Mount Pleasant (26 page)

Listen, she went on, even Njoya's favorites, the ones he made love to the night of his attack, didn't understand who he was calling when he said the name Manga; how could they? Manga, that's also the name of the town where Njoya had met his first rival, in a very bloody battle from which he had emerged victorious. That was in 1894, years before the arrival of the first whites in the sultanate. Njoya had won that war thanks to an alliance with the Fulani of the north, who had taught him the art of cavalry. The alliance with the Fulani hadn't just secured his power, it had opened a new era for the Bamum; in exchange for their help, Njoya had given the Fulani permission to introduce Islam throughout his territory. It was then, when he saw a copy of the Koran, that the sultan fell in love with the chattering silence of books. When he saw the Arabic letters snaking their way across pages, he thought of inventing his own writing system. In short, Manga was the source of Njoya's grandeur.

How strange the echoes of places!

Really!

Could Njoya's two wives have known that Manga also named the site of his decline? Mata and Pena were too young for that story, too much in love with their man to feel anything but jealousy. Had they really studied his life, they would have known that this very word “Manga” was for Njoya as much an “open sesame” as a curse. At once storied—figuring in all the songs of praise sung about the sultan—and buried away in the shameful depths of his soul. The light of day and a silenced shade. Oh Mata and Pena, why, why didn't you see the depths of the monster that was swallowing up your man? For Njoya's body was attacked not by the forces of desire, but by the demons of history hidden in his veins: he, Cameroon's gravedigger.

“Ngosso! Samba! Manga!” he shouted.

And the two women thought he was lost in the antechambers of his climax when his body stiffened, his eyes grew fixed, his hand sank into the flesh of his own chest.

“Manga! Samba! Ngosso!”

Pena's voice awoke the main courtyard; she had thought that her husband was calling out for three other women to join their frolicking in bed. If the sultan needed those three ladies to pull him from his den, there was nothing she could do about it. Njoya had so many wives that even if you really tried, it was impossible to know all their names.

“Samba! Manga! Ngosso!”

Mata repeated her husband's cries.

“Manga! Ngosso! Samba!”

Njoya was also shouting. It seemed that the three horsemen of the past had suddenly returned, bursting into his apartments to demand the return of the lives he had betrayed, to remind him of this country, Cameroon, whose genesis he had delayed. They sent his wives rushing out into the courtyard of his home, the better to punish his scandalous shortsightedness.

Who, just who really could have known that the treaty between the monarch and his death was in fact a strange pact he had made with the burdensome guilt that was eating away at his soul like a ferocious worm? Who could have told his wives as they wailed in the courtyard that what was really causing him to suffer was something so private, so intimate that it wanted to stay hidden in the deepest recesses of his bed? Ah, if only Mata or Pena could have known!

How strange the echoes of names.

Really.

When Nebu entered the sultan's bedchamber on the day of his apoplexy, the monarch was still offering up those strange names and battling with devils. Slaves were running around, all convinced that the hour of final calm was knocking on the door of Nchare Yen's most illustrious descendant. So what pushed the boy out onto Nsimeyong's paths? How strange the echoes of names! That child, who began to run through the forest, rushing toward Father Vogt's church, envisioned, more than anything, his own liberation. By running away, he saved the sultan from a very spiteful story and transformed a little girl's suffering into the key to the salvation of an accursed monarch.

Njoya was caught up in a tornado from which even his most talented doctors couldn't save him, shaken by an explosion for which the sultanate's medical text, the
Nga Fu Nku Lap
, had no intelligent answer. He felt his body coming apart, ripped to pieces by the army ants of his best-kept secret. Torn from a nameless place where it had been entombed alongside the bodies of his shame, which were shrouded by nothing but his soul, Njoya's carnivorous past was eating him alive. Sitting in the wheelchair Father Vogt had built for him, Njoya knew that some calls for revenge never fade away. He had barely escaped. But anger's punishing flames would soon return, and once again he would have to face them alone. Maybe this time his body would prove too weak for the task. Yes, Njoya wanted to be saved from his past.

First from the catechisms of the missionary Göhring, and then from Father Vogt, he had learned that repentance was the only path to salvation. Yet—how could he forget?—it was Njoya's confession to Göhring that had alerted the German colonial forces, putting them on the trail of the budding nationalist conspiracy, for the pastor had repeated to the governor those three names the sultan had confided in him, one friend to another: Samba, Manga, Ngosso.

How strange, how strange the echoes of deeds.

“Can your God forgive the living for what they don't foresee?” Njoya asked, his struggle to speak tearing his face into a grimacing mask.

Father Vogt leaned his ear closer. Yet he had heard the question. He rubbed his beard and smiled, trying to take on an air of wisdom that his years in the tropics hadn't produced. Here is a man whose conversion won't be the result of the magic of sweets! A man whose suffering is a mystery! Clearly the sultan sought a way out of his torture, but what pained him so? Njoya didn't just want to be saved from his past; he wanted to be absolved of a future that was taking ever more unexpected turns, starting with Yaoundé, where he was exiled, which had been named the capital of Cameroon in 1921.

The history of his people filled his body. All he needed was to put just one foot in his courtyard to see it come to life, to see hundreds of people born anew—dancing, singing, shouting, ecstatic! Hadn't those thousand voices joined together to wail out those three accursed names and crush his body? Those people who filled his home, who had always filled his courtyard, would judge his actions. They all knew why Njoya was suffering; yes, he was convinced of that. Those evanescent storytellers, those who told of worlds of madness, were his paradise and his hell. That's why their stories, stronger than medicine, had swathed the walls of the room of his salvation. But didn't all those who had orchestrated a ballet of the dead in his quarters know the truth? The story of Manga, Ngosso, and Samba? Didn't the tellers of impossible tales know Cameroon's history? What was there to confess?

“Does your God forgive what the living can't forget?” the sultan started again, spitting out each word with difficulty.

Father Vogt thought for a moment before answering.

 

11

Are the French So Very Different from the Germans?

Let's head back to Foumban, fourteen years earlier, in 1916, for that's when the seeds of Njoya's doubt were sown. And for good reason. After nine months of occupation, the English left the capital of the sultanate in a military parade that woke everyone. A secret agreement with the French had persuaded them to abandon the city they had previously terrorized with their machine guns. Before leaving Foumban, the English officer offered Njoya his red pickup truck, the one he had brought to the city just a few weeks after his arrival. It all happened so quickly! Full of pride, the white soldier had shown the sultan his vehicle, telling him it was an example of King George's grandeur, “a model of British technological prowess.”

It was, to be sure, a pretty old truck, but it had proved its strength on ungrateful hills and some wild paths. Njoya, of course, was happy to have a motorcar. Unlike the Fulani books he had leafed through and admired so long ago, or the Koran that he had immediately decided to imitate, the vehicle awoke in him the simple desire of possession. He didn't need his master engineers, not Monlipèr, the blacksmith, not Nji Mama, the architect, not even Ibrahim, the calligrapher. All he needed was to sit down on the machine's seat and move his hands and legs the way the Englishman had shown him. In his enthusiasm the sultan failed to question the reasons behind this sudden show of magnanimity on the part of a man who had previously taken such joy in humiliating him. Oh, Njoya ought to have wondered whether this car was his compensation for the Franco-British treachery!

But let's leave that aside for now, shall we?

To show his goodwill, Njoya greeted the French forces with a speech in which he promised his cooperation and, in a further gesture of appeasement, also offered them, as he had the Germans, a plate of fresh eggs. The soldiers who raised the tricolored flag sang the
Marseillaise
, forgetting that the crowds gathered to watch were by then quite confused about all these different flags and songs. The sultan wasn't wearing his ceremonial garb, something many interpreted as a sign of his displeasure. Things changed very little at first, except perhaps that the soldiers of the French forces (they all came from Congo) didn't pray kneeling on mats as those of the English had done. They weren't Muslim. Another important difference: the French commander didn't move into the building where the previous German and English officers had set up their headquarters. No one weighed the significance of this, maybe because the Bamum were blinded by the all-too-great similarity among the faces that paraded through their courtyards. Yet the rituals varied so greatly from one group of colonizers to another. Oh, if only Njoya and the rest of the Bamum had reflected on the differences among the French, the English, and the Germans!

Some among them were blinded by things entirely unrelated to the spectacles of the occupation. Nebu, for example, was so obsessed by his experiments in the workshops of the new palace that the soldiers and their uniforms, their anthems and their flags had no effect on him at all. The search for perfection was the only thing on his mind. And how! One day, however, as he was gazing out the window of his bedchamber, the silhouette of a woman heading up the street caught his eye. She was a slave, and therefore naked. But her face was Ngungure's. He closed his eyes and opened them again to be sure of what he was seeing. Bertha's son would have sworn it was true: she was the embodiment of all his dreams, the exact image of the only woman he had ever really loved.

“That's Ngungure,” he exclaimed joyfully. “That's her!”

He stared at her intently, unable to believe his eyes. Oh! He saw the woman's head, her neck and shoulders, and her hands rising up to balance a basket of tomatoes on her head. No, it just wasn't possible! So he examined her legs and her feet. He watched her body as it moved, and he was captivated. He saw how her feet gripped the ground as she advanced so supplely, how her belly danced in rhythm with the slight movements of her silhouette. Just like Ngungure! Time and time again he had seen his beloved in his dreams, but never before had she appeared so perfectly. And yet he wasn't dreaming.

When the woman passed in front of him, he called out, “Ngungure.” She didn't answer. He whistled; she didn't turn around. He didn't complain, though, quite the contrary.

Still as proud as ever! he thought.

Once again he looked her over from head to toe; his eyes alit on her shoulders, then rolled down to measure the volume of her behind. Nebu noticed that her buttocks moved in perfect symmetry, following the stately back-and-forth of her steps. He was amazed at how Ngungure's back called out to be measured by a sculptor's knife: in his mind he saw himself cutting it into two equal parts, split open from top to bottom like a papaya. She spread apart and scattered her seeds without slowing her pace. Yet the bright flash of her blazing flesh helped the sculptor as he hurried to reshape her scattered parts. Because, as he tapped on his own temple, Nebu was quickly recalculating the mathematical equations he knew by heart. He wanted to be sure that it really was his beloved, without disturbing the surprising rhythm of her apparition, without freezing—and thereby dissolving—the gracefulness with which she had offered herself up to him.

He was torn between the joy of having found her again and the terrifying thought that his discovery would erase her from his sight. He thought for a moment about the girl he had glimpsed on the river shore, the washer girl from Dschang, and he remembered how fleeting beauty can sometimes be. He did not want to lose his Ngungure again. He ran to his room and grabbed his sheet, which he wrapped quickly around his body. He threw one corner of the cloth over his left shoulder, as a Fulani woman would do, and wrapped his beloved's red pagne around his head. Then he set off after the woman.

“I'll be back,” he said to his mother.

“Where are you going?” Bertha's voice asked from the backyard.

“I'm not going far,” her son replied. “I'll be right back.”

 

12

The Mathematics of a Woman's Body

Luckily for Nebu, his mother didn't protest. He realized only too late that he had forgotten his notebook.

“Argh!” he groaned. “I always forget it when I need it most!”

For a moment he considered going back to the house for it, but the thought of running into his mother dressed as he was made him keep going. He was happy that his woman's disguise allowed him to observe this newfound Ngungure freely, without being harassed by ill-mannered colonial soldiers. He wanted to capture her in movement. For a moment he was enchanted by the motions of his beloved's hands. Then it was her feet, then her shoulders. The perfect balance of the whole appeared to him, a synthesis that wrenched a cry of ecstasy from his lips. Yet he kept silent. Instead his eyes dived into the woman's steps, licking the footprints she left in the dust. He saw her place one foot on the ground, then the other, zigzagging slightly.