Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  Nebu was the pure product of two of the best workshops and two of the most respected masters the Bamum had ever known. Wouldn’t the reference to tradition diminish his feverish talent? Why not talk of a “work of genius”! For in fact Nebu was a genius, yes, the resurrection of the best sculptors of Nok, Ife, and Benin. The reincarnation of the masters who had carved the House of Granite in Zimbabwe. The renaissance of Africa’s true artistic genius, which had transformed Egyptian stones into pyramids! That’s what amazed everyone. What would the colonizers say? Yes, what would the French ethnographers say? Does it matter? To me, yes, and what’s more, their dubious comments are public: “Copy of a photograph most certainly seen in the display of a Swiss merchant who had previously opened a shop in Foumban”; “A poor imitation of European realist art.”

  Why are you surprised? The arguments put forth in the archives are always the same when it comes to the locals. It’s always so evident. Yet, what would the sultan say? What about Njoya? What would he say, he whose eyes were used to beholding grandeur? Nji Mama was walking on air, but also full of gratitude. He would bring the new master to the sultan’s attention; he would be the one who whispered in Njoya’s ear, when he introduced Nebu, “Alareni, here is a new spirit.”

  “Donnerwetter!” the sultan would say when he saw Nebu’s statue, and everyone around him would agree.

  This would be the third time Njoya would meet the sculptor. The first time, Nebu was a slave; the second, the sculptor was half dead. This time Njoya would free him from the obligation to dress in ways that marked him as an apprentice and as a slave. Bertha’s son no longer appeared to be one or the other with his long, untamed goatee and hair that flowed down his back. The monarch would make him a respected master, a Nji. No one was surprised that Nebu was the only one not enthralled by his historic creation.

  “That’s how true artists are,” Nji Mama observed. “Always skeptical,” he added after a pause.

  12

  Artists in Politics

  If Njoya had told himself that bringing Monlipèr back to the palace would resolve some of the conflicts shaking up the Artists’ Alley, he had underestimated the outrage caused by the replacement of the old master by a man the artists called a simple talker—a man in the pay of the French, to boot. Artists and artisans came several times to tell him that the best workshops had been left to the rats and to inform him of the planned death of their furnaces. These complaints saddened the sultan, who greatly valued the arts. He reassured the complainants, asking them to follow the orders of the French administrator, who, no doubt, he added, wanted to get them to do their best work, just through different methods. He also asked them to respect the initiatives of Mose Yeyap, who was, after all, a son to him.

  Njoya also knew moments of doubt and instants of rage—the latter being more frequent. What was most important to him was to avoid any public conflict, especially at that moment, when his mind was entirely preoccupied by the construction of his new palace. It was the thirtieth year of his reign, and never before had he quarreled with the whites who had passed through his lands. The fact that he had survived two colonial regimes reassured him. It hadn’t been easy. He had even maintained the peace in his country in 1914, when people said the whole world was at war. As for Ripert …

  When, in defiance of all protocol, Muluam and Ngbatu came once more to lay out their grievances against Mose Yeyap, Njoya asked them to calm down and go back to work. He advised them to follow the directives of their new master because that was what apprentices were supposed to do. He then told them that the roads of art were long and that the best way to become a master was to avoid politics and to work, work, and work some more. He took the example of Nebu, whom he knew to be the friend of these two fellows and who, after being dragged to the center of town and beaten almost to death by soldiers, had still mastered his anger, transformed it into beauty, and become the youngest master ever among the Bamum.

  “He could have gone mad, right?” Njoya added. “He could have gone mad.”

  “Yes, Alareni,” the two apprentices replied pitifully.

  “But he didn’t.”

  “No, Alareni.”

  “Follow his example,” the sultan concluded, “and common sense will prevail in the house.”

  “Imitate the masters,” he added.

  Njoya couldn’t really turn a deaf ear when these young men expressed a fury that boiled in his veins as well. Looking at them, he saw his own youth. One day they’ll understand, he reassured himself. They’ll understand that keeping quiet doesn’t mean being a coward.

  Njoya believed he’d put the affair behind him when the two apprentices left, bowing deeply, walking backward, and murmuring words of praise and thanks.

  “Master.”

  “Master.”

  “Alareni.”

  The next night, Foumban was awoken by the shouts of a terrified woman. Mose Yeyap had just barely escaped from the cutlass of a man who had forced his way into his house and terrified his family, although no one was hurt. The Man of the French had fled through the bush and spent the rest of the night hiding in his employer’s office.

  This attempted murder created a wild commotion. Never before had the city seen such crowds gathering in the night. Even the threat of the First World War hadn’t ignited such passions in the people. Foumban had been shaken by the shouts of Mose’s wife, who thought her husband was dead. And in the confusion, Muluam’s phrase was repeated again and again: “They want to kill the sultan.”

  The apprentice sought to distract the crowd from the failed murder by conjuring an imaginary one, an assassination that everyone feared would happen.

  “They want to kill him!” shouted Mose Yeyap’s wife.

  People repeated the words that Muluam carried from courtyard to courtyard: “They want to kill him!”

  “They want to kill Fran Njoya!”

  “Mfon Njoya?”

  “Mfon Njoya.”

  Muluam said that with his own eyes he had seen the sultan held prisoner in his palace.

  “Can we accept that?”

  He had seen Njoya weakened, yes, he had seen him naked.

  “Naked?” people asked.

  “Yes, naked.”

  “That’s unacceptable!”

  Muluam said that it was Mose Yeyap who wanted to see the sultan dead. He wanted to take Njoya’s place with the help of the French, who had made him their Man. His control of the Artists’ Alley was only the start of an elaborate plan, for since when in Foumban had one ever seen an artists’ cooperative run by a talker—“just a talker”?

  “When?” a voice asked from the shadows.

  “Never,” everyone replied.

  Riling up the pack in the dark of night, Muluam had become that voice of accusation whose strong echoes rolled up and down Foumban’s hills, gathering in valleys all over Bamum land. Meanwhile, Ngbatu galloped through the city’s alleys, spreading his friend’s cacophonous rage through all the compounds. Soon scores of torches signaled the movement of an agitated crowd, and the voices, gathered in courtyards, rose up in a stormy rumble. Captain Ripert did not intervene. He had no way to stop such gatherings in the night. The few Congolese soldiers posted to him were barely enough to ensure his security and that of his small hut against such an upswell.

  That night no one slept. Not even Ripert, huddled in his office, a rifle in his hands and big beads of sweat rolling off his brow. When he opened the door of his shelter in the morning, it wasn’t just hundreds of men who had overrun his courtyard, making Muluam’s and Ngbatu’s words of rage resonate through the night. His terrified eyes counted two … no, three … no, four thousand people at least.

  Let’s be very clear: the entire population of Foumban had gathered before the captain’s office, even if Ripert later minimized the incident in his report so as not to give the impression that the French administration (that is to say, he himself) had been defeated. Muluam and Ngbatu’s plan had worked. They had mobilized the workshop
s’ artisans and apprentices, who had spread out, whipping up anger across the land. They had repeated the phrase Muluam had grafted onto the maniacal shouts of Mose Yeyap’s wife: “They want to kill him!”

  Everyone understood: “They want to kill the sultan!”

  Nji Mama’s opinion had prepared the terrain for the hurricane now unleashed. Every man who was a man, every woman who was a woman—everyone had felt the threat run through their flesh. They wrested themselves from bed and rushed toward the palace.

  No one asked “Who?”

  Because everyone knew what had been going on for too long, no one asked “Why?”

  Because everyone knew what was happening in Foumban since Prestat’s arrival—no, since the English had entered the city, leaving one dog dead; no, since the Germans had appeared in Bamum land. The conflict that had begun more than twenty years before had taken an overtly violent turn. For a long time, far too long, patience had been the Bamum response to the underhanded European encroachments. Every time the sultan had asked his best soldiers to lower their weapons, they had obeyed: every time. They had obeyed “so that common sense would prevail” but had quickly realized that they were in fact defenseless. They had been fooled.

  Several times Njoya’s guards had caught young men and turned them over to the Europeans, who forced them to work like slaves on their plantations. The sultan had even asked his soldiers to fight in wars that were not their own and to defeat people that had never been in conflict with the Bamum, each time as a “sign of his friendship” for the Europeans. Never had his efforts resulted in greater peace for the Bamum. On the contrary, the sultanate’s foundations had been weakened, its most important achievements destroyed. Its inhabitants impoverished.

  Anger flowed through the veins of each woman and each man who had abandoned their beds that night to answer Muluam’s and Ngbatu’s cries; they all found themselves in front of Captain Ripert’s offices in a gathering of thousands of angers, small and large. The nobles had their recriminations, which differed from those of the women and of the slaves and, of course, of the captives. The captives had their own reasons to be angry, wholly unrelated to the motives of the nobles or the freemen, etc.

  Some members of the crowd complained about heavy taxes, the head tax that was slowly crippling large families. Others talked about being forced to build roads or lay railroad tracks, or about the coffee and cocoa plantations where they were put to work. Others still deplored the lessening of their power after the whites arrived and began giving authority to their intermediaries—who were all slaves, to make matters worse. Students complained that the education they’d received in Njoya’s schools had been devalued, their diplomas no longer guaranteeing any job because only those who had gone to European schools got posts in the French administration.

  Ah, what hadn’t they inscribed in the Book of Rage!

  Some voices, crazed voices really, raged against the sultan, accusing him of being a coward and a traitor who didn’t give a damn about the suffering of the Bamum and was selling the country’s future to the rats. All these voices in the night: if you listened closely, you could sense how they were working against each other, ready to fight each other, even to the death. It was only by chance that history had found, in the person of the zealous translator, the match to light all these different fires. And these voices—contradictory voices, curious voices, angry voices, vengeful voices, irritated voices—were all unified by Muluam’s one cry: “They want to kill the sultan!”

  They joined in Ngbatu’s urgent demand and amplified one another: “We want Mose Yeyap gone!”

  The only thing Captain Ripert could do when confronted with these voices, which grew louder and louder as day dawned, was to summon the sultan. But Njoya’s arrival didn’t resolve the problem—on the contrary. Mose Yeyap suddenly emerged from his hiding place; he saluted the sultan, executing an awkward series of incomprehensible gestures, at the end of which he tripped slightly and knocked the sultan’s cane from his hand. The chaos grew. A hand (was it Muluam’s? Ngbatu’s?) tore the translator’s hat from his head and threw it on the ground.

  At that very moment a rifle was fired.

  The sky froze.

  Let’s put it this way: Captain Ripert, who had just come through his longest night, during which he’d been worked over by maniacal mosquitoes; Captain Ripert, whose mind had not stopped imagining all night long the whole range of violent acts native hands could inflict upon him, who had seen unfolding before his eyes all the scenarios he’d read about in colonial travel tales; yes, Captain Ripert, who recalled what he had read in the reports of his predecessor Prestat, who had clearly warned him about the “Bamum people, and the natives in general,” Captain Ripert emerged from his insomnia with trembling hands and a transparent soul. The service weapon he held in his hands confronted the hundred rifles the sultan’s soldiers had brought when they answered the night’s call.

  Yet Captain Ripert’s frayed nerves are not to blame for this affair, nor is his fertile imagination, even if it multiplied his visions of death by mutilation and even nightmarish images of cannibalism, topped off with scenes of women’s breasts going wild. What is clear is that a fuse was lit in his mind that caused his better judgment to go up in smoke, making him think he was in real danger, ordering him to lift his rifle and fire a warning shot into the sky. Aware of the fact that if armed conflict broke out, he’d be whipped into mayonnaise, he didn’t mean to kill anyone. He didn’t want to hurt anyone. He wanted to send a warning to the agitated crowd, a warning that he translated himself so everyone would understand:

  “Calm down or else…”

  “Or else what?”

  In the heart of the chaos that had been brought to a halt by his rifle shot, rare were those who heard him finish his sentence:

  “I’ll kill your damned sultan!”

  No, no, and no. Njoya wasn’t taken hostage by a frightened captain. A French official is not a terrorist. The great French Empire that spread over three continents and on which the sun never set—“Eternal France”—had no need to take local kings hostage! That’s ridiculous! That Congolese tirailleurs pointed their rifles at a crowd, four-fifths of which was unarmed, including women carrying children on their backs, was just an aberration. An exception that confirms the rule.

  “Calm down,” Ripert repeated, “or I’ll call for reinforcements!”

  Dschang was only a hundred kilometers away, and many more tirailleurs were stationed there. But for years the administrative post in Foumban hadn’t even had a car at its disposal. In order to carry out his threats, Captain Ripert would have had to count on the freshness of his best horses, and it would have taken them a whole day or even two to complete the mission. Oh, the captain was clearly far from the calmest head in this gathering of men who were used to salvos of gunfire during the annual celebration of Nguon, at dances and other ceremonies, and who hadn’t even dropped to the ground after his warning shot.

  “We want Mose Yeyap gone!”

  That was Ngbatu.

  “We want Monlipèr back,” Muluam added.

  The crowd chanted, “Monlipèr!”

  “Monlipèr!”

  People stamped their feet and roused the sky with their inflamed mouths:

  “Monlipèr!”

  “Monlipèr!”

  “Monlipèr!”

  13

  Who Killed the Artist?

  All the tales of that demented day are in perfect agreement on one point: it was Captain Ripert who fired the one gunshot that everyone heard. Some testimonies stress that he shot into the air. Because his rifle was a Berthier 8-mm carbine, a 1906 model that the French army was still using in the colonies, I can say in all confidence that the bullet—shot at a speed of 2,300 meters per second by a rifle that could hit a target at a distance of 3,500–4,500 meters—would rise up to a certain altitude before falling back to the ground, pulled down by the indomitable laws of gravity. It also follows quite logically that the speed of Ripert
’s bullet would be reduced during its fall because it would be propelled by gravity alone and, most of all, because it would have been slowed down by wind resistance. That bullet wouldn’t pose any real danger to anyone, and the possibility that it could kill a man is next to nothing. The only damage it could cause would be a bump on some unfortunate soul’s forehead.

  More than three thousand people clearly saw the French captain take his rifle, point it at the sky, and shoot: kaboom! That those assembled later said instead that it was “the French,” in the plural, who had tried to kill the sultan is certainly linked to the nature of the anger that had clouded everyone’s judgment since Nji Mama had leveled his accusation—the anger that had pushed shadowy hands to try to assassinate Mose Yeyap and had brought together the crowd in front of Captain Ripert’s office. “A rush to judgment,” the historian would say. Yet I know, yes I do: the objectivity required for the analysis of the actions of the colonial officer is the same as for any reading of the actions of Njoya. It is one hundred percent certain that the sultan wasn’t in his palace when Ripert’s shot flew through the sky. Ripert had summoned him to his office, counting on the presence and authority of the sultan to get him out of an explosive situation.

  Njoya’s entourage would without a doubt testify that the sultan was right in front of Captain Ripert when the trigger was pulled, and I am sure that some would have happily taken truth serum, if that practice hadn’t been forbidden by one of Lieutenant Prestat’s decrees. Yet no one was called to testify, not one of the three thousand mouths who were gathered in front of Ripert’s courtyard when he sat down to hatch his report. And what remains in the archives are the conclusions of the stressed-out captain, who declared that only Njoya could have killed Nebu: yes, that’s what he wrote: “killed Nebu.”

  A pretext serves many ends, but first and foremost it provides a way out of a difficult situation. And this is where objectivity is replaced by illogic. Of course, colonialism isn’t logical. After Ripert’s rifle shot, it took a lot of goodwill for everyone in the surrounding crowd to be convinced that the sultan was still alive and that no one, not even Ripert, had tried to kill him. Still, the captain would have had to make a certain number of promises to finally clear his courtyard and find a way out of this crisis. The first thing that everyone was asking—or, rather, demanding—was the replacement of Mose Yeyap. Captain Ripert wouldn’t do that; for him, replacing an unpopular official would have been a sign of “weakness.” According to one of the directives there on the French officer’s desk, the French Republic should never show any “sign of weakness,” especially not “in front of any natives”—that was the real crux of his problem.