The African

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  It would have taken growing up listening to a father telling about his life, singing songs, taking his sons out to the River Aiya to hunt lizards or catch crayfish, it would have taken slipping my hand into his so that he could point out rare butterflies, venomous flowers, the secrets of nature he must surely have known about, listening to him talk about his childhood in Mauritius, walking beside him when he went to visit his friends, his colleagues at the hospital, watching him repair the car, or change a broken shutter, helping him plant the bushes and the flowers he loved, the bougainvilleas, the strelitzias, the birds-of-paradise, everything that must have reminded him of the marvelous garden of Moka, the house where he was born.

  Instead, we waged a perfidious, grueling war against him, sparked by punishments and beatings. The period when he came back from Africa was the hardest. In addition to the difficulties he had in adapting, there was the hostility he must have felt in his own home. His fits of anger were disproportionate, excessive, exhausting. For insignificant things, a broken bowl, an inappropriate word, or look, he would mete out blows with the cane, with his fists. I remember having felt something akin to hatred. All I could do was break his sticks, but he went out and cut down others in the hills. There was something archaic about that approach, it didn’t fit in with what my friends experienced. I must have come out hardened, as the Arab proverb goes: he who is beaten is weak at first, then he grows strong.

  Today, in hindsight, I understand that my father was transmitting the most difficult part of an upbringing to us – that which no school will ever provide. Africa hadn’t transformed him. It had brought out rigor in him. Later, when my father came to spend his retirement in the South of France, he brought that African heritage back with him. Authority and discipline, to the point of brutality.

  But also exactness and respect, like one of the rules of the ancient societies of Cameroon and Nigeria, where children must not cry, must not complain. A penchant for a religion with no frills, no superstitions, that I suppose he developed using Islam as a model. That is how I have come to understand what seemed absurd back then, his obsession with hygiene, the way he washed his hands. The aversion he showed for pork, extracting the encysted tapeworm eggs from the meat with the tip of his knife, in order to convince us. His way of eating, of cooking his rice African-style, adding hot water little by little. His love of boiled vegetables, which he seasoned with hot pepper sauce. His preference for dried fruits, dates, figs, and even bananas that he would set out to dry in the sun on his windowsill. The care he took to go to the market very early every morning, in the company of North African laborers whom he also encountered at the police station every time he renewed his residence permit.

  All of that might sound anecdotal. But those African habits, which had become second nature to him, surely brought home a lesson that could not leave a child or – later on – an adolescent indifferent.

  Twenty-two years in Africa had inspired in him a deep hatred of all forms of colonialism. In 1954, we took a trip to Morocco (where one of the “uncles” was manager of an agricultural domain). I recall an incident that marked me much more than any of the traditional folklore. We had taken a regular bus from Casablanca to Marrakesh. At one point the driver (a Frenchman) grew angry, insulted an old peasant who probably could not pay the fare and threw him out on the side of the road. My father was indignant. His tirade extended out to include the entire French occupation of the country that prevented local people from holding the most menial of jobs, even that of a bus driver, and mistreated the poor. Around that same time, day after day, he would listen to the news on the radio about the Kikuyus’ struggle for independence in Kenya and that of the Zulus against racial segregation in South Africa.

  It had nothing to do with abstract ideas or political leanings. It was the voice of Africa that spoke within him, that awakened his earlier sentiments. He’d undoubtedly thought about the future when he was traveling with my mother on horseback along the trails in Cameroon. It was before the war, before the solitude and the bitterness, when everything was possible, when the country was young and new, when anything could happen. Far from the corrupt, profiteering society on the coast, he had dreamt of the rebirth of Africa, liberated from its colonial shackles and the inevitability of pandemics. A sort of state of grace, like that of the vast grassy expanses through which the herds moved driven by their shepherds, or the villages around Banso, with the immemorial perfection of their walls of pisé and their leaf-covered roofs.

  The advent of independence in Cameroon and in Nigeria, then – step by step – across the continent, must have impassioned him. Each insurrection must have been a source of joy for him. And the war which had just broken out in Algeria, a war his own children could have been drafted into, could only have been the worst of his nightmares. He’d never forgiven de Gaulle’s double-dealing.

  He died the year AIDS was discovered. He had already perceived the tactical state of neglect in which the colonial powers left the continent they had exploited. Tyrants were put into place with the aid of France and England – Bokassa, Idi Amin Dada – to whom the Western governments provided arms and subsidies for years, before repudiating them. The doors of immigration having been flung open, cohorts of young men left Ghana, Benin, or Nigeria during the sixties to serve as a labor force and populate the ghettos of the urban outskirts, then those same doors clamped shut again when the economic crisis made the industrial nations wary and xenophobic. And above all Africa was abandoned to its old demons, malaria, dysentery, famine. Now AIDS, the new plague, threatens a third of its general population with death, and again the Western countries, who control the remedies, pretend to see nothing, know nothing.

  Cameroon, it seemed, had escaped those maledictions. The highlands of the west, in separating from Nigeria, had made a sensible decision, which protected the region from the corruption of tribal warfare. But the arrival of modernity did not bring the expected benefits. What had disappeared, in my father’s eyes, was the charm of the villages, the slow, carefree life punctuated by the rhythm of agricultural tasks. The lure of money, venality, a certain degree of violence had replaced all of that. Even far from Banso, my father must have been aware of it. He must have felt the passing of time like an ebbing flow, leaving the tide-marks of memory behind.

  In 1968, as my mother and father were observing the mountains of garbage left by the general strike piling up under their windows in Nice, and as I, in Mexico, was listening to the whirr of army helicopters carrying away the bodies of students killed in Tlatelolco, Nigeria was entering the last phase of a terrible massacre, one of the great genocides of the century, known by the name of Biafra. To gain control of the oil wells at the mouth of the Calabar River, Ibos and Yorubas were exterminating one another, as the Western world looked on with indifference. Worse yet, the large oil companies, mainly the Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum group, took sides in the war, putting pressure on their own governments to safeguard the wells and pipelines. The countries they represented confronted one another by proxy, France on the side of the Biafran insurgents, the Soviet Union, England, and the United States on the side of the federal government made up of a Yoruba majority. The civil war became a world issue, a war of civilizations. There was talk of Christians against Muslims, or of nationalists against capitalists. Developed countries discovered an unforeseen market for their manufactured products: to both sides they sold light and heavy weaponry, antipersonnel mines, combat tanks, planes, and even German, French, Chadian mercenaries who made up the Fourth Biafran Brigade serving the rebels in Ojukwu. But at the end of the summer of 1968, surrounded, decimated by the federal troops under the command of general Benjamin Adekunle, nicknamed the “Black Scorpion” for his cruelty, the Biafran army capitulated. Only a handful of combatants continued to resist, most of them children wielding machetes and sticks carved in the shape of rifles against Migs and Soviet bombers. At the fall of Aba (not far from the ancient sanctuary of the magician warriors of Aro Chuku), Biafr
a entered a long period of agony. In collusion with England and the United States, General Adekunle clamped down a blockade over the Biafran territory, preventing the arrival of all aid, all supplies. Before the advancing federal army in the grips of a mad desire for revenge, the population fled toward what was left of Biafra, flooding through the savannahs and the forest, trying to survive on their reserves. Men, women, children were caught in a deathtrap. From September onward, there were no more military operations, but millions of people were cut off from the rest of the world, without food, without medicine. When international organizations were finally able to penetrate the zone of the insurgency, they discovered the extent of the horror. Along the roads, on the banks of the rivers, at the entrances to villages, hundreds of thousands of children were dying of hunger or dehydration. It was a cemetery as vast as a country. Everywhere, in the grassy plains similar to the one where I once ran to wage war on the termites, children without parents wandered aimlessly, bodies transformed into skeletons. For a long time after that, I was haunted by Chinua Achebe’s poem, “Christmas in Biafra,” that begins with these words:

  No, no Madonna and Child can match

  The picture of a mother’s tenderness

  Toward the son she must soon forget.

  I saw the unbearable pictures in all of the newspapers. For the first time, the country in which I’d spent the most memorable period of my childhood was being shown to the rest of the world, but only because it was dying. My father also saw those pictures, how had he been able to accept it? At seventy-two years of age, one can only look on in silence. No doubt shed some tears.

  The same year that the country he had lived in was destroyed, my father had his British citizenship revoked, due to the independence of the Isle of Mauritius. From that moment on, he stopped dreaming of going away. He had planned on going back to Africa, not to Cameroon, but to Durban in South Africa, to be closer to his brothers and sisters who had remained in Mauritius, where they were born. Then he had toyed with the idea of settling in the Bahamas, buying a plot of land in Eleuthera and building a sort of camp on it. He had pored over the maps. He was looking for a different place, not the ones he had known and suffered in, but a new world, where he could begin all over again, as if on an island. After the Biafran massacre, he dreamt no longer. He fell into a kind of obstinate silence that hung over him till his death. He even forgot he was a doctor who had led an adventurous, heroic life. After a bad case of flu, when he was briefly hospitalized for a blood transfusion, I had a difficult time having the results of his tests given to him. “Why do you want them?” asked the nurse, “Are you a doctor?” I answered, “Not me. But he is.” The nurse brought the documents to him. “But why didn’t you say you were a doctor?” My father responded, “Because you didn’t ask me.” In a way, I don’t think it was really resignation, but rather a desire to identify with all the people he had treated, whom he began to resemble at the end of his life.

  * * *

  I am forever yearning to go back to Africa, to my childhood memory. To the source of my feelings, to that which molded my character. The world changes, it’s true, and the boy who is standing over there on the plain amidst the tall grasses in the hot breath of wind bearing the odors of the savannah, the shrill sound of the forest, the boy feeling the dampness of the sky and the clouds upon his lips, that boy is so far from me that no story, no journey will ever make it possible for me to reach him again.

  Yet, at times I walk aimlessly through the narrow streets of a town and suddenly, as I go past a door at the foot of a building under construction, I breathe in the cold smell of cement that has just been poured, and I’m back in the visitors’ cabin at Abakaliki, I go into the shadowy cubicle of my room and see, behind the door, the big blue lizard that our cat strangled and brought to me as a sign of welcome. Or else, just when I’m least expecting it, I am submerged in the fragrance of wet earth rising from our garden in Ogoja, when the rains drummed down on the roof of the house and made blood-colored streams zigzag over the crackled ground. I can even hear, over the throb of automobiles jammed in an avenue, the gentle and hushed music of the Aiya River.

  I can hear the voices of children shouting, they are calling to me, they’re in front of the hedge at the entrance to the garden, they’ve brought their pebbles and their sheep vertebrae to play, to take me on a garter snake hunt. In the afternoon, after the arithmetic lesson with my mother, I’ll sit down on the cement of the veranda, before the oven of the white sky to make clay gods and bake them in the sun. I remember each one of them, their names, their raised arms, their masks. Alasi, the god of thunder, Ngu, Eke-Ifite the mother goddess, Agwu the prankster. But there are many more, every day I make up a new name, they are my chis, the spirits that protect me and intercede with God on my behalf.

  I’ll watch the fever rise in the twilit sky, the lightning snake silently between the scales of gray clouds wreathed in fire. When the night has grown black, I’ll listen to the steps of the thunder slowly approaching, the swell that makes my hammock rock and blows on the flame of my lamp. I’ll listen to my mother’s voice counting the seconds that separate us from the impact of the lightning and calculating its distance at the rate of three hundred and thirty-three meters per second. At last the wind and the extremely cold rain, moving along the crowns of the trees with all of its might; I can hear each branch groan and crack, the air in the room fills with the dust stirred up by the rain as it hits the ground.

  It is all so far away, so close. A simple partition as thin as a mirror separates the world of today and that of yesterday. I’m not speaking of nostalgia. That dereistic affliction has never been a source of pleasure for me. I’m speaking of substance, of sensations, of the most logical part of my life.

  Something was given to me, something was taken away from me. That which is definitively absent from my childhood: having had a father, having grown up by his side in the comfort of the family circle. I know, with no regrets or extraordinary illusions, that I lacked that. When a man watches the light on the face of the woman he loves day after day, when he tries to catch every sly glimmer in his child’s eye. All of the things that can never be captured in any portrait or photograph.

  But I remember everything I received when I arrived in Africa for the first time: such intense freedom that it burned inside of me, inebriated me, gave me so much pleasure it was painful.

  I don’t mean to speak of exoticism: children are absolute strangers to that vice. Not because they see through beings and objects, but precisely because they see nothing but them: to me a tree, a hollow in the land, a column of carpenter ants, a band of turbulent kids looking for a game, an old man with blurry eyes holding out an emaciated hand, a street in an African village on market day, were every street in every village, every old man, every child, every tree, and every ant. That treasure is still alive deep within me, it cannot be eradicated. Much more than simple memories, it is made up of basic truths.

  If I had not experienced that carnal knowledge of Africa, if I had not inherited the part of my life before my birth, what would I have become?

  Today I’m alive, I travel, I have in turn founded a family, I have taken root in other places. Yet at all times, like an ethereal substance floating between the partitions of reality, I am traversed by those days of old in Ogoja. In waves, it floods over me, and leaves me in a daze. Not only that childhood memory, extraordinarily precise with regard to all the sensations, the odors, the tastes, the impression of relief and empty spaces, the sensation of duration.

  It is in writing it down that I now understand. That memory is not mine alone. It is also the memory of the time that preceded my birth, when my mother and father walked together on the highland trails, in the kingdoms of western Cameroon. The memory of my father’s hopes and fears, his loneliness, his distress in Ogoja. The memory of moments of happiness, when my mother and father are united in love that they believe to be eternal. Back then, they walked freely on the trails and the names of places p
enetrated me like family names, Bali, Nkom, Bamenda, Banso, Nkong-samba, Revi, Kwaja. And the names of lands, Mbembé, Kaka, Nsungli, Bum, Fungom. The high plateaus where the herds of cattle with moon-shaped horns snagging the clouds move slowly forward between Lassim and Ngonzin.

  Perhaps in the end, my old dream wasn’t wrong. Though my father became the African by force of destiny, today I think I can truly believe in the existence of my African mother, the one who embraced and nourished me at the moment of my conception, the moment of my birth.

  DECEMBER 2003–JANUARY 2004