Under African Skies

by Charles Larson

  “I’ll try my bossman at my working place to lend me some money ’cause money palaver is hard on me this time.”

  “Money palaver hard on you? But your wife’s in our hospital.”

  Kollie felt like saying: “And so what?” But he realized that his pleading wasn’t doing much for him.

  Four days after his meeting with the chief medical doctor, Kollie was able to get a large advance on his wages from his employers. When he got the money, he rushed to the hospital to show it to Marwu.

  Kollie waited outside the Midwives Department for Miss Washington, who had now become his best friend in the hospital. When she walked toward him, she had a big smile on her face.

  “Kollie, your wife gave birth to a baby girl this morning, and the doctors didn’t have to operate on her,” Miss Washington said, all in one breath. “Your troubles are over now.”

  “Really, Miss Washington?” Kollie said excitedly.

  “True. The baby and the mother aren’t doing too bad yet.”

  “Thank God for that,” Kollie said, smiling. “I want to see my wife so I kin show her the money for her hospital fees.”

  “I’m not sure you can see her now, but let’s go and find out.”

  Miss Washington and Kollie walked over to the room where Marwu was resting. She was asleep, and the midwives assigned to her said the doctors had advised that Marwu shouldn’t be disturbed for any reason.

  “Maybe I kin see my baby and then come back tonight to visit my wife,” Kollie said.

  “No, no,” Miss Washington said. “The baby is in the Baby Pool, and we normally don’t let people in there.”

  The Baby Pool was a spacious room where all infants delivered in the hospital, dead or alive, were deposited until their mothers were ready to take them home.

  “Why was the baby separated from the mother so soon?”

  “This is a big hospital, and we must separate the babies and their mothers—especially if the mothers are sick, as in the case of your wife.”

  “This is the first time that I ain’t see any of my babies after delivery.”

  “Maybe your other babies were born in a country hospital, but this is the new way of things in big city hospitals.”

  6

  During the three weeks Marwu spent in the hospital, Kollie couldn’t visit her as much as he had wanted because visiting hours were short. He couldn’t even see his baby as frequently as he had wanted; visits to the Baby Pool were restricted. Marwu herself didn’t get to spend much time with her baby. She was sick, and the nurses and midwives told her that “sick mothers don’t play with their babies much in the hospital.”

  Kollie arrived early at the hospital the morning Marwu and the baby were ready to go home. He was anxious; he wanted to take a good look at his baby. He stood impatiently with Marwu before the Baby Door, the entrance to the Baby Pool. It was actually a large window through which all babies had to pass from the pool to their parents. Several other couples were also waiting.

  About an hour passed, but nobody brought a baby to Marwu. Kollie’s anxiety greatly increased.

  “Why the nurses and midwives taking too long to bring our baby to us?” he asked Marwu.

  “Be patient,” Marwu said to him. “We’ll soon get our baby.”

  Kollie tried to calm down, but when a midwife told Marwu that the nurses were looking for her baby in the pool, Kollie panicked.

  “Looking for our baby in that big place?” Kollie said. “I hope they ain’t give us the wrong baby.”

  The midwives finally brought a baby to Marwu in a wheelbasket, almost two and half hours later. Kollie looked skeptical about the features of the baby. After the midwives had laid the baby in Marwu’s arms, they watched Kollie curiously as he examined the infant seriously.

  And as soon as they had left, Kollie turned to his wife. “Do you think this is the baby you born in this hospital?” he asked.

  “Why you asking me that kinda question?” Marwu said, laughing softly, but her face changed as soon as she remembered why Kollie was so concerned about the baby. “Well, I ain’t God to make you a boy child.”

  “Don’t you worry about that. But I think this is someone else’s baby the midwives gave us.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Oh, you ain’t see how they took too long to bring us this baby from that big-O Baby Pool?”

  Kollie felt somewhat disappointed that he didn’t get a boy child. But he felt that something might have gone wrong in the Baby Pool. He had heard rumors that apart from mislabeling of infants in the pool, which sometimes caused problems, an exchange of babies frequently took place. Sometimes rich men gave large amounts of money to nurses and midwives to give them the boy children if their wives had given birth to girls in the maternity hospitals. Kollie tried to believe Miss Washington, who was the first person to tell him that Marwu had delivered a girl child. But he wondered if the senior midwife wasn’t part of trading in babies in the hospital.

  “Let’s go home now,” Marwu said. “We just have take this baby since this is what God gave us.”

  “You had better say that this is what the nurses and midwives gave us from the Baby Pool,” Kollie said.

  Marwu laughed. Kollie he still looked somewhat skeptical, but his mood had changed. He had even smiled. When he looked at Marwu’s lappa and buba suit, he thought she looked very much like when she graduated from the literacy class in Monrovia where she had learned to read and write simple English.

  “I thank God I’m safe again,” Marwu said. “I know you men always want boy children, but I ain’t going to get any more big belly just to get you a boy child.”

  “That’s all right ’cause this was the only way out for us,” Kollie said. “Maybe this is our baby, but I ain’t know.”

  —1975

  René Philombe

  (BORN 1930) CAMEROON

  René Philombe (Philippe-Louis Ombedé) attended Catholic mission schools before he was admitted to secondary school in Yaoundé, where he first began writing poetry and prose. One of his young history teachers at the high school so radicalized him that Philombe was expelled, and thus his formal education came to an end when he was sixteen years old. But writing and political thought had already become entrenched in his personality.

  While working as a secretary for his father, Philombe continued his extensive reading, which included the study of his people’s indigenous traditions. By the 1950s, he was actively working for the anti-colonialist movement within Cameroon, including union organizing. While participating in the liberation struggle, he began suffering from the acute pain of a spinal tumor, the effects of which he would suffer the rest of his life. After surgery, Philombe continued his writing during periods of convalescence. In that decade, he also began an active career as a journalist.

  Further encounters with the colonial authorities continued, including periods when he was incarcerated. Richard Bjornson, his translator, describes Philombe’s repeated altercations with government officials as “reprisals by political authorities who resent his independence of mind.” Philombe’s harassment did not cease with his country’s independence. Like many of his contemporaries across the continent (Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka), Philombe has always been a spokesperson for social and political injustice. Again in Bjornson’s words, Philombe himself is “a man who passionately identifies with the suffering, disinherited, simple people of Africa and just as passionately cries out against oppression, injustice and cruelty. Always implicitly urging his readers to penetrate false masks and to preserve a feeling of what it is to be human … .”

  Injustice is at the center of “The True Martyr Is Me,” which Bjornson describes as a story of the colonial past, “foregrounding the corruption of a sociopolitical system and the effects of that system on human consciousness.” More specifically, the story describes life within the sixa, “a curious institution invented by Catholic missionaries in French West Africa. Before any woman could receive the s
acrament of marriage, she had to spend an indeterminate amount of time in a special compound at the mission. The compound was called a sixa, and the ostensible reason for its existence was moral and spiritual instruction, but because the women worked in the fields of the mission, they were sometimes kept there for unreasonably long periods and exploited for their labor.”

  “The True Martyr Is Me” was first published in Tales from the Cameroon (1984), which included the stories from both of René Philombe’s collections, Lettres de ma cambuse (Letters from My Hut) (1965) and Histoires queque-de-chat (Cats’ Tails Tales) (1971).

  THE TRUE MARTYR IS ME

  Translated by Richard Bjornson

  The last shades of night had barely lifted in the village of Nsam. A fifty-year-old woman left her hut. Supporting herself on a cane, she walked over to a little neighboring house, planted herself in front of the door, and began to shout: “Edanga … ! Edanga … ! Get up. Edanga … ! You have more than five river crossings to make … ! Get up so that you can be on your way … !”

  Not the slightest sign of life from the interior. The woman approached, and rapping her little cane on the barricaded door, she began again: “Isn’t there anyone in this house, then? It seems silent as a grave. Could Edanga have left already without taking anything with him?”

  She broke off, having heard the creaking of a rattan bed.

  “Aha … ! Are you there then, Edanga, still asleep? How many legs do you have, eh? More than five river crossings and with that basket on your head … ! Get up, Edanga. Now is the time to be on your way. When traveling by foot, people quickly get tired in the heat of the sun!”

  Inside, a voice grumbled disgustedly. Then, with a great creaking of the lock, the door opened, permitting an approximately thirty-year-old man to emerge. His pants had been patched repeatedly, and his shirt was covered with mud splotches. Without looking at the woman, he sank down upon a log: his features were drawn.

  “What’s wrong, Edanga?” She was worried.

  “Where’s the basket, Mother?” he muttered, and that was his only reply.

  The woman regarded her son for a moment before wending her way back to the hut. When she returned, she was dragging an enormous basket pleated with palm leaves. She deposited it in front of him. Once more she disappeared into the hut and returned with a good-sized rooster and a hamper filled with assorted parcels.

  “Go get yesterday’s stalk of bananas. I can’t carry it. It’s too heavy. Don’t forget to take the yams as well. These days your wife must be begging, if she wants to stay alive at Mbankolo. It’s been many moons since you’ve been there.”

  Edanga complied, dragging his heels. He came back and placed the stalk of bananas and the yams in the bottom of the basket. Then he sat down again on the log; he was holding his head between his hands, and his gaze was lost in space. His mother could not understand why he was in such a bad mood. He had always been happy and gay, especially when it was a question of going to Mbankolo. With slow, labored motions she began to arrange the food, all the while sighing; “Here’s the package of groundnuts, and here’s the cucumber … ! Here’s the packet of sesame seeds, and here’s the one with the spices … ! There are also several bunches of onions and a little calabash of palm oil … ! In this package, there’s some smoked fish; it could crumble into little pieces if you aren’t careful how you carry the basket … !”

  If there had been a witness to this scene, he might well have asked who the woman was talking to. Frozen into a posture of complete detachment, her son had eyes only for the surrounding vegetation, still bathed in the misty shadows of dawn, and he had ears only for the dissonant chorus of frogs, toads, crickets, and birds greeting the sunrise with their carefree songs.

  “Good, that’s it, Edanga! You can leave now. You can tell your wife that I’ll do my best to come see her someday myself.”

  Edanga’s mother had said it with a hint of triumph in her voice, as she finished tying up the basket with banana-tree fibers and carefully placing the good-sized rooster on top.

  A moment later, like a slave who intends to obey only his own whims, the young man stood up ponderously. He stretched and ill-humoredly inspected the enormous, food-swollen basket with his eyes, before bending down …

  “What’re you doing, Edanga?” said his mother suddenly, as an idea crossed her mind. “Today is Sunday, and you want to leave for Mbankolo like that? Without washing up? Without changing clothes?”

  “You’re getting senile, Mother!” scolded the young man angrily. “I know old people of your age who don’t talk such nonsense! To get me out of bed so early, when the basket hadn’t even been loaded yet?”

  Before the dumbfounded eyes of his mother, he tested the weight of the basket, lifted it, and placed it on his head. He was just preparing to get under way when an almost completely bald old fellow shot out of a nearby hut and began to take his turn at scolding: “Who are you so impudently accusing of senility, Edanga? My wife may be old, but yours who is so young and beautiful—where is she? If you were a man worthy of that name, she wouldn’t still be imprisoned in the sixa6 after three years … ! And all that simply because you can’t pass the catechism examinations … !”

  “Aie-Kai-yai, Father!” cried Edanga with respect and fear. “I didn’t insult my mother … ! All right, don’t tease me about that. I’m going … !”

  “Yes, go, and be quick about it!” bellowed Edanga’s father as he brandished his flyswatter, “My daughter must be dying of hunger at Mbankolo … ! Look at his getup! It’s that of a convicted criminal! Do people pay visits on their loved ones in such filthy costumes … ?”

  Swelling in turn with threats and mockery, the paternal voice railed on as the young man disappeared around a turn. He walked along a pebblestrewn road, his head burdened with thoughts of martyrdom beneath the heavy basket of food, on top of which the good-sized rooster intermittently trumpeted a royal cockadoodledoo, as if to accentuate Edanga’s torments.

  It wasn’t the first time that Edanga had gone to the Catholic Mission at Mbankolo. He had gone there many times during the last three years. A twenty-kilometer walk with a heavy load of food on his head eventually became an onerous burden to him. The last time was six months ago. On that day, he’d found the women of the sixa in a coffee plantation. Covered with sweat and under the supervision of an elderly catechist, they were clearing the land with blunt machetes dulled by long years of toil. As they worked, their tearful voices intoned this popular lament:

  Skin and bones,

  I’ve become skin and bones,

  Skin and bones like a ripe fruit withering on the vine,

  Never having been relished by a loving tongue.

  I toil in the fields of Lord Fada7

  I toil for whole moons and whole seasons,

  And my spine grows old with it,

  Yet Lord Fada doesn’t love me,

  And when I’m told that the race of Fadas

  Never long to see a woman’s skirt,

  I know that I’m toiling in vain,

  Toiling for nothing,

  Toiling to harvest nothing.

  Men shall I toil then,

  Oh, my mother,

  In the fields of one who loves me?

  Edanga had slipped behind a bush and made a sign. Having caught a glimpse of him, Angoni had asked permission to go shake his hand and receive her provisions. Immediately, a switch whistled through the air and flattened itself cruelly on Angoni’s tender skin. Then a scolding voice: “What conduct! Who deceived you into thinking that you’re out here with me to find ways of committing a sin against the sixth commandment, eh? Get back to work, and be quick about it!”

  Tears in her eyes, Angoni went back to work. Edanga could not prevent himself from crying at the sight of his fiancée’s tears. “Did I pay the bride price for my beautiful Angoni to watch her being mistreated by just anybody?” he asked himself, trembling with rage. Alas, what could he do but chew the cud of his bitterness in silence? No one h
ad ever dared raise a hand against a catechist, even in the country’s most unenlightened village. And all the more if he were the catechist in charge of the sixa. No one! That would have meant provoking the wrath of the Fadas. And God alone knows whether a Fada might not be more respected and feared than a white Commandant. People feared the white Commandant because he had brutal guards armed with long sticks that spit lightning. But a Fada, think about it … ! Not only was he of the same race as the white Commandant; he was also God’s representative on earth. Not any old God, but the one who had made white men superior to black men!

  Already boiling with a desire for vengeance, Edanga felt his blood turn to ice at these thoughts. Thus, completely crestfallen and defenseless, he withdrew from the coffee plantation to go, like everyone else, and wait for his fiancee in the visiting room at the Mission.

  The visiting room at the Mission was a plank enclosure that witnessed countless uneasy whisperings, hastily blurted words, and half-formed tears. At four o’clock every day, it became animated with pairs of fiancés. There, separated by a cruel wall which it was forbidden to cross, engaged couples chatted, hardly able to see each other through the peepholes in the wall. And what chats they had … ! The old catechist marched ceaselessly back and forth, his ears pricked up like those of a sheep dog. If in all this chirping he overhead a few words he considered obscene, he would cry scandal, separate the offenders, and sometimes even threaten to delay the formal celebration of their marriage. For that reason, each couple continued to speak softly, like saints—that is, without prattling about love or exchanging amorous smiles. The women adopted a more reserved attitude. In their faces one could not see the passion which renders the world’s ugliest fiancee beautiful in the presence of her beloved. Their eyes were fixed in glassy stares, like those of elderly widows who no longer expect anything from life. What sorts of pleasantries can two fiancés exchange in front of interlopers? All of a sudden, an enormous bell was tolling loud enough to split your eardrums, calling all the occupants of the sixa to evening prayers. And as each guest withdrew from the cursed visiting room, his heart was consumed with a throbbing grief.