“Your son!” one of them shouted. Their eyes burned red with anger.
Terrified, Bertha stammered, “What?”
“Your son!”
The soldiers were in such a hurry that they provided no explanation. Two of them rushed into the house and came back out with Nebu, pushing him forward with their weapons. The young man’s eyes were haggard. He sank down in the dust. The soldiers dragged him by his hands, feet, and hair. He struggled but couldn’t stand up against four of them.
Bertha would have given her bones, her flesh, her soul, her life! She would have given everything, just not her son. The soldiers didn’t know that. They didn’t know what kind of mother she was; they had no inkling of the depth of her love. Yet it was love that threw her in front of their rifles, made her protect her son with her own body. It was love that made her run to Lieutenant Prestat, stand right in the path of his intimidating horse, and speak to him in a jargon she thought was French but was really a mixture of German, English, and French—in short, of all the European languages she had heard in Foumban, and which the officer took for Bamum. Sitting on his horse and stroking his four-day-old beard, he watched, silently distant, as the arrest took place. His uniform was dirty, his shirt gaped open, exposing his chest. His white hair was blowing in the breeze. His stony silence encouraged the violence of the soldiers, who pushed Bertha away, the better to chain up her son.
Isn’t colonialism a good thing? Prestat thought, chewing on a stick and spitting out the splinters. Tell me, isn’t it a good thing?
There you have it: the portrait of this man, old enough to be happy not to have died an unknown hero, decorated but dead, poisoned in the trenches of the Marne or Verdun. He had survived the worst of the butchery because he had opted for a career in the colonies, and now he had become the most important voice in this four-hundred-year-old sultanate. Yes, that’s him, Prestat, Lieutenant Prestat, an officer whose career had been stalled by a colonialist asshole who didn’t understand his brusque style of governing and had exiled him to the hinterland. A man given free rein to rule as a Lord of the Tropics! Yes, that’s him, almost ready to retire and still only a lieutenant, a man who felt the virtues of old Europe weighing on his balls while his heart beat with the fervor of a Napoleon in exile, and who marched across this conquered land to free the people so they could enjoy the pleasures of a constitution and a civil code!
Yet writing laws, even democratic ones, meant breaking with age-old customs. For the good of all, someone needed to grab hold of those traditions and tear them to shreds, since, after all, “you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs.” That was Prestat’s motto; he didn’t see his omelet-making mission in the same sneaky way Göhring had, for example. The missionary had been able to use his friendship to convince Njoya that many of the customs handed down from the ancestor Nchare Yen were inhumane, even cruel; the English had passed through the sultan’s city, apparently staying out of his business and even, in the end, giving him a car; Prestat, on the other hand, was convinced that the place needed a firm hand, a ruler inspired by a love of progress and democracy. It needed a Man of the Law capable of inspiring respect, or else any laws he’d proclaim wouldn’t be worth the paper they were written on.
Let’s take slavery, for example. Didn’t Lieutenant Prestat himself order that “as of today, December 15, 1920, no one will work anymore without pay in Bamum land”? Had the Bamum immediately complied? No. What about matrimony: Hadn’t he decreed that polygamy would henceforth be abolished in the sultanate? Hadn’t he announced—and his word made it law—that “to set an example, he would begin with Njoya’s six hundred eighty-one wives, who”—as he explained in his report—“would henceforth have the right to sleep with whomever they wanted if their husband didn’t call for them”? Had the sultan separated from his excessive number of wives? Ah, we can understand the lieutenant’s impatience, can’t we? After all, isn’t colonialism a good thing?
Claude Prestat, lieutenant of the French army, chief administrator in Foumban: sitting in his headquarters under mosquito netting, he could include “liberty, fraternity, equality” and anything else he wanted in his Bamum Declaration of Rights; he could have calligraphers copy it in bright letters and post it all over the city, including on the palace doors. With one swift move he could tear apart the Bamum Book of Laws, the Lewa Sun Sun pa Funfun manten ne Mfen Njweya ka let mi a yet mun nera, mbu a pu na! And of course, the same Prestat, betrayed by his girlfriend, now trampled the very same progressive laws he had just promulgated! He could come with his Congolese tirailleurs and arrest the son of a bitch who had screwed his girl, and that’s exactly what he was doing.
The woman in question was the slave Nebu had followed one day for purely aesthetic reasons. She had retraced the sculptor’s steps, going backward along the path where he had followed her, searching everywhere in Foumban for him. She had found his house and, rather than calling his name, had knocked three times on his window and waited. She had waited and knocked again. When Bertha’s son opened the window, he saw her face and remembered his madness from two years before; he remembered the spice market’s laughter and his master’s mocking smile. He shook his head in disbelief.
“What do you want?” he asked.
The woman didn’t reply, but smiled and lowered her eyes. Nebu didn’t push for an answer.
This time she was dressed.
Maybe she’s converted to Christianity, he thought, shaking his head once more.
Christianity was very popular among the slaves and women. If Foumban’s nobles and freemen were turning toward Islam, which gave them the right to take, or keep, multiple wives, Christianity was mostly a religion of slaves who couldn’t even afford to get married. There were exceptions, of course, first among them Mose Yeyap, that son from a good family whom Fräulein Wuhrmann and the missionary Göhring had convinced to join their church, to pray alongside slaves, and even to marry one …
But let’s get back to Nebu, for the young man was no longer used to seeing women let their pagnes fall in front of him. Time had tempered many of his impulses, if not all of them, and his talent had made him an enigma. So why didn’t he just slam his shutters in Njapdunke’s face? Was it because, like any man, he had nothing against a quick adventure? Who can say that he didn’t see complications lurking behind this brazen woman’s face, who? Yet the flesh is a curse, at least according to Bertha. Flesh can suddenly come back to life, especially in a young man who has spent too much time in his palace workshop calculating the proportions of women without being touched by a single one. No need for metaphysics here. It was simple: Nebu needed to get laid.
17
The Audacity of the Flesh
One year after Nebu had followed Njapdunke across the city, an act had been proclaimed that officially released Njapdunke from slavery; at the same time, however, she’d been led right into Lieutenant Prestat’s bed. There had been a lot of gossip about her move, but Bertha’s son was deaf to Foumban’s rumors, as well we know. Njapdunke had previously belonged to Njoya’s mother, whose name she bore. Her rise into the spheres of power explained her arrogance, and Nebu hadn’t forgotten that she had previously called him a rat. Her foul words reminded the sculptor of the vocabulary his mother used to describe his father, the language of his friends Ngbatu and Muluam. Why do lower-class people always cover themselves with muck? In Nebu’s mind, Njapdunke was dressed like a European because of Prestat, that was all. So he asked her, “Aren’t you the white lieutenant’s woman?”
Nebu saw her eyes flash defiantly.
“What of it?”
“That’s just what I’m asking you.”
He smelled a trap. Njapdunke knew it, and so she told him something sure to make him fall like a man whose head is controlled by his stiffening penis.
“He can’t get it up,” she said when Nebu asked why she had knocked on his window. “He can’t get it up.”
She assumed a look of abject humiliation, as only a neglected
woman can. Wasn’t that the worst part—that she had to come looking in the streets of Foumban for a man who could get it up? How embarrassing! It wasn’t bad enough that she had been born a slave, did she have to become a whore? After all, wasn’t she a woman, too? And a Bamum woman at that? And Nebu, wasn’t he a Bamum man? Njapdunke admitted that the lieutenant gave her things, lots of things, and bought her the most extravagant dresses.
“Like the one I’m wearing,” she said.
She opened her hands, spun around with her arms spread so Nebu could see the brightly colored, ostentatious dress she was wearing.
“It’s from France,” she added. “From Paris.”
Bertha’s son didn’t react.
“Do you know what the French call it?” she asked.
Nebu didn’t.
“They call it haute couture.”
Saying the French words “haute couture,” she smiled. Then a shadow fell over her eyes. She didn’t lack for things, she explained, her voice cracking, but for action.
“What can I do with these useless outfits?”
She didn’t need clothes, but a man, she continued, stressing “a man.” You should have seen how she stared at Nebu when she said that. With those words she seemed to break down the window that framed the sculptor’s face, freeing a man hidden behind it. And that wasn’t all; with a strange smile, she added that she needed “a djo as crazy as you.” She recalled out loud how Nebu had followed her across the streets of Foumban “that day.” She recalled how he had looked at each part of her body, capturing details she knew were inscribed in his dreams.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
Nebu’s voice was gone.
“Don’t tell me you’ve changed,” Njapdunke went on.
She felt that, in the young man’s mind, her clothes were as transparent as her body had been on that day.
“Do you think I’ve forgotten?” she asked.
Of course she had realized that day that his behavior was a sign of his love. Putting her hands on her hips, she asked him again, “Do you think I don’t know?”
Yes, she had heard about the statue Nebu was creating in the palace. Who in the city hadn’t heard of it? But she knew, yes Njapdunke did, that the statue had the shape of her body. She had come to the artist’s home, she continued, still smiling—and she emphasized “artist”—in answer to a call that his timidity prevented him from making and that had burst out silently in his art.
“You love me, don’t you?” she suddenly asked.
“What?”
The conjugation of the verb “to love” woke Nebu like a bucket of cold water on the face of a sleepwalker.
“You love me,” Njapdunke continued confidently. “I know.”
“You?”
“But you don’t want people to know, right?”
“What?”
“Tell me the truth.”
“The truth?”
She had knocked at his window, she said, because Foumban would have been scandalized had she been seen at his door. Prestat wasn’t a violent man; he was violence personified. In short, he was the Man. Everyone knew that. But they wondered if it was the result of demented tropical dreams—nightmares filled with venomous snakes, dangerous crocodiles, nosy rats, cockroaches, and mosquitoes—or if, perhaps, it was drinking too much alcohol in the sun and avoiding the shade that produced such colonial characters. No one knew for sure. Some believed that it was the lack of sex. Only a good fuck can calm an irascible man, they said.
To avoid any misunderstanding, let me quickly add that these aren’t the reasons why Njoya had given the girl to the lieutenant when he arrived in Foumban; it was because custom required it—ah, our famous customs! And the girl in question, Njapdunke, learned only after she’d gone into Lieutenant Prestat’s bed that the reason for the Man of the Law’s infamous anger was, in fact, his impotence.
“And the truth is, Nebu, you can get it up.”
It was her way of skirting an embarrassing situation and making sure the sculptor understood what she meant.
Nebu was listening. He didn’t need Njapdunke to praise her own beauty, he could see it. And even if he had forgotten, his hands would have shown him the way around her womanly body, for, oh yes, they still knew the dimensions of her skin! Knowing that this perfect body—the body he had taken apart and put back together repeatedly in his dreams—was going to waste made him angry. He wanted to pull this woman off the street and peel those degrading clothes right off her. How many times after this did she come knock on the artist’s window? Over how long?
One month? Or two?
One thing is certain, even if Nebu didn’t give a fuck (no joke), the sculptor wouldn’t be the first artist in history to sleep with his model. So why was there such a fuss? His story had a flavor no one could make the women at the spice market give up; they immediately recognized the man who’d disguised himself as a woman. The story was imbued with the scent of those tales the idle nobles ate up, and they knew Njapdunke, too. This rumor had the hot pepper bouquet of delicious gossip, the succulence of braised fish in tomato sauce. Soon the whole city knew the story of the woman who knocked on the sculptor’s window, and they recognized the young man whispering from behind the shutters. People smiled. No one allowed themselves to tell the betrayed man the dirty story of his knocking girlfriend, oh no! Many women opted instead to come to the boy’s mother, urging her to remind him to be prudent. And that’s how Bertha learned of her son’s secret exploits. Trembling, she lectured him, talked to him about love. Ah, she said, the Bamum talk a lot! Was he trying to bring about his own death? This time—though it’s hard to believe—Nebu obeyed her.
Never was a mother happier! If only such a story could be forgotten. Njapdunke’s belly soon got the silent mouths talking again, giving new life to the winded tales. Her belly began to chatter in those places where all the people had fallen silent. And in the heart of the uncharacteristically quiet spice market it revealed the story that every woman had decided to keep from Lieutenant Prestat. Njapdunke’s belly grew. It grew and grew, defying Nebu’s mathematics. It grew so much that the women of the city had to hide the future mother. In one of their kitchens, Njapdunke gave birth to a little boy as dark as a shadow, with the sculptor’s face—a baby whose first sign of life was a satisfied chuckle.
A man’s humiliation can have the dimensions of a suffocatingly small kitchen. It can be as broad as a courtyard. Lieutenant Prestat’s humiliation was the size of a sultanate, more gigantic than an iroko, a teak tree, in a clearing. It was amplified by the centuries-old baobab in the center of Foumban, which matched the height of his colonial ego. His humiliation was mythic: it had silenced a market full of women but made a newborn burst out in laughter. The child’s laughter echoed through all the alleys, streets, and passages, all the houses and bedrooms of Foumban; it came through the history of the old city and woke up the chief omelet maker from his worst nightmare, the face of an infant howling with laughter. It filled him with a burning desire to “kill the son of a bitch who did this to me.”
Or rather, no: “To kill the bitch who made a fool of me.”
After a little more thought, no, better to commit suicide, those vile creatures don’t deserve a bullet.
Kill the child?
Kill the son and the mother and silence the nursing baby’s guffaws? For silence was the only thing that could bring peace back to the horrified streets, to the horrified world. The women of Foumban were not unaware of Prestat’s anger. Terrified by the universe’s uncontrollable laughter, they sent the mother and child to a distant exile. Njapdunke left behind her a bit of doubt and mostly a question: Where had she gone? She also left behind an imprudent accusation of rape that she thought would clear her name entirely, but which sent the Man’s soldiers flying to Nebu’s mother’s door, encouraged in their quest for vengeance by a silent and devious informant, Mose Yeyap, who recalled quite clearly the lover’s long braids. That’s how Lieutenant Prestat arrived in Bertha�
�s courtyard, his body consumed by an unbroken anger, his tin soldiers marching ahead of him.
18
The Newborn’s Mirth, and So On
Even if the firsthand accounts of this period are lacking in women’s voices, what version of events could be closer to the truth than the scar left on Bertha’s neck? The report written by Commander Martin, Prestat’s superior, then based in Dschang, uses a euphemism to describe the lieutenant’s actions. It invokes an “error of judgment.” A recounting of the events as they happened are found only in Njoya’s memoirs, the Saa’ngam, although it was Martin himself who translated Njoya’s book into French. “Two pages were cut out,” he mentions in a note, “undoubtedly because they mentioned living persons still occupying important functions in the country.” He wrote this in 1949, the height of the French colonial reign in Foumban, leaving us thirsting to know who, yes, who culled those pages, so important for our story, from Njoya’s book—and especially, what that person was trying to hide.
Here’s what we know: the previously mentioned report tries to massage the truth underlying the shame, for it takes Lieutenant Prestat’s version of things, exaggerates parts, and then lays out an elaborate theory of colonialism. According to Prestat, the girl—who had been given to him by Njoya upon his arrival in Foumban and whose accomplice he had arrested—was the sultan’s secret agent. She had tried to poison him with a dried fish head, having obtained the poison from a palace artist known as Nebu—the sultan’s evil hand—whose braided hair marked him, “according to local custom, as a master herbalist.” As soon as Prestat had eaten the poisoned meal served to him by Njapdunke, he had felt his lips burn. He opened his mouth, stuck out his tongue, and his eyes turned red. His breathing grew strained and his heart raced. He was only able to prevent his entire body from exploding because he had the presence of mind to drink a whole barrel full of water.
“Have you ever eaten Bamum cooking?” my friends from Nsimeyong asked; they recognized the description of the aftereffects of a hot, spicy meal.
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