Mount Pleasant (25 page)

“Me too, I have sad stories to tell,” Charles Atangana confessed.

He told about losing his first wife, Marie Biloa, in a car accident just a week after he'd returned from Spain. “The very first car accident in Yaoundé, can you imagine?” He admitted that the accident had really changed him.

“I became an entirely different man,” he insisted. “Monogamous.”

He paused for a long moment, as if to make his reasoning more evident.

“Now,” he went on, “I've decided to avoid bad luck.”

Hadn't Joseph Ngono's whole life been just a succession of misfortunes? Sara's father opted to keep quiet and agree with his friend; he even “forgot” to tell him that he had also gotten married, and to a “white woman.” He forgot a lot more things, our dear Ngono. But what does it matter? The two friends were together again, bantering in German, just for fun. That day, Nsimeyong echoed with the laughter of their reinvented friendship, the happiness of a complicity that had emerged intact from history's furious trenches. They met up again several more times, and on one occasion Charles Atangana left the neighborhood quite smitten with his friend's sister. Word had it that he was blind drunk, but so what? He had met Ngono's youngest sister, Juliana, who'd been just a “little girl with a flat butt” the last time he'd seen her, kicking a ball around in the rain as if she were a little boy. Today she had become “a beautiful woman of marrying age.”

Charles Atangana was so happy he decided to run straight off to the church with his “dear Juliana” so Father Vogt could set a date for them to stand “before the Lord, our God.” Joseph Ngono could only rejoice at giving his sister to his best friend; he agreed to be a witness at their marriage.

 

9

The Sultan's Soul Is an Open Book, Written in a Mysterious Alphabet

Very little of note happened in Mount Pleasant. The arrival of Ibrahim, Nji Mama's younger brother, shifted Njoya's perimeter somewhat. Although not part of the princely nobility, the Nguri, that man had, as he put it, abandoned the plebes and their foolishness. In short, that man, who broadcast his aristocracy through the tilt of his hat and his catlike eyes, infused new life into Ngutane's veins. It seemed that she chose her wardrobe just to garner one of his winks. Besides, the doyenne told me, the dance had returned to her steps, just as when she was in her glory back in Foumban. If until then she had found no partner who could keep up with her, in Ibrahim she suddenly had a man whose sense of style revealed a vanity beyond compare. And the master calligrapher was her childhood love, too. Sometimes, when the two of them entered Njoya's bedchamber, it was as if they were staging a play.

“Wow!” everyone exclaimed.

Of course rumors began to fly. After all, Ngutane was married to one of her father's ministers, who had stayed behind in Foumban. But Njoya had other things to worry about. With help from Ibrahim, Nji Mama, or anyone else, he began to move about, one step after the other, in the rooms where he was confined. Father Vogt's wheelchair had made a big difference, yes. Everyone, including Ngutane, raved about its practicality. All the sultan had to do was get out of bed. She'd push him along Mount Pleasant's corridors. The master artists had studied that chair until they were exhausted. Monlipèr had used all his talent as a blacksmith; Nji Shua had called on the spirits of his carpentry; even Nji Mama had joined in the artists' conspiracy. The seat the three of them had built together, however, proved dangerous for someone who was learning to walk again. The easy simplicity of the prelate's chair was far better than the magnificence of their rolling version of the legendary throne, the Mandu Yenu.

The three men weren't used to defeat, and tears ran from Monlipèr's eyes when Njoya finally chose the wheelchair that, according to the master, was an insult to the Bamum and their genius. It was a moment of triumph for Father Vogt, who spoke of God's will and paid more frequent visits to the sultan.

“God's grace is infinite,” said Father Vogt, “for He is love.”

He came to Mount Pleasant not only to check on the patient's health, but especially because the two had begun a conversation on faith and the washing away of sin, which the priest wanted to continue. If you'd told him that his arguments were just awkward reiterations of the same theses, antitheses, and syntheses of Christian conversion that the missionary Göhring had already exchanged with Njoya, he wouldn't have believed you. Father Vogt's hopes of converting Njoya burned all the brighter since the sultan, his interlocutor, was no longer the thirty-year-old who had played chess with Göhring in 1906, making him read and reread passages of the Old Testament translated into his language. And Father Vogt was convinced that Njoya was no longer the man who, back in Foumban, had had his scribes copy whole passages from the Bible while, unbeknownst to the German missionary, he wrote his own Book of Faith.

This was 1932, after all! This Njoya, living in exile, had looked death in the eyes, and, Father Vogt believed, no one could emerge unchanged from such an encounter, not even a sultan. The priest just needed to roll him along the corridors of his home in exile, through Mount Pleasant's courtyards, and soon the old pagan would shed the tears of his new faith. So great was the missionary's confidence that he had written in his circular #113 of the advent of a “triumphant future.” His ambitious text concluded with the word “miracle.” “A miracle has awoken the hills of Nsimeyong!”

So there they were, the sultan in his wheelchair and, behind him, like spirits, the brothers Nji Mama and Ibrahim. There they were, Njoya and Father Vogt, once again waging the battle of light against darkness or, as translated in the language of colonialism, the struggle between civilization and barbarism. Sometimes Ngutane listened to their exchanges (who else could referee such a combat?), even if only to protect her father from expending himself in useless arguments. Ah, isn't it a stroke of luck that Nebu was right there, glued to the sultan's side, even in the most private moments of his life? Isn't it a stroke of luck that he was there to fan the sultan's face in those moments of effort? That it was he who held a parasol to protect him from the sun?

Only once did the missionary look at him suspiciously. No one had told Njoya that it was the quick thinking of his shadow that had saved him from death. Nebu's silent eyes repressed his own story, pushing it down into the depths where no monarch ever strayed. Would it have been different had he spoken? The sultan's shadow has no need for a voice. No. The subaltern can't speak, and no one would have listened to him anyway. When the cleric suggested one day that the sultan leave his room for a bit of fresh air, Nji Mama intervened. He had understood Father Vogt's plan.

“The sultan can't be seen naked,” he said. “It's forbidden.”

How so? The ailing sultan is naked. It's that simple. Njoya's authority relied on restrictions. It was heightened by barriers similar to the thornbushes that surrounded the women's quarters in Foumban, where his wives lived. Even seeing him drink was forbidden. The right to look into his private chambers, his bedchamber, his bed, especially when he was weak and ailing, was a privilege possessed by some and not by others. Father Vogt knew that chance had brought him into a place where he had no right to be, but he wasn't content to leave it at that. He knew that his pale skin trumped all the restrictions built up around the monarch's body over a four-hundred-year reign. Colonialism had put the priest on a high horse, and he used that authority when necessary, his arrogance dictated by his certainty that he was following God's path.

For Father Vogt, Njoya was just a man, and what's more, a sinner. After all, hadn't Father Vogt himself, dressed in a doctor's garb, pulled him from the jaws of a certain death? How could anyone forget that the sultan's new throne was just the bicycle the priest had used to spread faith and sow miracles across Yaoundé? Ngutane was the only one who would occasionally interrupt his crazed sermons, under the pretext that her father was tired and had no more ears. Father Vogt would then bow out because in those moments she wore a face that no man (not even a white priest) would dare contradict. But even Ngutane couldn't assess the dizzying depths of the fatigue that had turned Njoya's body to rubber. The sultan wasn't just tired; truth be told, he was consumed by guilt.

Let's be clear: Njoya was pursued by nightmares. In his nightmares, he saw again and again Ngosso Din, the secretary and emissary of Manga Bell; Njoya had betrayed him to the Germans at the start of the war, an act that resulted in his being hanged for treason alongside his master.

Here is what had happened: having learned that war had broken out in Europe, Rudolf Manga Bell, the paramount chief of the Douala, who had studied law in Germany, wrote a long “Petition Addressed to All Cameroonian Chiefs.” One short sentence summarized his arguments: “The Germans will lose the war.” This wasn't his first petition, but it was the first that he hadn't addressed to the Germans. Manga Bell had long been in conflict with the colonial authorities. He had spent the months leading up to the war writing petitions to the Reichstag, the German parliament, and to German deputies; he had even sent his secretary, Ngosso Din, to Berlin to try to convince kindly ears in the German fatherland of the justice of his cause. These efforts had not produced the desired results; even the most fervent champions of democracy in the German parliament, the Social Democrats, had rejected his complaints. So for Manga Bell, the war was an unheard-of opportunity. In 1914 he turned toward Cameroon, sending emissaries inland, hoping to build a coalition of Cameroonian forces to chase the Germans from “our country.” Ah, the famous coalition! To be brief, it never saw the light of day, and Njoya was the first to start digging its grave.

The sultan recognized the signs of his impending fall the day he saw his German friends in chains, at the mercy of the English. Then he thought of Ngosso Din, whose plans he had revealed to the Germans, and realized that he had rallied to the losing side. He also realized that he had betrayed the cause—which hadn't yet fully emerged from the mists—of what Manga Bell's envoy had called “our country,” and “Cameroon” as well. Njoya hadn't ever stopped blaming himself for his fateful shortsightedness. Had he paid more attention to the news in the papers read to him, he told himself, he would have foreseen the German defeat as clearly as had Manga Bell. But he only actually read German newspapers, and one of them, the
Deutsches Kolonialblatt
, had announced in a big headline that Göhring read to him, “
Niederlage ist kein deutsches Wort
”: Defeat is not a German word.

With “ifs,” anything is possible. In some sense, it was only logical that he adopt such warlike sentiments; after all, four hundred years of Bamum history had shown him that defeat was not a Shümum word either. What instinct could have whispered in his ear that the “invincible kaiser” and with him all his people were lost in a rather demented delusion? He should have taken Ngosso Din's predictions seriously, for Ngosso had been in Germany; he should have listened to the geostrategic analysis of his master Manga Bell, who had lived in Germany as well—then he wouldn't be in this place! Had he just looked beyond the borders of Bamum land on the map he himself had traced, he would have realized that to hold on to the colony, the Germans needed to fight the English to the west and the French in the east and in the south. He would have understood that only a miracle could let them win a war fought on so many fronts. Just looking at the Bamum map, Njoya could have foreseen what would happen in Germany. He had been blinded by his friendship with the Germans, that was the fact of the matter. The names of Ngosso Din, Manga Bell, and Samba Martin Paul were on his lips the night he collapsed in his bedchamber. They had come to him in a furious nightmare. History had proved them right: the Germans had lost the war on all fronts.

 

10

The Strident Echo of Names and Deeds

How strange the echoes of words! Even whispers are enough to awaken a sleeping infant. When returning to the matron's bedroom late at night, Nebu sometimes heard voices repeating old stories; sometimes, though, they told of real people's lives. They weren't exchanges among characters in a tale, but actual dialogues between people he knew. Not the whisperings of figures long gone, but of lovers united in exile. He heard the squeaking of doors opening after he'd passed by. He heard furtive steps behind him. Sometimes a woman chuckling in the dark. Sometimes he also caught the sounds of lovers. He knew that this licentious din was not born of his dreams. He also knew they were sounds children weren't supposed to hear, so he hurried on.

One day he stopped when he heard a burst of laughter at the end of a corridor. He looked up and down the passage, although he should have looked the other way. He saw a caftan and recognized the silhouettes of the master calligrapher, Ibrahim, and Ngutane. Nebu saw them disappear under the moonlight, complicit in their steps. He knew right then that he shouldn't have happened upon those secretive exchanges. He tried to convince himself it was just a dream, another bit of the endless reverie he'd been living since his arrival in Mount Pleasant, since his own face—a little girl's face—had disappeared into a multitude of rooms, a sea of words, and the uncertainty written on the faces of the banished men and women washed up there on the hills of exile. Yet the kid couldn't lie to himself that evening: “Just more stories,” he said.

This time it was Ngutane, Nji Mongu herself, who was the protagonist. Nebu knew what kind of earthquake the echo of this adulterous love in exile would cause if revealed to the chattering mouths of the idle nobles. He knew what thunderbolts would be released in Njoya's bedchamber. Yes, how strange the echoes of words, the doyenne told me, especially in Mount Pleasant!