Mount Pleasant (45 page)

“Do you think one cigarette can set a whole cocoa plantation on fire?”

How could I know?

“Do you think urine can burn like kerosene?”

There I wanted to say, “Go ask Sara!”

They didn't stop.

“Do you think wind can carry fire?”

“What do these city boys know about fire?” the old mama would have responded, chortling as only Cameroonian women can.

Whatever the explanations and theories, the fact remains that Ngono's efforts didn't save him. The people celebrating at the chief's were alerted by the yellow glow of the flames that lit up the sky, and not by the shouts of a man trapped by his own death. Or rather, no, it was Sara, still a young girl, who said to her mother, “Mama, fire!”

And pointing at the courtyard with her finger, she showed her mother, whose thoughts, like those of all the other adults that evening, were elsewhere.

“Fire?” repeated her distracted mother.

“Isn't that a fire?” someone else looking out the window asked at the same time, but then, too, the dancing crowd didn't listen.

“A bushfire!” shouted a man who burst in suddenly.

Only then did the whole crowd awaken.

“A bushfire!”

“Fire!”

“The plantation's on fire!” cried another man.

“Fire!”

Then the dancers were caught up in a wild commotion. Everyone ran to the door. Husbands forgot their wives; children, including Sara, were left inside the house. Dancers trampled on one another because some had heard that it was Charles Atangana's house that was on fire. When the crazed crowd ran toward the cocoa plantation with water to put out the flames, it was already too late. The confused guests found everyone in the neighborhood fighting the fire, wearing themselves out in a fight that was lost from the start. Yaoundé had only one fire truck, and that day it arrived too late. In fact, the firefighters arrived in time only to write down in their report that the cocoa plantation that “Monsieur Charles Atangana, Paramount Chief of the Ewondo, had planted on his property to lead his people by example into a new era of progress and prosperity, had been reduced to ashes.”

“A criminal act?” the white officer in charge asked.

His eyes scanned the guests.

“Do you know who did this?”

How could the chief's guests have answered? If Charles Atangana hadn't intervened, the
tirailleurs
would have arrested everyone, guests or not. The chief was crushed, of course, but he wasn't defeated. He knew that the cocoa project had already gone too far to disappear in flames. The French government had invested millions and millions of francs, and already cocoa trees were popping up all over Southern Cameroon. The destruction of his plantation was a desperate act that, in the chaos of this brightly lit night, could only make him laugh.

“Only a madman could do that,” he told the French official, “only a madman.”

For Sara, however, her father wasn't a madman. On the contrary, she told me, the fire had spread so quickly only because hundreds of people had joined in his rage. Guests from the chief's wedding had come out to pour petrol on the flames instead of water, she told me. Sara suggested that some of them urinated on the cocoa trees. Too many people didn't want cocoa in their lives, she confided. That's how the enormous fire on the hilltops of Nsimeyong lit up the whole capital.

That fire is Sara's first real memory, her very first memory of her father.

“The fire killed him,” she concluded.

And sometimes at night she still heard his voice calling them, calling her and her brother. When she told me this story, it was as if she could still see him burning in the flames. Tears ran down her cheeks, and she looked at me sadly, for I couldn't save her “poor Ngono” either.

“His body nourished our land,” I said, trying to console her.

Sara smiled.

I could see the fire from that long-ago evening burn in her eyes once more. Yes, it was as if she had become her own father. The members of her ethnic group, ordered by Charles Atangana to replant cocoa trees on his property, refused to set foot on the accursed field. Some said they had seen a man walking there at night, as if trying to find his way between what remained of the trees. The man was reciting names.

“A madman?”

“No, a dead man.”

“Dead dead?”

“Dead dead.”

The workers said that the dead man had called their names, too.

“Our real names.”

“Even the names of our wives.”

“Of our children.”

“It's a spirit.”

“That plantation is damned.”

Of course Charles Atangana burst out laughing. Still, the laugh of a chief, however paramount he may be, doesn't make a cocoa tree grow. So he hired Bamiléké workers. He had good memories of them from his exile in Dschang. He paid them a reasonable wage and added health insurance to their salaries, something that in all those years had never before been mentioned in the colony. It was an offer those men couldn't ignore. The vision of money persuaded them to leave their native plateau en masse and to confront Yaoundé and the curse of the pyromaniac spirit. But this time it was the ground that balked.

Or maybe the Frenchmen's seed wasn't any good.

The cocoa trees still didn't grow.

“Bad seed,” cursed the workers, albeit under their breath, “bad cocoa!”

They also said, “Damned cocoa!”

For a long time people talked about the burned-down plantation that refused to bear fruit, refused to repeat the cycle of infamy. If the city already told itself a million stories about the paramount chief, this only added to the man's mystery. The story of the spirit in his house was well known. In the pocket of his flamboyant jacket Charles Atangana kept a key with which he locked the haunted room, everybody knew that. Why else would he have a gold chain hanging from his jacket pocket, people wondered, if not to lock up the spirit of the fire and to keep him from burning down his house?

Joseph Ngono's calcified body was discovered only much later. The story of his wandering spirit spread through the capital. People said he'd been sold out to the French by “his own brother,” Charles Atangana. His death coincided with a time when workers on construction sites and factories in France began to demand better salaries. Even those who didn't know the story of the spirit talked about a man who had died on a plantation, “in a fire” that nothing had been done to prevent. That tragic end reminded the wretched of the injustice of their own condition.

There were some who were impressed by the salary Charles Atangana promised his workers, a salary that, any way you looked at it, was far above the pittance their white boss gave them—even if none of the chief's workers had been paid yet. Sara recalled that there had been revolts here and there in the protectorate, protests in the streets of Yaoundé. People were demanding the same salary as the whites. Soon they demanded the same pay on all the cocoa plantations, and then on all plantations, on all worksites. And, finally, the same working conditions for whites and blacks. In the end, the protestors were demanding nothing less than equality and freedom.

The doyenne also recalled that her father's spirit inspired the words of the rebels when they faced the
tirailleurs'
rifles. The discovery of Ngono's body had transformed Charles Atangana's cocoa plantation into a cemetery. No one wanted to go near it anymore.

“Superstitions,” cursed the chief.

Aside from his colonial friends, he was the only one to think that. Even the French officials couldn't convince the recalcitrant population, or the land, to resume work producing cocoa. In the end, Charles Atangana had no other choice but to abandon his field to the first taker. Only foreigners could be convinced to build homes there. So first he gave a part to the Catholic missionaries when one of them, a priest, knocked on his door bearing the conviction that he “could make miracles in this bush.” Charles Atangana asked him just one question,“Can you also chase away spirits?”

“The Divine Spirit will inhabit this place,” he said, “and make this a land of miracles.”

A fervent Catholic, the chief understood the prelate's words in religious terms and answered, “Amen.”

He named what remained of his property “Mount Pleasant”; perhaps he hoped that name, which he'd heard once on his travels and was a happy reminder of his wanderings, would conjure away the curse. Did the chief invite Njoya to the capital so he could help him in his final attempt to convince planters from the west of the country to conquer the cocoa spirit, hoping they would obey an authority they'd known back in their villages? Why not? In any event, his friendship was always two-faced.

So in 1931, when Njoya agreed to leave his retreat in Mantoum for Yaoundé, when he agreed to drive his red pickup truck to the City of Seven Hills and take up residence there with his entourage on that bit of land Charles Atangana so graciously offered him, he was the one doing his friend a favor. But the sultan didn't know that he was bringing a painful chapter to a close. The rest, as we already know, is Sara's story.

 

19

Sublime Reveries on a Tour Through the City

Even though Charles Atangana's car had, in the meantime, become a constant presence in Mount Pleasant's main courtyard, the children had never gotten used to the noise of its motor. Each time, they announced the Cadillac's arrival with their happy voices and enchanted its departure with their shouts, songs, and dances. Running in the dust that the machine kicked up, waking up the houses, shouting along with the motor's noise, they transformed Charles Atangana's appearances into an unending party.

This time the chief had come, as he said himself, “to take the sultan out.” It was high time, Sara realized. After two years of reclusion, it was time for Njoya to get out of his house, out of Mount Pleasant's alleys, out of the main courtyard, out of the walled community, just to breathe in the city's air. Besides, the sun was shining regally, like a ripe orange unpeeling in the sky. There was no longer any reason to stay cloistered, no. Charles Atangana had trouble believing that Njoya hadn't seen anything of the capital in all the time he had been there. He took it personally. “I will show you my city,” he declared.

Njoya had done the same for him in Foumban, when Atangana had visited him there, before his exile. In fact, the idea of a walk outside was what really excited the sultan. He was more than happy to escape from the labyrinth of Mount Pleasant, even for an instant. Still, “Where are we going?” he asked.

His expectant eyes were bright.

“Into town,” Charles Atangana announced with a broad smile.

In Foumban, it would have taken at least an hour to dress the sultan. It would have taken even longer that day to dress this man who'd been handicapped for so long but had lost nothing of his natural vanity. Njoya demanded light clothes. He chose a black and red
gandoura
himself, one in the Bamenda style.

“Perfume!” he ordered. “Perfume!” Even though he was already wearing perfume.

“We're just going out, right?” he asked with concern.

“That's all,” his friend swore. “But after two years, that's enough of an exploit, isn't it?”

“Just a quick tour?”

“We'll leave the moon for tomorrow!” the chief joked. “No photos today, no surprise visits. Just a quick tour.”

He and the chief took the Golden Car. Nebu, the shadow, was sitting in the back, between the chief architect and Ibrahim. He held the sovereign's cane. The price Charles Atangana had to pay to have the sultan sit next to him was separation from his “dear Juliana.” But it was worth it. “Just for today,” he said, full of good humor.

The sultan's guard ran behind the car. The excursion looked like a parade. Sara confessed that she had never been in a car before. That her first experience took place in a procession, wasn't that ideal? Because the chief's car drove along slowly, she had the impression that cars always went slowly. The golden Cadillac was well known in the city, and the convoy never crossed through a courtyard without people turning toward it and shouting with joy. Truthfully, they were all excited by the sound of the automobile and by its song, so new here! Their curious eyes added a sort of dignity to the procession. Several people joined in, marching alongside for quite a while.

Njoya had always loved going down into his city, into Foumban.

“Is there a market here?” he asked his friend.

Charles Atangana did not hesitate.

“Not just one!”

He began to count, using his fingers on the steering wheel.

“There is … the shoe market, a … coal market, a spice market, of course, a fruit market, a women's market, and so a men's market … a … clothing market … a…”

His pride that Yaoundé had not just one but a whole slew of markets to show his guests from Foumban was visible. He had used all his fingers and still kept counting.

“Did you know we have galleries now?”

He realized that his friend didn't know what a gallery was. He added that it was a “white man's market,” but that didn't help. The chief himself had seen a gallery only once, in Paris.

“Well then,” he concluded, “let's go to the gallery.”

From Mount Pleasant, that meant crossing through Plateau, going past the French military base and the post office—in short, going into the white part of town. When the car reached Plateau, it became clear that this excursion by the two chiefs would be a historic event. People gathered around the procession, forcing it to stop. They didn't disperse, even when Njoya's men tried to force them back. Charles Atangana was in his element. He reached out with his hand and waved. The people waved back gleefully. It was as if the city were touching its Miracle Maker.