2
Time Regained When You Least Expect It
What a trove of information to be found in the observations of colonists! What an immense contribution colonialism made to African historiography. No more sifting through idle chatter: real books, the written word, firsthand accounts, actual facts. I needed to restrain myself in the name of science, or else I would have shouted with joy, ecstatic at the sight of those piles of official accounts, biased ethnographic studies, missionaries’ circulars, and the administrative reports in which the lives of the natives were buried. The vast colonial archives laid out Joseph Ngono’s life before me in minute detail. And what’s more, I could draw on photographs and even films, not to mention the Internet. What I had previously found in the Library of Congress and in the German Staatsarchiv also came to my rescue. The colony is fixed in our memory in black and white; all I needed to do was to wipe off my glasses and give free rein to my Technicolor imagination to see it all play out before me. With a little effort, I came up with enough details to please Sara, who was waiting for me, ears open wide.
The young people of Nsimeyong would tell me that these comments are not politically correct “for any good Cameroonian.” But if I wanted to stitch together Sara’s confusing ancestry, if I wanted to tell her her father’s name, I needed to draw on all my sources, all of them. It was thanks to colonial-era films that I was able to see Joseph Ngono walking through the streets of Yaoundé in 1911, from Nkomkana—the neighborhood where his family had a compound—to Ongola, the city center. I saw him as a child, holding his little sandals in the rain to “save them”; I saw him with his schoolbag on his head to keep off the sun; I saw him carrying his slate under his arm and hurrying to make it to the mission school on time. Because I saw him go about his business so clearly and carefully, I could tell Sara that her father was a true flower of the colony. I found Ngono again several years later, working as a clerk, politely answering the questions of a German officer, just as he’d been taught. At times he laughed, and occasionally he got angry.
But what I couldn’t tell from the archives was what Ngono did when he wasn’t with the whites. Although he clearly spent most of his time with his compatriots, he seemed to have lived a good part of his life—the most important part for his daughter’s story—in the shadow of the whites, in and around their settlements. The reasons behind his unpredictable behavior were beyond me. In a certain sense, his life was the mirror image of Charles Atangana’s, even though Ngono’s had unfolded in Germany’s sordid underbelly, its stinking bars, and Atangana was received by emperors and kings, even greeted by the pope. Wouldn’t that have been enough to make the most honest of men lose his footing?
A temperament can change radically over the course of a life. The more police reports, anthropological articles, and greeting cards from German citizens I read, the more obvious it became that Ngono’s decision to quit his job at the Institute of Colonial Studies of the University of Berlin was the real start of his wanderings. Charles Atangana, on the other hand, zealously fulfilled his mission at a similar institute in Hamburg, where he was posted: he copied folktales from his homeland, provided the vocabulary necessary to produce an Ewondo-German dictionary, recorded his voice for phonetics exercises, and gave endless Ewondo conversation classes. And unlike his compatriot, he was rewarded for his efforts. As for Ngono, after several months of work, he knocked on the door of the institute’s director and, after being invited in and without even taking a seat—as etiquette required—abruptly declared, “I quit!”
Of course, this scene isn’t recorded in any document; still, it is just as true as any of the reports of the vice squad, who were soon instructed to follow him across Berlin. For the first time, this man—who had, for too long, dreamed only of the sunny future laid out for him by colonists—felt how hard life could be. Ngono quit just before the start of the Great War, that’s a fact. Up till then, his life had been a pale copy of his friend Karl’s, for that’s how the chief was known at the time. Roped in by promises of an endless supply of candy, they had both started at the missionary school and converted to Christianity together. Thanks to the rudiments of their European education, they quickly embraced the future that colonialism held out for men of their precocious intelligence.
In reality, the possibilities open to them were quite limited. Just two years after the end of his studies, Ngono realized that he had already gone as far up the colonial ladder as a native could go. I am sure that somewhere in the archives there is a report where a German officer, let’s call him Lieutenant Rectanus, describes his visit to Kribi, Douala, or Yaoundé and wonders who had swept the streets: the person responsible for this is clearly destined to do great things for the colony! Or maybe a description of another officer, Killmann, let’s say, eating his red sausage off a plate so clean he wants to know what local hands have washed it. “The future of this country is in these hands,” he shouts, greedily swallowing his sausage. “What attention to detail!”
Of course, my years of remove from the situation give me the advantage of perspective. I know now that the future evoked by this colonist never came to be; these colonial officers—so amazed by the hands of their subalterns who washed their plates, swept their streets, took care of their every need—they could do anything they wanted in the tropics, and yet they still couldn’t predict an African’s future. Whatever the outcome of the conflict ahead—a conflict moving ever closer, although they couldn’t see it coming—Joseph Ngono seemed destined for success, just like Charles Atangana. It couldn’t go any other way. Weren’t the two friends the cream of the colony’s crop?
“Attention,” the administrative regulations declared, “colonialism provides professional mobility for the natives.” Yes, according to the system’s logic, you could leave a job as a houseboy to become a clerk or even a translator. But for the translator to become a lecturer of Ewondo—and in the fatherland, to top it off—that was a step that no colonized subject would have dared to dream of in 1913. This dream assumed that this colonized subject would teach classes of future colonial administrators, all sitting politely in rows and listening to a black professor. It would have turned the whole colonial order upside down.
Because a black professor in Germany would, of course, grade the exams of his white students, requiring the less assiduous among them to amend their work, it goes without saying that his position would be untenable. The mediocre students of the professor in question (who, following the tenets of colonialism, certainly think themselves smarter than the professor) would sometimes have to repeat a course, and perhaps even abandon their colonial dreams. These same students would give themselves permission to stop by the professor’s office to ask that he let them retake exams or that he adjust their grades—by which I mean falsify their report cards to save their careers.
Sometimes the Ewondo lecturer would watch his students—especially those most certain about their mission to civilize the colonies—and he would start to laugh, a ferocious laugh, deep in his chest, that he would have a hard time stifling. Why? Ngono had just discovered European poetry, and these human specimens working so hard to scale the steps of conformity made him uncomfortable, for in the verses of their compatriots he had discovered the hymn of futility.
In the Staatsarchiv I actually found—no joke—a note written in the margins of the minutes of a meeting by the famous Professor Baumann, doctor of philosophy (then the director of the Colonial Institute and Ngono’s boss), that mentioned a book the illustrious doctor had found on his lecturer’s desk: Rilke. This theoretician of Bantu languages, including the one spoken by Ngono, burst out with a laugh that echoed down the halls and through the classrooms of the whole university; he was amused by the scandal of someone like Ngono reading Rilke, a logical reaction if measured against the colonial mentality that so blinded him.
Dr. Baumann wrote a paragraph about this affair in his annual report of the institute’s activities, although he neglected to mention which book of Rilke’s
Ngono was reading. This lapse really says something about the esteemed professor’s poetic tastes, or about the commotion his discovery provoked in the institute (too much laughter for a German research institute!). It also taught me why, just a few months after Ngono arrived in Berlin, the Ewondo lecturer suddenly began to feel uncomfortable in his role as colonial educator and cut off from his colleagues. It’s a fact: he had started to separate himself from his shadow—or rather, to think independently of it.
Sara willingly accepted this image of her father, adding that she knew him to be a dreamer.
“But you weren’t even born yet,” I remarked.
What did it matter? In the end, such details weren’t important to her. That Ngono was clearly the father she preferred, the one she would have invented herself if necessary.
“He was a poet,” she repeated.
I was amazed by her lack of pretension as I described her father to her, and nothing entertained me more than that look of hers, which reduced me to silence in a flash. “You’re joking, right?” she seemed to ask.
“He’s crazy, isn’t he?” she sometimes said about her father, interrupting my story. “He’s really crazy, isn’t he?”
At other times she said, “Tell me the truth.”
3
A Sultan’s Smile Can Change the Face of the World
But I wanted to hear the rest of Sara’s story. The one she was telling was as tumultuous as her father’s, no doubt about it. Several days after the events that shook up Nsimeyong and condemned Njoya to lie in bed in an unending coma, Nebu found the sultan’s apartments abuzz with activity. Ngutane came running out of the bedroom, her hair a mess, tears in her eyes. Her voice echoed through Mount Pleasant’s corridors and made everything in the main courtyard fall still. Njoya had opened his eyes! It wasn’t his daughter’s faithful reading sessions alone that had given him the will to live once more. Ngutane had brought his grandchildren to his bedside, asking each of them to sing happy songs and recite joyful verses.
That’s what had roused Njoya.
At the end of the last poem, something strange had happened: all of a sudden the sultan smiled. He felt heartbeats speeding up in his chest. The smile was still on his lips when Nebu came into his bedroom. Ngutane was outside crying, whether in disbelief or happiness. At first she had taken her father’s grimace for the start of a mad dash to the doors of eternal absence. Oh, had she stayed by his bedside, Ngutane would have seen the extraordinary signs of a man’s victory over fate. But perhaps she wanted to hide the shock of her unexpected joy from Njoya’s keen eye.
It had taken him so long to wake up that the idea of a miracle was hard to swallow. Still, Father Vogt didn’t miss the chance to appear at the bedside of the newly awakened sultan; he even found a way for his future flock—meaning all of Mount Pleasant—to know that the hand of his God had made it so.
“He smiled?” he asked the overexcited artisans.
“Yes, he smiled,” a chorus replied. “He smiled!”
“God,” Father Vogt said simply, “God is great.”
Father Vogt kept asking the same question and always got the same answer: “Yes.”
Only a few voices—exceptions in the crowd—ignored his enthusiasm.
“In faith,” the father insisted, “we are all God’s children.”
“Amin,” said the Muslims.
“Amen,” said the others.
When the prelate made the sign of the cross, no one followed suit. Even the energetic professional pagan hunter inside him could understand that the bedroom of someone brought back from the dead is not the place for a conversion. But he wasn’t a man to show restraint when a miracle just needed a little bit of help. Instead of looking for Bible verses that would back him up convincingly, he reprised his role as doctor. And what Father Vogt the medic did then will forever be engraved in Mount Pleasant’s memory. He took apart his bicycle and asked that someone bring him a chair. Even Nji Mama was startled.
“A chair?”
“Yes, I want to make a chair for the sultan,” he answered, rubbing his long beard and smiling.
“I don’t understand,” interrupted the chief architect. “You want a chair to make a chair?”
The artisans looked at one another in amusement, and with good reason. Ah, these white people!
“Yes,” the priest continued, carried away with his idea. “A special chair.”
He stressed special in his most convincing voice.
“A special chair,” old Monlipèr repeated, closing his eyes the better to see how special the chair would be. “Yes.”
“A throne, if you will,” Father Vogt added. “But I need a chair to build it.”
Monlipèr was in charge of all the tools and materials in the palace. The prelate’s surprising proposal was crossing a line, but since he had made his way into Mount Pleasant, Father Vogt basked in the prestige of his medical talents. No one refused him anything, even if it would have been unthinkable for anyone else. He wanted a chair? Here’s a chair! He wanted to make a throne? Well, let him do it! Mount Pleasant’s artists would judge his work on its merits; that’s really all the man was asking.
Father Vogt worked all afternoon. Under the compound’s watchful eyes, he attached the wheels of his bicycle to the chair they’d provided; then he stood up, stretched his legs, and looked around at the skeptics he knew he had won over. He sat down on the chair and made it roll, turning the wheels with his hands. When he stopped, his broad smile faded quickly under the glare of Ngutane’s eyes as she burst onto the scene.
“My father will walk,” Njoya’s daughter declared tersely.
Father Vogt quickly fell back on his double role as doctor and priest.
“Of course he will walk,” he said, standing up. “By the grace of God, he will walk.”
Ngutane didn’t listen to what he had to say. The bright colors of her robe were a symbol of her certainty; she disappeared into Njoya’s chambers. Father Vogt turned back to the gathered crowd.
“This chair will help him to walk again.”
What Father Vogt didn’t realize was that Ngutane was the least of his problems. In fact, the talents of the community assembled around him were insulted by his audacity; up till then, they had refrained from reacting, out of respect for the sultan. Just who did he think he was? Did he really think Njoya would sit on that thing, even if it did roll? Or that the artists, blacksmiths, and carpenters—whose hands had sculpted the sultan’s seats their whole life—would just accept this? These thousand questions silenced those who had gathered around the priest, but he, blinded by his faith, had no idea and just showed off his handiwork, taking their silence as an open invitation.
“It’s a rolling throne,” Father Vogt repeated.
The priest caught Nji Mama’s eye. The chief architect was calmly stroking his beard.
“A rolling throne, yes,” Monlipèr murmured, his face breaking into a smile. “Not bad. Not bad.”
4
Black in Berlin
Sara had interrupted her own story because she was afraid for her father, and rightfully so. She was caught up in Ngono’s tale. Being unemployed in 1913 Berlin was no small problem, especially if you were black. He really was a poet, the doyenne said, or else her father would have thought long and hard before quitting. Sara, however, would soon learn that Joseph Ngono just followed his impulses, unlike the chief, that master of careful calculations. When the Ewondo lecturer left the institute, he didn’t realize that he had become the centerpiece of one of the vice squad’s special dossiers, nor that his boss had made the call to put the police on his trail. This dossier, fifteen pages long, can still be consulted in the Staatsarchiv. It’s a monument of detective work, spiced up with satirical comments that say a lot about the sort of people Sara’s father was dealing with.
Once the doors of the institute had closed behind him, Ngono suddenly found the German capital inspiring. He meandered through it for one, then two hours, heading no place in particula
r, lost in his thoughts, his hands stuffed into his pockets. In the neighborhood known as Wedding, he went into a bar where German workers stopped for a drink. It was his first time in such a place, but he really needed a strong one. He sat at a table in the corner and waited for a waitress. Patting the pocket of his jacket, he realized that he had left his copy of Rilke behind (once again, the archives don’t tell us what book he was reading; whose fault is that?). The book had been left on his desk. He got up to go back and get it, but he stopped at the bar, where men were trading drinking stories.
“Darf ich bitte um Bier ersuchen?” he asked.
Yes, Ngono actually said, “Beg your pardon, might I request a beer?”
Surprised, the bartender looked him over from head to toe. Because of his clothes, perhaps? It must be said that Ngono was dressed like a Prussian civil servant of the day. The lecturer realized that all the faces at the bar were locked on him. As if they had just discovered a scandal.
“What did you say, comrade?” asked the heavyset man beside him as he put his hand on Ngono’s shoulder in a friendly gesture.
“Ersuchen?” added the man next to him, who was missing two teeth.
“Darf ich bitte um Bier ersuchen?” Ngono repeated, feeling less and less sure of his German.
Sara’s father thought the chuckling workers were trying to start a fight, but the laugh that shook the bar was a welcoming one. The labyrinths of ignorance hold many surprises. These dapper gents appreciated the flavor of his words, so different from their usual call for “n’Bier.”
How could they have imagined that the lecturer had memorized that phrase after reading Buddenbrooks, which he finished right before he started on Rilke. And how could Ngono have known that at the very same moment when he, in his bedroom on the Koloniestrasse, was flipping through Mann’s pages and enjoying the characters’ banter, in the green mountains of Foumban, a missionary named Göhring was reading the same pages to Sultan Njoya, translating as he went.
Mount Pleasant Page 10
