Mount Pleasant (23 page)

Several voices hurried to calm her down.

“That's how children are.”

“Forget about it.”

“My own children…”

Bertha didn't want to hear anything unless it was about her son, her own Nebu, about her own maternity. Nothing superfluous! She just kept screaming out her pain even louder.

“I'm going to teach him to respect what his mother says!”

All the voices agreed.

“Yes, you show him!”

“Hit him!”

“He needs it!”

“Do you want a whip?”

“That'll teach him to listen!”

“Nebu, where is the whip?”

“Children must respect their parents!”

“Hey, who took my whip?”

“You must teach him to love you.”

“Teach him love.”

“Where is my whip?”

“I'm sure your apprentice took it.”

“Here, here's a whip.”

“That's how children are.”

“They wanted to hide my whip, uh-huh!”

“I told you I'd found your whip.”

“Yaoundé,” one voice said. “It's Yaoundé that's making our kids crazy.”

It was a bald man with a bushy beard who said that, the menacing one who'd been so eager to find her whip. Nji Shua, the carpenter, whose beard always frightened the kids. He was known for his violent rages. No one called him by his Shümum name, Laponte, because he behaved like a brute. He whipped his apprentices till they peed in their pants, just for making little geometry mistakes.

That day, when Nebu came back to Bertha's, his ears burning and his eyes red with tears, the matron knew who had beaten him. She rushed to the door of Nji Shua's workshop, where the child told her she'd find his torturer. There she was, standing at the door of the man no one dared to look in the eye.

“Nji Shua,” she shouted, “who asked you to hit my child?”

She was met with silence.

“Why don't you just slap me, too?”

Silence.

“Criminal,” she cried at the door's persistent silence. “Assassin!”

She marched through the motionless courtyards.

“Is it bad luck or what?” she said to the few apprentices who stared at her, too afraid of the carpenter to show their approval of her actions. “He can't teach his own wives to listen to him and yet he dares to punish my son!”

Njoya's bedchamber was filled with fantastic stories. Paths that twisted and turned through unexpected lives, a paradise of surprises for children. All who visited would have liked to stay longer. Except Bertha; yes, all except Bertha. Yet one day her son went into the monarch's bedchamber and found him standing there—just standing there, not lying in his bed, Sara reported. The mute little girl she was back then was about to scream; she was ready to drop everything she was carrying. But the sultan gestured for her to keep quiet. Njoya wanted to surprise everyone. He always liked to catch his entourage off guard. Nebu played along, trembling as he completed the task for which he'd come: taking away the sovereign's excrement.

Some secrets are too heavy for a kid to bear; once outside, he coughed, and the calabashes he was carrying crashed down at his feet, feces covering the slaves lying before Njoya's door. Horrified, they stood up, but their anger was stayed when Ngutane's voice suddenly rang out. Rather than the shouts of a mischievous child, it was the voice of Njoya's daughter that filled the corridor.

“He walked?”

She had seen it with her own eyes, but still couldn't believe that Njoya had gotten himself up to stand by the window. She was asking the slaves, who stammered in their confusion.

“He walked?”

“He walked?” they asked back.

Njoya's smile was their only answer.

Ngutane wanted to know the details. “He really walked?”

Soon she opened the chamber's window and, putting her hand to her lips, let loose with the joyful cry of a Bamum woman:
“Woudidididi!”

When she was sure of the truth, she ran through the corridors, her voice echoing in the main courtyard, announcing in tremolo the sight she had been awaiting for weeks, months.

“Alareni walked!”

Her voice multiplied her joyful cries.

“He's walking!”

“Fran Njoya is walking!”

“The sultan is walking!”

The echo of this cry that began in Njoya's bedchamber woke up not just Mount Pleasant, but also Nsimeyong and all of Yaoundé. The hundred people gathered at the sultan's doors, all those who had been waiting so long and so impatiently for a sign of life from their fallen sovereign, joined Ngutane in her celebratory cries. Some ran back to their homes, others came rushing out, all lifted their voices in a universal song.

“Woudidididi!”

The cry that took over Mount Pleasant on that tumultuous day of revelation didn't belong only to Ngutane, but to a country, a whole continent.

“He is walking!”

“He is walking!”

It was a long, strident cry that cut across the main roads of the stupefied city, rolled right down the hills like a landslide, and even grabbed hold of the fish in the river:

“Woudi … Woudi … Woudi … Woudidididi!”

 

6

The Audacity of an Apprentice Before His Master

Back when he was in Foumban, Njoya never could have stepped into his palace courtyard and not found it full of action. Dozens of flutists, and just as many talking-drum players and poets singing his praises, turned each of his steps into another mythic tale. Telescoping trumpets, or
kakaki
,
algaita
oboes, and bells tried to outdo each other, providing a sound track for his walks. Despite all this tumult, he went along the streets of the city at his own pace. Sometimes he'd walk as far as the spice market, stopping amidst the thousand scents and the “
woudidis
” of the women amazed to see him, checking the prices of palm oil, paprika, chili, ginger, and bitter leaf as if he were a woman. He'd stop at a covered stand and ask the salt vendors about their wares as well as their families. He walked into the courtyards of houses, letting children come and tell him their names and their dreams for the future.

“What do you want to become?” he'd ask them.

“A master,” replied one young girl.

“A weaver, like my father,” said a boy.

“A potter.”

“A calligrapher.”

“An officer in the palace police.”

Some children were too timid to talk. Sometimes one declared that he would rather be the sultan, which always made everyone laugh. Even Njoya.

“You must imagine your future if you want it to come true,” he told them. “Don't ever let anyone else dream your dreams for you.”

The children fell silent at these words of wisdom.

Then he'd ask, “What did I say?”

And they'd repeat, just like in school: “Don't ever let anyone else dream your dreams for you.”

The sultan would smile and add, “Dreams are a basket of unending treasures.”

And then, “You don't want a thief to steal them from you, do you?”

“No, Alareni!”

“And not your future either, right?”

“Yes, Alareni!”

“Why?” one child asked, seeming to grasp the invisible threat the sultan hinted at.

“Well, because the future, that's your gift to all of us, my son.”

Njoya also reminded the children that every night they could dream the world anew and rebuild their future each day.

These ideas were far too weighty for them, but no one could resist the charm of his words.

“If you don't dream when you're children, what will you do when you're grown up?”

One of the sultan's favorite destinations was the Artists' Alley. Njoya loved to watch the artists at work. He became someone altogether different in a workshop, giving the blacksmiths and ceramists advice, speaking as if he were one of them; and he
was
one of them. He watched how their hands moved, the speed with which their feet set the machines in motion. He made suggestions about the choice of materials and colors, on how to use and combine them.

Monlipèr gloried in these visits to the workshop where he ruled. The old man went up and down the main street, more agile than any of the praise singers who busily surrounded the sultan, dancing in his shadow and ahead of him, adorning each of his gestures with an array of descriptions, decorating the sky with his magnificence.

It was during one of these visits that Nebu did what he should not have done; he leaped out of the frantic crowd and threw himself at the monarch's feet.

“I want to work at the palace, Alareni!”

Only Njoya's kindness kept him from being cut to shreds by the police and their cutlasses, for his sudden movement had broken all protocol. The sultan asked his riflemen to lower their weapons.

“I want—to work—for you,” Nebu stammered.

Bertha's son spoke into the dust where he had thrown himself. His words were unintelligible. When he got back up, assisted by two guards who held him back, his braided hair was covered in the red earth of Foumban; he looked like a mystic. Nebu knew there was no precedent for his actions, but he also knew that only an extraordinary gesture could free him from the workshops of the Artists' Alley, from his master above all. Later he'd learn that it was because of his braided hair that the palace guards hadn't killed him. They thought he was an herbalist and were expecting him to describe his visions.

“He's just a madman,” Monlipèr begged, waving his hands at the menacing guards. “He's my apprentice!”

Monlipèr was exaggerating a bit. Nebu had spent only two years in the master's workshop and already he wanted to move on. This wasn't how things usually went, but a necessary step in this case. The boy had learned all he could in Monlipèr's workshop, and as he grew less humble, he was increasingly unable to hide what was emerging in his dreams. And now work had begun on the sultan's new palace! This was an important project for any artist or artisan with ambition. Everyone working there had been chosen by the sultan himself or by one of his foremen. For once, Muluam and Ngbatu didn't seek to do harm with their indiscretion; filled with nothing but admiration for Nebu's hands, they now used all the superlatives at their disposal to prove that the palace was just the place for his talent to bloom.

Of course everything made in Monlipèr's workshops was destined for the palace, but those two boys had let Nebu understand that it would be different if he actually worked there. He would have the free rein all true artists dream of; a worksite of that size was the perfect place for him to test the limits of his audacity. For Nebu, it would also mean freedom from his two advisers, for he knew their darker side all too well. In truth, his actions had been triggered the day he noticed his two-headed snake adorning the palace entryway. Monlipèr didn't even tell me, he thought, feeling let down.

Clearly, he wasn't seeking full credit for the work, which he had been able to realize only as a result of his master's teachings, even if he had taken them as far as his imagination would go. It was a brilliant work, yes, the result of all he had learned from Monlipèr. In a way, the old master was right to present it as his own, even if it hadn't been made by his hands. It was the reflection of his ideas about art, even if seen from a perspective he hadn't really explored.

The influence of a dispassionate aesthetic was increasingly evident in the work produced by Nebu's hands, guiding their creation of sculptures like that one.

“It's mine,” he had murmured.

An unknown feeling rose up in him, a feeling he knew was outrageous. Yet even after he returned home, he couldn't keep from telling his mother about it; she tried to temper his artistic sedition.

“It's mine.”

After that episode Nebu stopped discussing aesthetics with his master. He just watched Monlipèr work, smiling at the master's ever-closed eyes and the “yeses” that peppered the old man's language. Bertha's son knew that his master could see only the vulgar side of reality. But you don't contradict your master; you just quit. The problem is that a slave can't do that. Joining a workshop meant accepting the master's unquestioned authority. Only he could free his apprentices—he or someone in a similar or even greater position. The boy's status prevented him from finding someone capable of freeing him in Foumban. The only option was to throw himself at the sultan's feet, as Muluam and Ngbatu had suggested. Nebu knew that he was breaking a thousand barriers and taboos. He was lucky. That day, instead of punishing him, Njoya heard his prayer and put him under the tutelage of Nji Mama.

In the palace, he met other artists, the best in the country and even in the world. There were Fulani, Bamiléké, and even Germans working on the new palace. Nebu was amazed by the ease with which these men reached heights he'd never dreamed of, making connections between things he had seen as unrelated. Sometimes he felt once again like a baby playing with clay, unaware that one drop of dirt can give birth to a man.

This is where he discovered the grandeur, no, the genius of Nji Mama and his younger brother Ibrahim, the sultan's two closest collaborators. People said they slept on either side of the monarch, that they were his “twin spirits.” Some tongues hinted that Njoya preferred to turn toward Nji Mama as he slept. The two brothers were the only master artists who had accompanied the sultan on his trip to Buea in 1908, when he had tried to explain the symbolism of the Mandu Yenu to the Germans, who were very impressed by the sultan's dynastic throne. Their real mission was to observe the white men's tools, to see if their ideas could be used to further the ideals of Bamum art. Nebu had the good fortune of being apprenticed to Nji Mama, and he quickly learned that he couldn't hide any of his thoughts from his new master. “I know it's your work,” Nji Mama said to him one day as they were passing by the palace's main doorway, which was adorned with the two-headed snake. “I know it's yours.”