Mount Pleasant (6 page)

The truth is that the group of native Ewondo families that today claim the history of Yaoundé as theirs and theirs alone was already outnumbered by the Fulani shepherds who had settled in the valley, on both sides of the Mfoundi River, and by the Bamiléké who had immigrated to Yaoundé from the western plateaus or from Nigeria. The Bamiléké weren't yet talking about putting down roots. Their peregrinations across the Ewondo swamplands dated back to an invitation from Charles Atangana himself: he had needed workers for his cocoa plantation. I'll get back to that later. If the town didn't yet have the shops run by Indians found elsewhere in Central Africa, it's because the French administrators had placed their bets on the Lebanese they'd brought to the region. There was a rumor that Yaoundé's “Lebanese” were actually Indians—that is to say, decommissioned British colonial soldiers who had settled there at the end of the First World War. Some even claimed that they were actually Egyptians, but what does it really matter?

Among the whites, several different nationalities were represented: the French, of course, but also Englishmen and Greeks (actually, the Greeks were Cypriots who owned trading companies), and even Germans, almost all of whom had “gone native” under the leadership of a collector of flowers, birds, and butterflies named Zenker. This eccentric, who hid away in the depths of the forest with his compatriots, had refused to return home and, no joke, insisted on being called “Cameroonian.” Most of the white colony was made up of Frenchmen who owned the best stores in the city, as well as the bordellos, which were off-limits to the black population.

Despite its two-tiered cosmopolitanism, Yaoundé kept traces of its original seven villages; these had been transformed into neighborhoods, some might even say slums. Most of the natives' houses had mud walls and roofs covered with palm fronds, despite an order from the French high commissioner banning the use of such materials in the city and insisting on cement-block houses with corrugated metal roofs. Was this order followed? Hmm. The authorities had no means of enforcing their decrees save the force of the law, as always. But, well, the law …

Even then it was impossible to live anonymously in this city, especially if, like Nebu, you were the sultan's shadow. The child's red pagne made him stand out, as did his shaved head. To think that the boy was the only person in Foumban who could have stripped bare and become an entirely different person, yes, a girl who could come down the hill from Nsimeyong and disappear!

So what kept him from going back to where he was born? Yes, what made Nebu stay among Njoya's men? Bertha, or rather … Ah! that's it! It was Uncle Owona's eyes—Sara could never forget them—the wild flames in those treacherous eyes that, even when she was ninety, she still described as horrifying.

“He gave me to the chief to forget.”

“Forget what?”

The voice of the doyenne was again that of a young girl. “His crime.”

No, she'd never gotten over it.

“There are things that even a whole life can't erase,” she added in a muffled voice.

“Did your mother know?”

“She knew my uncle went crazy when he was drunk.”

She paused thoughtfully before continuing.

“My mother knew Uncle Owona did things he would regret for the rest of his life and that he kept drinking more and more to forget.”

“Like every drunk,” I added tentatively.

Was agreeing to incarnate Nebu the young girl's own way of escaping Uncle Owona's grasp? Of getting rid of him once and for all? Even after all these years, her uncle's face still burst violently through her words as she told me her story.

 

11

What a Man!

“What a man!”

Yes, what a man! That's how many German and English texts speak of Njoya—with repeated exclamations. Though French texts usually do tend to minimize his genius. Some call him a “Negro king.” Of course, Nebu couldn't know what the colonial chroniclers had written, much less grasp the implications of what they said. How could he have? Thankfully, before my trip to Cameroon I had visited the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and then the German Staatsarchiv in Berlin. The Cameroonian National Archives came to my rescue in moments of doubt, spreading before me the totality of the words, the mountains of correspondence that the monarch exchanged with the colonial authorities of his day.

From this unending supply of confidential reports and books filled with admiration and hatred, I was able to reconstruct an image of Njoya as he invented the writing system that had fueled his dreams, as he toiled away in flickering lamplight for twenty years to perfect it. I saw him, Njoya, dressed in his caftan, awake at five in the morning, already eager to get to work. I saw him standing in front of his table in the half-light of his workshop, imagining model pictograms, then moving on to phonograms, and then to phonemes. Making calculations and sketching drawings of his printing press with Monlipèr, the master blacksmith he had brought with him into exile so that the traditional Bamum heraldic banners might keep flying high. I saw him crumple up his designs and start again. I saw him poring over his plans for his new palace, the “Palace of All Dreams,” which he wanted to finish building as soon as his exile ended and he was allowed to return to Foumban.

I saw Njoya examining the sketches, despite the painful distance of his banishment, and finding them lacking. Assessing disdainfully these manuscripts that Western archives now guard so jealously, wanting to tear them up, and staying his angry hand because of a noise behind him. “You must maintain control of time,” he said to the man who had just entered, focusing his anger on him. “You are always late,
Mama
.”

And Nji Mama would bend his head in shame. He was the sultan's closest collaborator. The occasions when Nji Mama angered the sultan were rare, for after all, it was he who had built Mount Pleasant. He had done it in just one month, though he didn't brag about it too much. In his haste he had reused sketches drawn up for the old palace in Foumban that he had constructed in 1917. Njoya's arrival in Yaoundé had caused some turmoil. The vast entourage that accompanied the monarch needed to be housed somewhere. That Nji Mama had had to copy his own sketches was humiliating for a man who took such pride in his art. And yet, who was unaware of his talent?

Here are the presumed plans for Mount Pleasant:

Copy of the plans of the former palace in Foumban, drawn in 1917 by Nji Mama

Nji Mama included distinctive design elements in his sketches, patterns of snakes and geckos above the doors, for example. He surrounded the windows with five rows of bamboo rather than the two typically found in Foumban. As for the entryways, he decorated them with buffalo heads instead of human faces. More important, he replaced the seemingly infinite rooms found in the former palace with a more modest number (sixty), and had the interiors painted with yellow chalk, the color of the sun. For the exteriors he chose the color of the earth in Foumban. As for the windows and the doors, they were white.

Even if these decorative features contributed to the building's originality, it was nothing compared with what Nji Mama had already built. He was the one who had worked with the sultan on a topographical map of Bamum land in 1913, before the war. In 1920, with a team of thirty assistants, he had drawn the map of Foumban. He, again, was the architect of the Palace of All Dreams in Foumban and oversaw its building as well. His many achievements were not limited to the domain of construction: he taught in Njoya's schools, and he was responsible for the
muntgu
, the palace police, as well as for the collection and transcription of Bamum folktales. And he was credited with collaborating on—or perhaps inventing—the writing system officially attributed to Njoya. Yet the master was a deeply humble man and, I might add, too respectful of the sultan to boast of his own genius. Chief architect—that was his title, and it suited him.

“You must maintain control of time, Mama!”

For the moment, humility was the only possible response to the sultan's anger; Njoya grumbled and banged his cane on the ground, showing little concern for his interlocutor's expertise.

“Things can't go on like this!”

“Yes, Alareni!”

Even the most respectful forms of address failed to calm the sovereign's anger. It had become clear that Nji Mama was lost in Yaoundé without the assistance of his younger brother Ibrahim, who was a master craftsman as well as a Muslim, and whose hours were measured by the rhythm of his five daily prayers instead of by a watch. Ibrahim had stayed behind in Foumban, managing the sultanate's assets in Njoya's absence.

“
Donnerwetter!
Damn it all!” Njoya cursed in German. “I have been working all night, and look when you arrive!”

“Yes, Fran Njoya.”

Even his praise name had no effect …

“This just can't continue!” Njoya railed.

Here I can imagine Nji Mama risking a subversive phrase, something along the lines of “Perhaps you are working too much, Mfon Bamum?”

He couldn't really have said anything of the kind to Njoya, even if it was cushioned by a respectful expression of gratitude. There are things that no man—other than the colonizers—ever dared say to the sultan. Besides, Njoya had always worked too much. He walked in a dreamlike state; work was his refuge, the garment in which he clothed his wounded soul. For Njoya had to protect himself from many different furies. The period of time I'm discussing actually produced abundant documentation describing Njoya's intellectual pursuits, things of which Sara had no inkling. Why? Nebu was illiterate, yes, but good God, let's drop the speculations! I am just the mouthpiece for the dusty archives, for the documents eaten away by roaches. Still, I'll admit that sometimes, carried away by the scent of the leather-bound pages of the
Saa'ngam
, the sultan's memoirs, I abandon myself to the flow of my dreams …

That said, I have no right to lose sight of the goal of my efforts: to explore the building that is the life of an old lady. Sara's life.

So why not just listen to her?

“What a man he was,” said the doyenne. “What a man!”

 

12

The Primer of Love

“You are a good boy.”

Bertha's voice was insistent. With one hand she held Nebu's head while she ran a wet razor over it with the other. The child didn't complain.

“You'll be a handsome man.”

She filled the child's silence with her resonant voice.

“A very handsome man.”

If Nebu had spoken, Bertha would have expected to hear words in Shüpamum, the Bamum language. That's because the matron was a pragmatic woman. This child had come back to her, and she didn't want to waste her second chance. She wanted to show this prodigal son the best life had to offer, and like anyone offered a second chance, she knew exactly what she had to do.

“You'll speak better,” she added.

Her eyes plunged into Nebu's to erase any trace of Sara in them. Did the other boy have a stutter? That's something she wanted her new son to get over. Did he wet his bed? That, too, he needed to get over. Bertha didn't want a mute son, either; she wanted to overcome death. Her son's tightly shut lips gave her the opportunity she needed to slip in words of her own choosing. Yes, it was up to her to coat this child's lips with words of love that would replace Nebu's tragic story. Bertha knew it: her son would speak not just to say something, but to conquer his former destiny. He would need a dictionary filled with a new kind of beauty. And what of Sara? Ah, the girl retreated into her own flesh, where she spun about in silence until, little by little, she built the vocabulary of her survival. She would take as her own the boy's phrases, which Bertha whispered to her; patiently, she would learn the language of a redefined existence.

“I will teach you the words you need,” Bertha said. “Better words. Pure words.”

Bertha was carried away by her own enthusiasm. One day, she undid her pagne and offered her full breasts to Sara, as Bamum women would do for a prodigal son! “Do you want to eat the stars?” Her hands pointed at the nipples while her eyes expressed the perfection of her happiness.

“Crazy, isn't it?” Sara summed it up for me. She was smiling.

Even the young men from Nsimeyong were stunned.

“So did you … eat … the stars?” I asked the old lady. “Did you?”

I waited, bemused, expecting Sara to reply, “Of course not.”

But what she said was “Of course I did.”

“What?”

“Would you have refused if it were you?” the doyenne asked, showing me her nine-year-old face.

That's how Sara came to suckle at Bertha's breasts and swallow the matron's new words. Bertha insisted that the pronunciation be perfect, the tone sweet. “That is what makes a sentence exquisite,” she said, “for how could a virtuous soul reside in a filthy belly?” She remembered her son; she remembered how Nebu called some women “whores.” Such awful, slavish words, Bertha eradicated them from her respectable language.