Then the letters ceased and my father heard from the nuns in Bamenda that his old friend had died. Similarly, one year the package of guava pastes from South Africa didn’t arrive for the first day of the year and we learned that Doctor Jeffries had passed away.
That was how my father’s last ties with his adopted country were severed. All that was left was the meager pension that the Nigerian government had pledged to pay its former civil servants when independence was declared. But not long afterward, the pension stopped too, as if his past life had entirely vanished.
So it was the war that had broken my father’s African dream. In 1938 my mother left Nigeria to return to France and give birth with her parents at her side. The brief leave of absence that my father took for the birth of his first child made it possible for him to join my mother in Brittany, where he remained until the summer of 1939. He took the boat back to Africa just before the war was declared. He took up his new post at Ogoja, in the province of Cross River. When war broke out, he knew it would put Europe to fire and sword again, as it had in 1914. Perhaps he hoped, as did many people in Europe, that the advance of the German army could be checked at the border, and that Brittany, lying the furthest west possible, would be spared.
When news of the invasion of France reached him in June of 1940, it was too late to act. In Brittany, my mother saw the German troops marching by under her windows in Pont-l’Abbé, while the radio was announcing that the enemy had been stopped at the Marne. The orders of the Kommandantur were irrevocable: anyone who was not a permanent resident of Brittany was to leave. Though she had barely recovered from childbirth, my mother had no choice but to go, first to Paris, then on to the free zone. No news could circulate. In Nigeria, my father knew only what was transmitted by the BBC. For him, isolated in the bush, Africa had become a trap. Thousands of miles away, somewhere on the roads crowded with people in flight, my mother was driving my grandmother’s old De Dion, taking her mother and father and her two children, a one-year-old and an infant of three months, along with her. That was probably when my father made that crazy attempt to cross the desert to Algeria so he could get on a boat going to the south of France to save his wife and children and bring them back to Africa with him. Would my mother have agreed to follow him? She would have had to abandon her parents in the middle of the upheaval, when they were in no condition to withstand the ordeal, face the dangers along the return journey, risk being captured by the Germans or the Italians and possibly deported.
My father probably had no real plan. He threw himself into the venture without even thinking. He left for Kano, in the north of Nigeria, and bought his passage aboard a caravan of trucks that were crossing the Sahara. The war hadn’t reached the desert yet. The merchants continued to transport salt, wool, wood, raw materials. The sea routes had become dangerous and the Sahara made it possible to keep goods circulating. For a medical officer of the British army traveling alone, the plan was audacious, insane. My father made his way northward, camped in the Hoggar near Tamanghasset (Fort-Laperrine at the time). He hadn’t had time to prepare for the journey, bring medicine, provisions. He shared in the daily fare of the Tuaregs who accompanied the caravan, he drank the water from the oases, as they did, alkaline water that purged those not accustomed to it. He took pictures of the desert all along the way, in Zinder, in In Guezzam, in the Hoggar Mountains. He photographed the Tamacheq inscriptions on stones, the nomadic camps, girls with their faces painted black, children. He spent several days at the In Guezzam fort, on the border of the French possessions in the Sahara. A few buildings made of pisé, over which the French flag flew, and at the side of the road, a stopped truck, perhaps the one he was traveling in. He reached Arak, on the other side of the desert. He might have reached Fort Mac-Mahon, near El Goléa. In times of war, all strangers are spies. In the end he was stopped and turned back.
After that setback, Africa no longer had the same taste of freedom for him. Bamenda, Banso, was the happy period, up in the highland sanctuary surrounded by giants on all sides, Mount Bambouta at 2,700 meters, Kodju at 2,000, Oku at 3,000. He’d thought he would never leave there. He’d dreamt of a perfect life, in which his children would grow up in that natural setting, would become, as he had, inhabitants of that land.
Ogoja, to which he had been condemned by the war, was an outpost of the British colony, a large village in a stifling basin on the Aiya River, encircled by the forest, cut off from Cameroon by an inaccessible mountain range. The hospital he was in charge of had existed for a long time, it was a large cement building with a sheet-metal roof housing an operating room, dormitories for the patients, and a team of nurses and midwives. Though it was still a bit primitive (it was an hour’s drive from the coast after all), it was organized. The D.O. was not far away, Cross River – the province’s large administrative center – was in Abakliki, which was accessible by a motorable road.
The government house he lived in was right next to the hospital. It wasn’t a lovely wooden building like Forestry House in Bamenda, nor a rudimentary pisé and palm leaf hut like his home in Banso. It was a modern, rather ugly house, made out of cement blocks with a corrugated metal roof that turned it into an oven every afternoon – and that my father quickly covered with leaves to insulate it from the heat.
What was his life like during those long years of war, alone in that large, empty house, having no news of his children or the woman he loved?
He threw himself into his work as a doctor. The carefree, easy way of life in Cameroon didn’t exist in Ogoja. Though he still consulted in the bush, it was not on horseback along the paths that wound through the mountains. He used his car (the Ford V8 that he bought from his predecessor, more of a truck than an automobile, the one that made such a strong impression on me when he came to pick us up as we were getting off the boat in Port Harcourt). He went to neighboring villages, linked by laterite tracks, Ijama, Nyonnya, Bawop, Amachi, Baterik, Bakalung, out as far as Obudu in the foothills of the Cameroon Mountains. The contact he had with his patients was no longer the same. There were too many of them. At the hospital in Ogoja, he didn’t have time to talk, to listen to the complaints of the families. The women and children weren’t allowed into the courtyard of the hospital, lighting cooking fires there was against the rules. The patients were in dormitories, lying on real metal beds with starched, very white sheets, they probably suffered as much from anxiety as they did from their illnesses. When he walked into the room, my father could read fear in their eyes. The doctor was not the man who brought them the virtues of Western medicine and who could share his knowledge with the village elders. He was a stranger whose reputation had spread throughout the land, one who cut off arms and legs when gangrene had set in, and whose only cure was contained in the instrument that was both terrifying and ludicrous, a copper syringe equipped with a six-centimeter needle.
Then my father discovered – after all those years of having felt close to the Africans, like a relative, a friend – that the doctor was just another instrument of colonial power, no different from the policeman, the judge, or the soldier. How could it have been otherwise? Exercising medicine also meant having power over people, and medical supervision also meant political supervision. The British army knew that all too well: at the turn of the century, after years of fierce resistance, it had conquered the magic of the last Ibo warriors with the might of its arms and modern technology in the sanctuary of Aro Chuku, at less than a day’s march from Ogoja. It is not easy to change entire populations when the change is made under duress. My father probably learned that lesson from being plunged into loneliness and isolation by the war. That knowledge must have deepened his feeling of failure, of pessimism. I remember his telling me once, at the end of his life, that if he could do it all over again, he wouldn’t be a doctor, but a veterinarian, because only animals are able to accept their suffering.
There was also the violence. In Banso, in Bamenda, in the Cameroon Mountains, my father was under the charm of the African
people’s gentleness and sense of humor.* In Ogoja, everything was different. The country was troubled by tribal warfare, retributions, scores being settled between villages. The roads, the trails were not safe, one could not go out unarmed. The Ibos of Calabar resisted European penetration most vehemently of all. They were said to be Christians (it was even one of the arguments that France used for supporting their struggle against their Yoruba neighbors, who were Muslims). In truth, animism and fetishism were common at the time. Witchcraft was also practiced in Cameroon, but for my father it was more straightforward, more positive. In eastern Nigeria witchcraft was secretive, it was practiced through the use of poisons, hidden amulets, signs intended to bring misfortune. My father heard for the very first time, from the mouths of the European residents and later spread around by the locals in their service, stories of possession, of magic, of ritual crimes. The legend of Aro Chuku and its human sacrifice stone still deeply affected people. The stories that went around created a climate of suspicion, of tension. In such and such a village, they say, not far from Obudu, the inhabitants have a custom of stretching a rope across the road when a lone traveler ventures out on a bicycle. As soon as he falls, the poor man is immediately clubbed over the head, dragged behind a wall and his body cut up to be eaten. In yet another village, the district officer confiscated what was purportedly pork from the butcher shop, but, as rumor has it, was in fact human flesh. In Obudu, where the gorillas from the mountains are poached, their amputated hands can be found on sale in the market as souvenirs, but they say that if you look more closely, you can see there are also children’s hands for sale.
My father repeated those alarming stories to us, he probably only half-believed them. He never saw any evidence of cannibalism himself. But one thing is certain: he often had to travel in order to autopsy murder victims. It was that kind of violence that haunted him. I heard my father say that the bodies he had to examine were sometimes in such a state of decomposition that he needed to tie the scalpel to the end of a piece of wood before cutting into the skin to avoid the explosion of gases.
To him there was something offensive about disease, once the charm of Africa had worn off. The profession he had exercised with enthusiasm gradually grew to be toilsome, in the heat, the humidity of the river, the solitude in that remote corner of the world. The close contact with suffering wore on him: all those bodies burning with fever, the bloated bellies of cancer patients, those legs eaten away with ulcers, deformed by elephantiasis, those faces gnawed away by leprosy or syphilis, those women torn apart in childbirth, those children grown old from deficiencies, their gray skin like parchment, their rust-colored hair, their eyes enlarged at their approaching death. A long time afterward, he talked to me about the terrible things he had to face, as if the same sequence of events would begin all over again every day: an old woman driven mad with uremia who must be tied to her bed, a man from whom he removes a tapeworm so long he has to wrap it around a stick, a young woman he is going to amputate due to gangrene, another one who is brought to him dying of smallpox, her face swollen and covered with pustules. Close physical contact with that land, the feeling one gets only from encountering humanity in all of its painful reality, the odor of skin, of sweat, of blood, the pain, the hope, the small gleam of light that sometimes illuminates a patient’s gaze when the fever goes down, or that infinite second during which a doctor can see life burning out in a dying man’s eye – all of that, everything that had inspired, had stimulated him in the beginning, when he sailed up the rivers in Guiana, when he walked the mountain paths in the Cameroon highlands, was put into question in Ogoja, because of the appalling grind of days filled with unexpressed pessimism, because he realized the impossibility of succeeding at his task.
His voice still husky with emotion, he told me about the young Ibo who was brought to the hospital in Ogoja, hands and feet bound, mouth gagged with a sort of wooden muzzle. He’s been bitten by a dog and rabies has set in. He is lucid, he knows he is going to die. At times in the cell where he’s been isolated, he is seized with attacks, his body arches up on the bed in spite of the ties, his limbs are possessed of such strength that the leather thongs seem to be near breaking. At the same time, he moans and screams in pain, foams at the mouth. Then he falls back into a sort of lethargy, numbed with morphine. A few hours later, my father inserts the needle that will carry the poison into his vein. Before dying the boy looks at my father, he loses consciousness and his chest collapses in one last sigh. What kind of man are you when you’ve lived through that?
* * *
* The reputation of the gentleness of the people in the Banso region could hardly be generalized to the rest of west Cameroon. In a study devoted to the Wiya people of the Province of Bamenda, Doctor Jeffries reports atrocities committed during the war that has always pitted them against the Fulanis of Kishong: when the latter capture a Wiya, they slice off his ears and cut off both arms at the elbows and, sewing the palms of his hands together, make a sort of collar that they put around the neck of the prisoner before sending him back to his village. The French and British occupying armies tried in vain to counter such exactions that are reappearing in certain countries in West Africa such as Liberia.
NEGLECT
SUCH WAS THE MAN I met in 1948, at the end of his African life. I didn’t recognize him, didn’t understand him. He was too different from everyone I knew, a stranger, and even more than that, almost an enemy. He had nothing in common with the men I had known in France in my grandmother’s circle of acquaintances, those “uncles,” my grandfather’s friends, gentlemen of another age, distinguished, decorated, patriotic, revanchist, talkative, bearing gifts, having families, relations, subscribers to The Travel Journal, readers of Léon Daudet and Barrès. Always impeccably dressed in their gray suits, their vests, wearing stiff collars and ties, sporting their felt hats and wielding their metal-tipped walking sticks. After dinner, they would settle into the leather armchairs – souvenirs of prosperous times – in the dining room, they would smoke and talk, and I would fall asleep with my nose in my empty plate listening to the murmur of their voices.
The man that appeared before me at the foot of the gangway on the wharf at Port Harbor was from another world: wearing a shapeless pair of pants that were too baggy and too short for him, a white shirt, his black leather shoes dusty from the dirt tracks. He was harsh, taciturn. When he spoke French it was with the sing-song accent of Mauritius, or else he spoke in pidgin, that mysterious dialect that jingled like bells. He was inflexible, authoritative, yet at the same time gentle and generous with the Africans that worked for him at the hospital and in his government house. He was full of idiosyncrasies and conventions that were foreign to me, about which I hadn’t the slightest inkling: children should never speak at the table without being authorized, they should not run, or play, or laze in bed. They could not eat between meals, and never eat sweet things. They should eat without laying their hands on the table, could not leave anything in their plates and should be careful never to chew with their mouths open. His obsession with hygiene led him to do amazing things, like washing his hands with alcohol and then lighting a match to them. He was forever verifying the charcoal in the water filter, drank nothing but tea, or even hot water (that the Chinese call white tea), made his own candles out of wax and bits of twine dipped in paraffin, washed the dishes himself with extracts of soapwort. With the exception of his radio connected to an antenna hanging across the garden, he had no contact with the rest of the world, read neither books nor newspapers. The only thing he read was a small black book that I found a long time afterward, and that I can’t open without being moved: The Imitation of Christ, a military-man’s book, as I presume soldiers in the past might have read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius on the battlefield. Of course, he never said anything to us about it.
As soon as we met him, my brother and I tested him by putting pepper in his teapot. That did not make him laugh, he chased us around the house and beat us soundly. Perhaps
a different man, I mean one of those “uncles” that visited my grandmother’s apartment, would have merely laughed. We suddenly learned that a father could be fearsome, that he could be ruthless, go out and cut down switches in the woods to thrash our legs with. That he could establish a virile code of justice, ruling out all dialogue, all excuses. That the code was founded on example, refused all negotiations, all denunciations, the whole act of tears and promises we were used to bringing into play with my grandmother. That he would not tolerate the slightest manifestation of disrespect and would accept no propensity for tantrums: to me the matter was clear, the house in Ogoja was on one level, and there was no furniture or windows to throw it out of.
It was that same man who insisted on prayers being said every evening before bed, and Sundays being devoted to reading the mass book. The religion we discovered under his care did not allow for compromises. It was a rule of life, a code of conduct. I suppose it was upon our arrival in Ogoja that we learned Santa Claus didn’t exist, that ceremonies and religious holidays were reduced to prayers, and that there was no reason to offer presents that, in the context we were in, could only be superfluous.
Things would undoubtedly have been different if there hadn’t been that fracture caused by the war, if my father, instead of being faced with children who had become strangers to him, had learned to live in the same house with a baby, if he had been part of the slow process that leads from childhood to the age of reason. That African land in which he had known the happiness of sharing his adventurous life with a woman, in Banso, in Bamenda, was the very same land that had robbed him of a family life and the love of his children.
Today I am able to feel regret at having missed that opportunity. I try to imagine what it must have meant for a child of eight, having grown up in the confinement of the war, to go to the other side of the world to meet a stranger who was introduced to him as his father. And that it should occur there, in Ogoja, in a natural setting where everything was excessive, the sun, the thunderstorms, the rain, the vegetation, the insects, a land of both freedom and constraint. Where the women and men were completely different, not because of the color of their skin and hair, but in their way of speaking, of walking, of laughing, of eating. Where disease and old age were visible, where joy and children’s games were even more marked. Where childhood ends very early, almost without transition, where the boys work with their fathers, the little girls get married and bear children of their own at thirteen.
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