Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  In Mount Pleasant, in any event, Father Vogt was the perfect target for all the master artists who detested him. When Nji Mama realized that he’d never convince Ibrahim either, he turned back to Ngutane, but he had to admit once again that she really enjoyed pushing her father along the corridors of Mount Pleasant in Father Vogt’s chair. In short, he remembered our Nji Mongu’s delightful discovery of European fashion—and of Ibrahim.

  “Now you are both talking like them,” Nji Mama said one day to Ibrahim and Ngutane, and like them, he was serious.

  It was the nocturnal whispering of those two that gave him the pretext he needed to express his disapproval publicly. No story is ever kept quiet for long in Mount Pleasant. Soon some storyteller would make it his own, seasoning it with the salt and pepper of his imagination. That’s how Nji Mama got wind of the love between his brother and Njoya’s daughter.

  “Do you want to kill him?” he asked the lovers.

  Nji Mama now held the stronger hand. He could go on the offensive; his arguments would carry the day. He knew that hearing about his daughter’s dalliances would be the end of the sultan.

  “After all you’ve done,” he asked Ngutane, “do you want your father to have a heart attack?”

  There was no room in the master architect’s heart to understand a diva’s loneliness. He had no patience at all for her search for happiness. For him, a woman was a child, and Ngutane needed to have a more dignified childhood, for she was Nji Mongu! If her version of this affair went unheard, it’s because Nji Mama squelched it. Ibrahim calmed his elder brother’s anger and kept the maniacal flames of his anger from reaching the walls of Mount Pleasant. But from the corner where he was contained by his guilt, the calligrapher couldn’t argue his case too strongly. So Njoya’s daughter suffered alone for a shared guilty passion.

  Ibrahim warned Nji Mama. “You’ll destroy everything if you talk to the sultan. Is it really necessary?”

  If Ngutane had, in any event, long thought about returning to Bamum land, the unexpected revelation of her love affair gave her the push she needed. Ibrahim liberated her from the vicious circle in which Njoya’s decline had trapped her. Only Ibrahim had wings broad enough to reach the heights where she had hidden her wounded heart, you could say. One push from him, and she fell like a bird. To think that Nji Mama failed to see that with her departure, the story of life in Mount Pleasant was coming to a close!

  4

  All Roads Lead to Foumban

  When Ngutane arrived in Foumban, she found a task so urgent she forgot her troubles at once—and how. When Ibrahim explained the situation to her, he had downplayed the volcano boiling there, not wanting to upset the ailing sultan. First some background: when he was in Foumban, Njoya had encouraged the slaves to enroll in the German school, which was now French. In other words, he had sent them away from his own school, which was of course quite popular but couldn’t accommodate everyone at once. Everyone wanted to learn to read the pictograms he had invented, but Njoya, a systematic man, had opted to educate the nobles first. He chose to start from the top, his dream being that once instructed, the ruling class would spread the knowledge that he wanted accessible to all: freemen, slaves, and the numerous captives in the sultanate.

  The Germans hadn’t upset his plans, but after the French banned the sultan’s school, the nobles suddenly found themselves in a paradoxical situation. The curriculum they’d followed in Njoya’s school had been invalidated; the knowledge they’d accumulated over years spent studying mathematics, drawing, law, medicine, agriculture, and other fields was now useless. In just one night, the cream of the crop of Foumban’s best schools had been transformed into a band of illiterates. They ran to the French school and found the first rows occupied by slaves or captives. This created extraordinary situations. The oldest students in the elementary classes were all from noble families. On top of that, these students were punished when they skipped school: French school was universal and obligatory!

  A truly shameful situation that soon became outright pitiful, for the noble students received awful grades, of course, even when they made an effort. Those young men who had sometimes worked for years as scribes, copying manuscripts for the sultan, who had mastered Njoya’s various alphabets—the Akauku, the Nyi Nyi, the Mbima, and sometimes even the Lewa alphabet that the sultan had invented—earned the worst grades in French composition because they were forced to write in the Latin alphabet they’d just learned. It didn’t help any that the sons of slaves burst out laughing when one of those nobles sitting in the back of the class didn’t understand a thing about the simple arithmetic taught in French. And it was even worse when, in the dictation exercise of one of these newly illiterate students, there were twice as many mistakes as there were words. When a small child, the son of a Bamiléké captive to boot, laughed right in the face of a member of the Mbansi secret society because he couldn’t conjugate the French verb “to be” in the past tense, the long-repressed anger of a class used to giving orders exploded. A resounding slap on the disrespectful boy’s left cheek, however, awoke the anger of the boy’s mother, who, thanks to Madame Dugast’s lessons, had smelled the sweet scent of emancipation. The years of French education were bearing unexpected fruits among the Bamum.

  That’s how things stood when Ngutane returned to Foumban. She joined forces with Madame Dugast, and together the two women visited each of the villages in the sultanate, informing the nobles of the need to listen to them if they didn’t want to lose the coming battles. Yes, they needed to convince those wounded men that this wasn’t a repeat of the story of Lieutenant Prestat fifteen years later! How could they forget about Prestat?

  “The battle lines have shifted,” Nji Mongu told them.

  But they weren’t convinced until she added, “This is our war.”

  Madame Dugast advised them not to keep their daughters at home when they sent their boys to school—“if you don’t want them to become slaves tomorrow.”

  Ngutane realized, however, that Nji Mama’s anti-French convictions had deep roots already and that none of her speeches—or the spectacle of her friendship with the woman she happily called “Idelette”—could change that. She also learned that the rumor of her father’s assassination by the French in Yaoundé had spread like a weed, sowing the seeds of anger everywhere.

  “The French are killing him in Yaoundé, aren’t they?” some asked her. “Thankfully, Madame Dugast isn’t like them.”

  Ngutane would have asked them what Madame Dugast was like, but they didn’t even let the sultan’s daughter tell them about Mount Pleasant. Their daily gossip had already crafted Nsimeyong’s true story, and Nji Mongu’s mouth could only confirm what they already thought they knew.

  “First they made him sick, right?”

  “They made him lose control of his hands.”

  “Unable to speak.”

  “What about his legs?”

  “Crippled him.”

  “Then they gave him a chair on wheels.”

  “So he’ll never walk again.”

  “Just sit there like a dead man.”

  “More dead than alive.”

  “So he’ll die.”

  Everyone in Foumban was consumed by this belief, and even today it still burns strong. This fiction made the fresh news that Ngutane brought from Yaoundé seem like nothing but lies.

  “But he’ll outlive them!”

  “Yes, he will!”

  The nobles held their breath, fuming mad. Things were no different in Foumban, they said. They had seen how the French administration was doing everything—everything—to destroy the dynasty that had ruled in Foumban for four hundred years. They had seen—no lie—the French build up their power to challenge the authority the nobles had always held in the palace. They had seen the French create new positions of authority and give them to slaves, who had no shortage of arguments against the reigning elite. Now the elite were no more than judges whose opinions no longer mattered, whose authority to r
egister births, marriages, and deaths had been revoked. They were Tangu, who had seen all the other members of their secret society exiled; teachers of Akauku writing who had been chased from the palace, where the library was found, and were now considered illiterate; the police of a palace devoid of life and, worse, forbidden to bear arms. They were praise singers in a time when nothing deserved to be praised, genealogists of a family whose power had been suspended. All these nobles, whose endless rants filled Ngutane’s days and nights, were wounded, yes, wounded. They looked to the sky and saw nothing but birds of prey and no one there to protect them. The sultan was gone.

  “They want to kill him, tell us the truth!”

  So the nobles sat in the courtyard of the half-built Palace of All Dreams, and nothing happened in the city to challenge their pessimistic views. They had seen how the most important decisions had been wrested from their hands, from the hands of the founding families; they had seen their slaves become masters over the Bamum. Because they didn’t want to obey orders from their own captives, they gathered in the palace courtyard and killed time with gossip, raffia wine, and games of ngeka. What else could they do? Even the sultan’s ears had been locked to keep out their advice. And that wasn’t all, one of the men insisted, his eyes aflame.

  “From now on, they want the sultan to be elected!”

  The nobles around him exploded. “Elected!”

  It was a rumor spread by the men who were working with the French, which the slaves had applauded, of course. It was only a rumor, to be sure, but the French often circulated their decisions that way, to see how the people would react before signing decrees and sending the police to arrest those who failed to comply.

  Mose Yeyap was the one who usually circulated the French rumors. During the sultan’s exile he had set himself up as the spokesman of the oppressed. He had managed to isolate the sultan’s representative, Fompouyom, by mounting sordid plots that made him unpopular. A man of many masks, who switched easily from a Fulani gandoura to a European three-piece suit with a top hat and spectacles, Mose Yeyap had positioned himself in the center of all the most important decisions in the sultanate and no longer hesitated to go by the European version of his first name, Moses. No one could explain the reasons behind his arrogance, even if in the Evangelical Church of Foumban—a legacy of the German missionaries, where he, as one of the first to convert, was the most influential member—he continued giving sermons on the innovations brought to Israel by Moses’s revolutionary laws. Holding the position formerly held by Pastor Göhring, whom the French weren’t in a hurry to replace, he often preached about the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt’s hell, pontificating on the liberation of the slaves from Pharaoh’s chains.

  His regicidal enterprise was helped along by the many episodes and books of the Old Testament that the sultan’s scribes and copyists had translated; he could enrich his incendiary sermons with verses written by Njoya’s own men in a language everyone understood. If in the church Mose used his faith to convince the slaves that he was their Man, outside, his position as translator helped tip the balance of power in his favor. His noble birth and his family name destined him to be one of the sultan’s councillors, and of course he’d never forget that. Nji Moluh, Njoya’s heir, had of course attended German and French schools, but he had refused to bow down and had gone into exile with his father. To top it off, he was Muslim. As a result of all of this, Foumban was open game, especially for the pretender!

  Ngutane peppered Mose Yeyap with questions.

  “Elected? Have the French lost their heads entirely?”

  Mose kept an even tone as he answered. “They elect their president, too, you know.”

  The calm look on his face annoyed Njoya’s daughter.

  “We aren’t French.”

  “So what?”

  Oh, Ngutane, had she gone to one of the French schools that had popped up in Bamum land (not the one where her friend Madame Dugast taught, it goes without saying), and had she read what the children studied, she would have known that the sultanate now had a new genealogy that wasn’t rooted in Nchare Yen’s bravery, nor in the waters of Rifum; she would have known that the children learned that their ancestors were “the Gauls,” whose strange mustaches were shown in the pages of their reader, Mamadou et Bineta! And she would have known that there was no role for her father in the future written in the books from which the children memorized and recited passages so happily.

  “A sultan is not a president,” she told Mose Yeyap.

  “Things change.”

  “Do the English elect their king as well?”

  Ngutane had understood that the battle for Foumban would be difficult. But she hadn’t anticipated such perfidy. She had heard about elections in Nigeria, where, they said, it had been suggested that the Yoruba elect their king, their alake.

  “The French aren’t the English,” Mose replied.

  “Ah, so explain it to me.”

  “The march of democracy cannot be halted.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “We aren’t in Nigeria—”

  “Believe me,” Ngutane interrupted at last, “even France is just one province in the world.”

  But did Mose Yeyap even want to listen? With his calculating mind, he already saw himself running in an election against the leader of the sultan’s family—once the sultan had died, if not sooner. He dreamed of such an election. He certainly couldn’t force the Bamum sultan to abdicate, but it no longer seemed impossible. Circumstances had forced the German kaiser, whose photo and W-shaped mustache had previously adorned Njoya’s walls, to abdicate in 1918. The end of their monarchy had shaken the Germans, who, as Mose knew, hadn’t seen it coming either. For him, the pathways of change were strange. Sometimes democracy was ushered in by machine guns, cannons, and grenades. Yes, sometimes it arrived at the end of a military occupation. Still, an election, and nothing but an election, would justify its bloody means. If the future could conjure monsters, he told himself, it could also open the doors to paradise.

  “A paradise of gangsters,” Ngutane protested once more.

  But Mose Yeyap didn’t listen to her. He was convinced that she had a “prewar mentality,” meaning before the First World War. She hadn’t yet understood that to win an election in occupied Foumban, what mattered wasn’t your position on a genealogical chessboard or the way the ground stuck to your feet, but the number of votes in the ballot box and, of course, the support of the French colonial administration. To become a leader in post-1916 Bamum land, what mattered most was being friends with the French. That requirement excluded Njoya and his legitimate heirs. Mose Yeyap had popular support, thanks to his position in the Christian church and his defense of the slaves, a support that, he knew, would put him in power in any democracy. He didn’t need to listen to the sultan’s daughter. In fact, history was moving against her. If an election were organized, with democratic-style campaigns, the slave vote—which he had wrapped up—would far outnumber the Mbansi nobles and the freemen. In short, Mose Yeyap already saw himself the newly elected sultan.

  “The world is changing,” he said, smiling broadly as he chewed on a kola nut and spat. “The world is changing very quickly.”

  “And some are hoping it will just come crashing down, huh?” Ngutane retorted.

  Ah, she was a master of irony!

  5

  The Writer’s Creation

  Meanwhile, in his room in Mount Pleasant, Njoya was battling with his body. He was battling to break through the barriers to his memory and his actions. Ibrahim held his right hand and taught him how to write again. Father Vogt had prescribed a number of exercises for the sultan to do each day to strengthen his muscles and had stressed the importance of drawing. The priest hadn’t been able to convince Njoya to worship his white God, but his arguments had sufficed to awaken the artist that, since the onset of his illness, had been slumbering within the sultan. So he spent hours in his bed or armchair, holding a slate, his two faith
ful aides by his side; the ink dripping from the piece of wood between his fingers made him look like a writer.

  If Nji Mama and his brother Ibrahim had forgotten that Njoya was recovering from a dangerous apoplectic seizure (could they ever forget that?), they would have thought that the sultan was frozen, just waiting for the inspiration he needed to create the seventh version of his writing system, which was, really, his most impressive work. What left the two masters speechless was that when he really did begin to write, the monarch jumped back to the birth of his intellectual project, reworking an older version of his writing, using once again the pictograms he’d abandoned long before. Memory can be a real curse, but it is also a testament to life. The two men were dumbstruck when Njoya dragged his hand across the slate and wrote, in the Lewa alphabet:

  That was his name. They stared at each other when, after a similar effort, the sultan dug further into the past for the name of his ancestor Nchare Yen:

  It was as if, through the flesh of the words, the sultan had invoked the spirits of his land, asking for their help to restore his crumbling authority. If Ibrahim had told him that the ancestors had fallen silent when faced with the sultan’s tragedy, this historic truth would have wiped out his sovereign’s efforts. Not all truths are good to say. Yet Njoya wanted his chief calligrapher to stay by his side. He wanted Ibrahim to mentor him in the cryptography of his pain as he sought to use the gracefulness of his fingers to rebuild the strength of his whole body. Ibrahim had previously supervised the composition of the Saa’ngam when they’d been in Mantoum; he had orchestrated the work of the scribes, the copyists, the calligraphers, the illustrators, and the miniaturists. Who better to be at Njoya’s side in those moments when, once again, thousands of storytellers filled his belly with their tales? When his fingers were impelled to produce letters, who better to guide them? And when his memory of painful things came back in malevolent nightmares, who better to help distract his mind with healing arabesques? Who better? If writing reinscribes life on earth in furtive blots of ink, Njoya’s battle against the forces that had defeated his body was waged primarily on the surface of a slate, by means of pictograms he hoped would bear fruit.