Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  How right they were!

  But Lieutenant Prestat didn’t buy it; poison was the only possible explanation. How so? The report continues, quoting many slaves who, when questioned, confirmed that the poisoning cook was following the sultan’s orders. Martin didn’t note that the aforementioned slaves were brought in by Mose Yeyap, a man motivated by his own ambitions. It’s true, the woman Prestat accused had been the slave of the “despot’s” mother—as he put it—and she was named after her. Poor Prestat, what a mistake it had been to hire her to work in his house, yes, what an “error of judgment” to have taken in that woman, clearly already “in the employ” of the sultan!

  Njoya wanted to kill Prestat, the report went on, because Prestat had been moved by the condition of the lower classes and intended to do something to bring “democracy to the sultanate.” He had opened his ears to the little people, his heart to the Wretched of the Earth, and he had worked to bring about the “emancipation of all the slaves and women in Bamum land.” “Isn’t colonialism a good thing?” the lieutenant asked. “Doesn’t it represent the opportunity for those who are now last to become first tomorrow?”

  Of course, once Nebu was arrested, Prestat had him tied to the baobab, but that wasn’t forbidden, and he had done it only in order to extract a confession from him, just as he hoped to extract the truth from the city that kept his secret—so these stubborn people would tell him where he could find the poisoner and, eventually, the name of the man behind it all: Njoya. “Progress and democracy can’t be stopped by one man alone,” he insisted.

  Nebu came through the ordeal with his teeth clenched. No, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t cry either. Or call for help. Why would he have called on Njoya? “The native is a child. He understands only one language,” that’s how Martin’s report concludes. In the darkness of Africa, Lieutenant Prestat did not want to force a young man to cry, but rather to demonstrate France’s infinite justice to all, so that no one would ever forget, but always remember.

  “Nothing personal,” reads a note added in pen at the bottom of the page.

  Who wrote that? Prestat? Martin? How to know? It remains that Lieutenant Prestat was not punished, for “France must not lose face,” as Martin concluded. Prestat left Foumban two years later, having reached retirement age, for “while his intentions were rather good, his heart was too sensitive to the fate of society’s most vulnerable classes.”

  When the soldiers arrived with their prisoner in the center of town, all of Foumban gathered around them. Old folks, women, men, children, animals: everyone was there. Not just Bertha; all the women from the spice market were up in arms, all the mothers horrified. Oh, everyone was terrified! The tirailleurs used their rifles to shove away the hands of the distraught city as they feverishly tied the sculptor to the trunk of the baobab. What Lieutenant Prestat ordered them to do, they did, without delay.

  “One!”

  “Two!”

  “Three!”

  “Four!”

  “Five!”

  The whip rained down on Nebu’s back.

  “Six!”

  “Seven!”

  “Eight!”

  Who was counting? The spice market. Who was counting? The granaries. Who was counting? The houses. The kitchens. The hundreds of people gathered in the courtyard of their collective humiliation. The hearts of the Bamum who had taken the boy’s story as their own. The bellies of all the women who had thought they could keep him hidden. The baobab whose sap had become the young man’s blood. Who was counting? The hair that had grown on the sculptor’s head for seven years, grown and grown, now braided itself around the tree of misery; his hair reached up and grabbed hold of the tree’s branches, hugging the sky, the better to stifle his torment. It is said that Nebu received as many lashes as there are branches on a tree, but who was counting?

  “Nine!”

  “Ten!”

  Yes, who was counting? The flesh of a man, of a son, but especially that of a mother, of all mothers; each mother felt the hippopotamus-tail whip through her belly, cruelly sealing her fallopian tubes. Who was counting? Those men, yes, who felt their blood and their sperm run dry. The weakened loins of everyone there, especially Bertha, who threw herself on her son and was lashed, once, twice, three times on the neck. Who took the blows of a whip so violent it bit into her flesh and tore at her bones before letting go. Who was counting? The old master, Monlipèr, his horror-struck eyes open wide because he had never before seen such a thing, who threw himself in front of the soldiers, covering mother and son with his own body, offering his face to the men with the whips, letting loose with a slew of proverbs and begging them to stop, only to receive his full portion of lashes, too. Who was counting? The whole country was begging the soldiers with the whips, asking them to stop, to stop before it was too late, to stop in the name of God! In the name of the black race!

  “This is my son,” Bertha said. “Don’t kill him!”

  His body was covered in blood.

  “My son,” said Monlipèr.

  The soldiers were deaf to their tears. The silent approbation of their lieutenant, or at least the nickering of his horse behind them, dictated their actions and encouraged their busy hands to keep going. They knew Lieutenant Prestat would sentence each of them to make up for any lashes they failed to administer. Those soldiers knew that in this country, where they, too, were foreigners, they could count their blessings that they were among those inflicting the pain. That’s what you call being on the right side. When Monlipèr threw himself down before their happy hands and grabbed hold of the whip they were using to lacerate Nebu’s back, they let him have the final blows meant for Nebu.

  “Who do you think you are, old man?”

  That’s what one of the soldiers said.

  “Who?”

  “Vermin!”

  “Monkey!”

  The fourth soldier finished the master artist off. “You are nothing!”

  “Yes,” repeated his fellow tirailleur, “you’re just a burro!”

  The word “burro” would have applied to the tirailleur if he weren’t wearing a uniform and if he didn’t have a whip in his hands. Whipping an old man had left him quaking in his bones, but he knew that all the laws around there were worth nothing compared with his tricolored uniform. He had stopped believing in proverbs the day the French colonial administration had given him a rifle. Was it Monlipèr who saved Nebu from death? Or were the vengeful soldiers just tired of making him suffer? What is clear is that different versions of the story were told. The old engineer paid dearly for his courage; when the list of people to deport from the sultanate was set by Lieutenant Prestat’s successor, four years after this incident, in 1924, his name was right there.

  “Don’t you have a mother?”

  Monlipèr’s question echoed off the pain that had torn open Bertha’s neck.

  “What kind of people are you?”

  His words made Prestat’s blood boil, for the lieutenant knew what danger he faced, alone in such a big city, practically a prisoner in the heart of a sultanate, where he understood neither the verbal gestures nor the body language. The old man’s questions were echoed in the mood of the gathered crowd, which had fallen silent but struggled to restrain itself.

  “What kind of men are you?”

  Isn’t it surprising that it was Nbgatu and Muluam, the two friends Nebu had met in the old man’s workshop, who ran to help their master to free the miserable sculptor from the baobab? No one else had the courage to undo what a colonial officer had done. But they couldn’t just leave an unconscious, beaten man to die in the middle of town. What was it that held back the usually quick hands of the Bamum? There were those who remembered that years before the French arrived, even before the English, during the German colonization, the boy’s father had hanged himself from the baobab where Nebu now suffered. They talked about fate closing a vicious circle. Thankfully, Nebu’s companions had shorter memories. The present, the chaos of the present al
one, dictated the logic of their actions.

  “He’s our djo,” they said, meaning, our brother.

  Bertha cried out to the heavens; Monlipèr held her son’s body. The old master spit blood, cursed the earth. Njoya arrived too late. He had been alerted by a strident rumor echoing across the city and was informed of what happened by his couriers. He had rushed to the site of the crime accompanied by his scandalized entourage, including Nji Mama and Ibrahim. The whole palace had followed, in fact. When he arrived at the foot of the baobab, Prestat and his men had already left. The monarch’s horrified face met the wounded eyes of the woman holding her son, unconscious and bloodied, in her arms, cuddling him like a baby. Njoya’s ears were filled with the people’s grumbling, which grew into shouts that were useless in the face of disaster. This wouldn’t be the last time the sultan would come out on the streets of his city without everyone bowing down respectfully, without praise singers lifting up their many voices, without the sky brightening in hopes that his reign would last for a century. The drama that played out that day in Foumban had transformed him into just another inhabitant in his sultanate. Everyone knew that he, Njoya, was the French lieutenant’s real target.

  NJOYA AND MOSE

  For one may rise, and fall the other may.

  —Dante, The Divine Comedy, Paradise, Canto XIII (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

  1

  In History’s Chattering Poor Neighborhoods

  While Sara went on with her story about the whipping, I noticed for the first time that her face was beginning to show her age. Her eyes were wan. Her hands and feet trembled. Her voice grew difficult to hear, a whisper. It was as if her throat had been eaten up by the story, by her own story. Or maybe, having spoken for so long without interruption, she was just losing her voice. But it was also because she felt each of Nebu’s lashes on her own body. Yes, it was as if the whips of the Congolese tirailleurs tore into her legs, flowed through her veins, and brought her heart to a stop with a strangled cry; as if her own forgotten past had come back to life, horrific blows tearing into her flesh. Reliving the life of that boy she had agreed to become when she was offered Bertha’s swollen breasts to suckle, she had unleashed the hell of the matron’s life in Foumban.

  There was a cost for opening herself up to the artist’s fate. Nebu’s lacerated body had left Sara without a voice—suffocating from his torment. She finally understood the pain of a mother’s bleeding heart. Had she been a mother herself, she also would have wished to give birth once more, just to alter his fate, to invent another, better life for him, because life in a colony is cursed, as we all know. Yet Sara followed another path. She accepted Nebu so that the mother would come back to life and smile at her once again.

  “She never hit me,” Sara said, her lips still trembling with emotion under the weight of her silent cry, her eyes red with pain. “She never hit me. Never.”

  “Now I know why,” I answered. “How long were you her son?”

  Her reply was slow to come.

  “For as long as she shaved my head.”

  I took her hands. Her palm was covered in sweat. She shivered again.

  “Do you want to do my hair?” I asked.

  My question didn’t surprise her, even if she opened her eyes wide, as if I were joking. Far from it. It seemed to me that any distraction would be welcome, would help her to find her way back to life after that painful tale.

  “Careful,” she added. “I’m not a hairdresser.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m just an old-fashioned woman,” she warned me, smiling now. “Just an old woman.”

  “I’ve straightened my hair, dyed it, cut it short, had bangs and everything else you can buy. Today I can tell you that I’ve become a fan of old-fashioned hair.”

  Sara burst out laughing and wiped her nose with a corner of her kaba.

  “But,” she added, “how would I know that?”

  I sat between her legs, putting my head into her hands. I felt her warm hands smoothing each part of my hair. She hadn’t asked me how I wanted the braids. If truth be told, I hadn’t just given her my head to do; I also wanted her to reshape my soul.

  “I’d prefer braids,” I suggested anyway.

  “At your service, Madame,” she replied in French.

  “Why not the style of 1932?” I suggested jokingly.

  “Okay,” she replied seriously. “Style 1932.”

  “Easy to remember?”

  “Let’s wait and see.”

  While Sara had been talking, the crowd around us had grown bigger and bigger. My friends from Nsimeyong who dreamed only of New York and whose days dragged under the weight of boredom seemed interested by the hidden history of their neighborhood, by the life of this girl dressed as a boy, the girl hidden in the old lady, and the boy taken in hand by the women of a spice market. They made numerous trips to the National Archives for me, photocopying the texts I needed to figure out Sara’s story. Their diligence left me speechless time and time again. Even the birds from the Internet café broke off their searches on husband.com and joined in our hunt for stories; Google became their favorite site. Often they came back angry, telling me that an essential manuscript written in Lewa characters, a register of capital crimes, an important circular, or an indispensable report had been abandoned in a dusty file, half eaten by rats, or drowned in the waters of idiocy. What my dear friends really couldn’t understand was why the ruins of Mount Pleasant, which they now gazed upon hungrily, had been left to rot. By uncovering layer after layer of the House of Stories buried under Nsimeyong, Sara had turned their limping lives into limitless fountains of potential. Their future had been stolen, and they learned that their past had been as well. They didn’t hold back their blame. “Can’t the state do anything right?”

  It was Arouna who asked that question. He had naturally become the leader of the group, always the most passionate, the most energetic, far smarter than his swagger of a wannabe gangster from the Bronx would suggest. I told him that the Cameroonian state, although built on a foundation of negligence, incompetence, and much more (corruption, nepotism, dictatorship, and everything else that a banana republic can come up with to sink its future), was the offspring of the historic betrayal that produced Njoya’s violent nightmare: the betrayal of the association of chiefs that the sultan had refused to join in 1914, which he had exposed to his friend the missionary Göhring, thereby causing the death of Manga Bell, Samba Martin, and Ngosso Din.

  I suggested to Arouna that the aborted nationalist roots of the Cameroonian state might be what were haunting the sultan, provoking the nightmares that were the true source of his suffering.

  “He had a different vision of our country.”

  “What vision?” Arouna asked.

  Perhaps, I explained, Njoya wanted the sultanate to become a state within the state, because the very strange history of the Bamum had always run counter to what we would today call “the Cameroonian national identity.”

  “So Njoya really was just a collaborator?” asked a provocative voice.

  “Collaborator” raced through the electrified crowd like a red-hot bullet.

  Arouna seemed to be waiting for it. “Isn’t resistance another form of collaboration?” he asked everyone.

  “You’re joking!”

  “If you resist, you’ve already accepted the premises of a battle,” he continued. “It’s not the same as ignoring it, right?”

  “Go on.”

  “Which means, you get swallowed up…”

  “By what?”

  “By a battle that’s not your own.”

  “And then?”

  “You get pulled into a war you didn’t start.”

  “What do you think?”

  “No one can win that kind of war, my brother, that’s what I think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The winner is the one who sets the rules,” Arouna concluded. “The others are just collaborators.”

&n
bsp; He seemed to have grasped the logic behind Njoya’s chaotic life; for him, the sultan was, you might say, a precursor, a Cameroonian before the letter. He met the irritated faces of his buddies, none of whom could muster arguments strong enough to shut him up. I felt a silent nationalism boiling up all around, the heartbeats of an elemental force. I didn’t come to Arouna’s defense. How could I? He didn’t let anyone else speak anyhow. Yet, I wanted to ask him, wasn’t Mount Pleasant—in a way—the realization of a new consciousness, since the voices heard there came from all corners of the earth to create the sultan’s memoirs? Maybe it was Njoya’s fate to be uprooted from Bamum land so he could give birth to a different country, a different Cameroon there in the capital of the country that had banished him. I told my dear friends from Nsimeyong that their buddy’s argument held water. Njoya never would have wanted to be consumed by greater forces—not race, nation, continent, or the First World War. Arouna and I were bombarded with a thousand questions.

  “What are you talking about?” one voice called out. “Wasn’t Njoya Cameroonian too?”

  “An African?”

  “A black man…”

  “Yes or no? If yes, then he had to…”

  “Then he couldn’t…”

  “Then how did he dare…”

  I was smothered by all these obligations that define an authentic black woman, a true African man, a good Cameroonian. I would have liked to ask my friends: okay, what if Njoya didn’t want to be covered in any of that shit? But I also didn’t want to offend them. They lived in a world of superficial evidence, when to my mind, the sultan was all about listening, doubting, searching.

  “The books tell me that he was Bamum,” I answered. “That’s all.”

  Njoya knew that, I added, from the genealogy transmitted to him by the many voices of his people; he wrote down those tales and compiled them in his book, the Saa’ngam, so that everyone would know and none would forget. “Your country, not mine,” he might have said to my self-styled nationalists.