Mount Pleasant (42 page)

The doyenne's theory was that Nebu's father had come back from the dead to kill his son. The Dog's anger was logical, no doubt: he wouldn't have been the first murder victim to rise as an assassin and then happily return to hell. That was what Sara thought, at any rate, and I tend not to contradict her. Foolish or not, this is what happened, according to the testimony of the slave who announced Nebu's death to Foumban's stupefied crowd. The man had heard a repeated noise coming from Nebu's workshop that sounded like a couple making love. When he went to look (an action he confessed with no little shame), he saw the sculptor's behind moving rhythmically between the legs of a woman. He smiled, of course, and headed off, “satisfied,” for Nebu was, and these again are his words, “still the right age for that kind of thing.”

“Artists always have women in their workshops,” he added. “Don't they?”

How could he have known that the woman in question was a statue? He thought, on the contrary, that it was a model.

“Artists always sleep with their models, don't they?”

Soon he heard the cry that typically marks the culmination of that sort of artistic practice.

“You wouldn't have imagined that he'd take flight, right?”

Evidently no one in Foumban had ever seen a man take to the air. The slave's description resonated in the ears of the artists who had worked alongside the sculptor and knew the strange voluptuousness his statue had aroused in them when they'd seen it lying on the ground. All were happy that they hadn't responded to the urge to “screw the statue” that had rushed through their veins: “That could have been me.”

The slave's tale had a very particular echo in Bertha's suffering ears. Once again she saw her son tied to the Devil's curse. The matron clenched her fist harder and harder, this time never relaxing. The woman she had wanted to kill for so long had been turned into dust when the statue had fallen with her son from the fourth floor of the Palace of All Dreams. Bertha blamed herself for not taking action sooner.

“I should have killed her before this,” she sobbed.

Little did it matter that she was talking about a statue. “That girl killed my son!”

“There was no way to know that she'd kill him, right?” asked the slave when he reached the end of his horror story.

“How could we have known that she was a spirit?” the frightened artists wondered.

And their eyes recalled the statue of the woman with the “behind as round as two calabashes.” They dissected “that woman,” who was now a vampire to them. Her beauty no longer awoke their dirtiest thoughts, their highest words of praise. Perfection never goes unpunished, they told themselves, these men of wisdom. Nebu had invoked a goddess, the Goddess of Beauty. She had come and struck him down! She had killed him, then disappeared like all the other women who, in different ways, had made him understand the devastating meaning of love. That's what the artists thought, with tears in their eyes.

“How could I have known the Devil would come back?” Bertha asked in despair. “How?”

She was thinking of Ngungure. Who else? The matron only ever thought of “that girl”! Yet in a certain sense it was the perpetual return of that same girl into her boy's life that later gave her the will to give birth to Nebu once again, even if only by telling of the twists and turns of his life, because for her, there was no doubt: the Devil had killed him. Who would have had the courage to tell her she wasn't being rational? Who, yes, who?

As we already know: colonialism isn't logical, either. So all these accounts, each as wobbly as the next—from the slave's tale to the thoughts of the artists about the Nebu affair and all the various other versions of his death—did not find their place in Ripert's terse prose when he sent the completed report on to his bosses in June 1924.

For Ripert, who hadn't witnessed the fall, there was only one person who could have killed Nebu: the sultan. Just as there was only one person who could have gathered such a crowd at the doors of the offices of the French administration: Njoya.

How could Ripert have guessed that for many in Foumban, and in many of the versions of the young man's death that blamed the French, it was more likely he, Captain Ripert and none other, who had killed Nebu. And those who lent their voice to the community's disgust spread word throughout the region of this new conspiracy: they had clearly heard one shot, just one gunshot, which had been fired by him, Captain Ripert.

“Listen,” they said, “Ripert's vicious bullet did exactly what the French administration wanted. After flying up into the air, it zigzagged and turned back down the street that leads from the Artists' Alley to the center of town. It flew past the spice market that, thank God, was empty, and drilled through the women's quarter, then the palace's main courtyard, which was, thank God, deserted; then it entered the palace through the main door, going up the forty-two steps to the fourth floor, through the door of Nebu's workshop, which, unfortunately, had a hole in it, and with its speed remaining at 1,623 meters per second, it had pierced the sculptor's heart—rather than just giving him a bump on the head—and pushed him out the window with the statue, whose hand he was holding just then, thereby putting an end to a fragile life and reducing the pinnacle of Bamum and African art to dust!”

“What a loss,” everyone cried. “Oh, what a loss!”

That was Nebu's destiny, they thought. It was the high point of his travels, of his search for perfection; and in perfection, his search had ended. Everything had begun and ended with a woman.

“O the misery of life!” the artists cried, looking at what was left of the dead statue. “He fell into your hands, and he is dead!”

Had I been there—me—Bertha, I would have probably said to the dead sculptor, “You! You who never expressed pain but only love, look at the cloak of suffering under which you were crushed!”

“Killed!” repeated a voice in the crowd.

And another, “Yes, killed by a French bullet!”

Of course thousands of voices repeated that truth.

“Truth?”

My friends from Nsimeyong would have sworn to it: “The distance covered by Ripert's bullet is well within the limits of an 8-mm Berther carbine Lebel. Logical, hmm?”

Yet the French officer, he didn't want to listen to such un-Cartesian accusations. His decision was supported by the power he had to write his own version of Nebu's death in a report, his ultimate weapon, which he would send to Dschang by soldiers on horseback. In his report, Captain Ripert wrote his conclusion in red capital letters and underlined it several times: “IN ORDER FOR PEACE TO BE FINALLY RESTORED AMONG THE BAMUM,” he insisted, “NJOYA MUST BE EXILED.”

He added a strongly worded warning against any reliance on the version of events written by the sultan in the
Saa'ngam
and against the very different conclusions drawn by Njoya. He also warned future historians who might discover the monarch's version, because, he said, “in his treachery, Njoya has invented a writing system just so he can hide his thoughts and actions from us.”

His “us” meant, of course, the “French administration,” and he added as appendices to his report examples of this writing. I think what he couldn't foresee is that Martin, his boss, would be so impressed by Njoya's Akauku figurines that he'd spend the rest of his life trying to understand the sultan's pictograms, an epiphany whose crowning moment came with the patient translation of the Bamum memoirs. Ripert, who was in Foumban, never evolved at all. In his report he even added, “Njoya has treated himself to a car to humiliate the French administration in the eyes of the Bamum people,” and concluded, “Njoya is a two-faced man.”

Did he mean that Njoya had the gift of being everywhere at once? Oh, he certainly wasn't suggesting that the sultan's power was so great that he could be both in front of him in a crowd of more than a thousand and, at the same time, in his palace killing the sculptor whom he had promoted to the rank of
Nji
just a few months earlier. Maybe Ripert only put into writing the threat that he had already articulated out loud, because whatever a colonial officer has already said in public will sooner or later become a decree from the colonial administration.

Deafened by the noise of all these stories, speculations, theories, and likelihoods, no one suspected that Nebu himself felt defeated when he finished his statue, that he had failed as an artist to bring Ngungure back to life, even though he had re-created her in a perfect statue. So no one suspected his despair at having achieved artistic perfection only to discover its limitations. Had the theoreticians of his death thought about it, they would have understood that in his suffering, the sculptor had decided to follow his beloved to the kingdom of death and to throw himself out the window of the Palace of All Dreams alongside her. For death is the limit of art, isn't it? Yet how could people have thought about suicide? And why should they have? After all, and here the French officials and their adversaries in Foumban would certainly agree, a Bamum man simply couldn't kill himself for a reason like that.

 

15

The Multiple Faces of Powerlessness

Njoya had never felt as powerless as on that day, when faced with Ripert's accusation; nor had the Bamum. In their reports and declarations, Prestat, Ripert, Martin, Marchand, and other colonial officers had called him all sorts of names. “A despot.”

The Bamum had put up with it.

“A man who doesn't respect human life…”

They had put up with it.

“… who keeps hundreds of women prisoner in his harem.”

They had put up with it.

“A Negro king who controls the life and wealth of his subjects.”

They had put up with it.

“A tyrant.”

They had put up with it.

“A multiple polygamist.”

They had put up with it.

“A slaver.”

They had put up with it.

“A rapacious potentate.”

They had put up with it.

Even “a black,” they had put up with it. But “a murderer”?

The Bamum had thousands of responses for that. Yet everything they had to say was suddenly meaningless in the face of this bald accusation. They proposed thousands of theories for Nebu's death, but all their explanations were shot down. They had filled the palace's main courtyard with their surprised faces, but it was as if the space had remained entirely empty.

“Njoya, a murderer?”

They had a tragedy on their hands, and even their tears were as weak as a rain in the dry season. Foumban—no, all of Bamum land—was crying for the dead artist and soon discovered that the land's most ardent defender was toothless. When the mourners spread out through the city, carrying Nebu's body, when they gathered in Bertha's courtyard to mourn the sculptor as he deserved, all that remained among the debris at the Palace of All Dreams was a profound silence.

Back in his office, Ripert had signed a decree forbidding any sort of public assembly. Even the children knew better than to cry. Lizards no longer lifted their inquisitive heads to the sky. Dogs no longer barked, no. In the deadly silence that clothed the city, had you listened carefully, you would have heard only the throbbing of an undercurrent of rage. It was the fury of a city, of a world some four hundred years old, of an ancient continent, of a timeless universe that had been trampled and had silenced its ire. It was an anger too large for a burning body. This fire had taken hold of Njoya's body—foreshadowing his fall, yes, his fall—its flames searing his body, licking his chest, veins of fire inflaming his heart, ready to consume him whole, like a mad volcano.

The sultan hadn't yet fallen victim to his treacherous body. He could no longer control his hands, that was all. They trembled, trembled. Suddenly all his inventions had become useless, yes, useless. His life had no direction. When he, now a wreck, returned to his palace, when he walked into the artists' workshop—the dead artists' workshop—he was slapped by the silence. In this place once so full of life, he was confronted by the absence of the young man he had met only four times and yet who had shown him the grandeur of what Bamum land could create. He suddenly evaluated the infamous price of all his compromises. It was as if his own son had been killed. With his cane, he struck the wall.

“Shit,” he shouted. “Shit!”

Everyone froze; Njoya had never used the foul language of slaves.

“Shit!” he said again.

The sultan couldn't control his tongue, couldn't stop his hands. His cane fell on the weaver's loom.

“Shit!” the weaver cried.

Njoya's mouth was creased. It could only come up with the same word, which he repeated endlessly. Had he shouted, had Njoya exploded, the sultanate would have understood. His hundreds of wives would have understood and his children, too. Looking on silently, everyone there knew that their land's fate had taken a tragic turn. Had he cried, the sultanate would have found a container for their sovereign's tears. Even his ancestors would have supported him.

“Shit!” said Njoya, striking a figurine.

He was destroying the work of his own artists. He threw out their manuscripts. The thousands of words in the palace library flew away. Calligraphers and miniaturists saw him coming and hurried to protect their work. With books hidden beneath their arms and on their bellies, they snuck away from his frenzy. Even today, the books they saved from the palace are scattered throughout Bamum land, hidden in boxes, stashed under the beds of the inheritors of that night of unequaled defeat, far from Njoya's endless wrath.

The sultan's cane came down on backs, but the wounded artists didn't cry out, their suffering bodies too busy protecting the work of their hands. They would have preferred to die in order to save their art. Alas, an anger that doesn't reach its target can only be self-destructive. It is born in the gut, takes hold of the throat, and, smoldering, dissolves all words. The body becomes its prisoner, for such a rage is like a strangled sneeze. The chaos that was unleashed in the palace workshops was the reflection of Njoya's silence, which had let disorder spread through Bamum land since the arrival of the first whites in 1902. Violence lives in powerlessness—it was twenty-two years of powerlessness that defined the trajectory of the sultan's cane.