he wouldn't come out of this battle a winner either.

Because he wanted to avoid a humiliating, bare-assed defeat, when he heard a motor coming up behind him, he jumped into the chief's cocoa plantation and hid. Once in the plantation, he began walking, past cocoa tree after cocoa tree. It was an endless plantation, the same tree, the same height and width, spread out all around. This monotony made him spew out the last thought he wanted to tell his friend: “Only superfluous people could plant this shit everywhere.”

He could vomit, oh, Ngono could cry, do anything he wanted in this plantation of Charles Atangana's, no one would have heard his voice. He could have insulted those trees, spit on their uniformity. He could have asked them if this was how they imagined Africa's future: the infinite reproduction of the same old shit. Yes, he asked them what used to grow there before them, if they had inherited the memory of the land where they were planted. The trees couldn't answer. He went on, asking them if they knew who had lived before on this spot they now occupied. If they knew whether those people, whose lives they had displaced, had been happy to see their future peanuts destroyed, those peanuts with which they could at least have made spicy sauce. He asked the cocoa trees if they knew they were the product of the forced labor of thousands and of the empty dreams of just a few: “People so empty that their seed is superfluous.”

He paused, looking for another way to put it.

“Superfluous seed,” he repeated.

He liked those two words: “superfluous seed.”

“Superfluous trees planted by empty minds and captive hands.”

And then, “Superfluous time inhabited by superfluous characters.”

He could have gone on, Ngono. In his indignation he didn't notice until it was too late that he was lost in their jungle. Maybe it was the alcohol that made his feet so heavy. Soon he felt the kilometers weighing on him. Yet he was still in the same spot, amidst the same cocoa trees, in front of the same tree. He decided to keep walking, to keep going through the middle of the cocoa plantation, but then he found himself back in front of the tree he'd just left.

“Shit!” he shouted. “Is there no way out of here?”

Had anyone told him that he was lost in a labyrinth, he would have burst out laughing. For Joseph Ngono the construction of a labyrinth was a sign of intelligence, generosity, playfulness, happiness. Here, all he saw around him was systematically planned misery, vacuity, “superfluous emptiness.”

“I am lost in the superfluous,” he said.

But this time he laughed, for even the thought seemed stupid. Still he continued.

“I am imprisoned in emptiness…”

He paused, entertained.

“In a prison of emptiness.”

His smile had become a laugh. He repeated the word “emptiness” several times, and each time the word ricocheted off the surrounding trees: “Empty. Empty. Empty.”

Suddenly Ngono wanted to urinate. With his legs splayed so he wouldn't lose his balance, and holding his penis with both hands, he emptied his urine on the roots of a cocoa tree. He pissed and pissed and pissed. He leaned on the cocoa tree to keep pissing, looking up at the overcast sky. It was as if he had a huge bucket instead of a bladder. When he finished, he took a deep breath and spit on his urine. He searched his pockets and found a pack of cigarettes.