Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  For Ripert, who hadn’t witnessed the fall, there was only one person who could have killed Nebu: the sultan. Just as there was only one person who could have gathered such a crowd at the doors of the offices of the French administration: Njoya.

  How could Ripert have guessed that for many in Foumban, and in many of the versions of the young man’s death that blamed the French, it was more likely he, Captain Ripert and none other, who had killed Nebu. And those who lent their voice to the community’s disgust spread word throughout the region of this new conspiracy: they had clearly heard one shot, just one gunshot, which had been fired by him, Captain Ripert.

  “Listen,” they said, “Ripert’s vicious bullet did exactly what the French administration wanted. After flying up into the air, it zigzagged and turned back down the street that leads from the Artists’ Alley to the center of town. It flew past the spice market that, thank God, was empty, and drilled through the women’s quarter, then the palace’s main courtyard, which was, thank God, deserted; then it entered the palace through the main door, going up the forty-two steps to the fourth floor, through the door of Nebu’s workshop, which, unfortunately, had a hole in it, and with its speed remaining at 1,623 meters per second, it had pierced the sculptor’s heart—rather than just giving him a bump on the head—and pushed him out the window with the statue, whose hand he was holding just then, thereby putting an end to a fragile life and reducing the pinnacle of Bamum and African art to dust!”

  “What a loss,” everyone cried. “Oh, what a loss!”

  That was Nebu’s destiny, they thought. It was the high point of his travels, of his search for perfection; and in perfection, his search had ended. Everything had begun and ended with a woman.

  “O the misery of life!” the artists cried, looking at what was left of the dead statue. “He fell into your hands, and he is dead!”

  Had I been there—me—Bertha, I would have probably said to the dead sculptor, “You! You who never expressed pain but only love, look at the cloak of suffering under which you were crushed!”

  “Killed!” repeated a voice in the crowd.

  And another, “Yes, killed by a French bullet!”

  Of course thousands of voices repeated that truth.

  “Truth?”

  My friends from Nsimeyong would have sworn to it: “The distance covered by Ripert’s bullet is well within the limits of an 8-mm Berther carbine Lebel. Logical, hmm?”

  Yet the French officer, he didn’t want to listen to such un-Cartesian accusations. His decision was supported by the power he had to write his own version of Nebu’s death in a report, his ultimate weapon, which he would send to Dschang by soldiers on horseback. In his report, Captain Ripert wrote his conclusion in red capital letters and underlined it several times: “IN ORDER FOR PEACE TO BE FINALLY RESTORED AMONG THE BAMUM,” he insisted, “NJOYA MUST BE EXILED.”

  He added a strongly worded warning against any reliance on the version of events written by the sultan in the Saa’ngam and against the very different conclusions drawn by Njoya. He also warned future historians who might discover the monarch’s version, because, he said, “in his treachery, Njoya has invented a writing system just so he can hide his thoughts and actions from us.”

  His “us” meant, of course, the “French administration,” and he added as appendices to his report examples of this writing. I think what he couldn’t foresee is that Martin, his boss, would be so impressed by Njoya’s Akauku figurines that he’d spend the rest of his life trying to understand the sultan’s pictograms, an epiphany whose crowning moment came with the patient translation of the Bamum memoirs. Ripert, who was in Foumban, never evolved at all. In his report he even added, “Njoya has treated himself to a car to humiliate the French administration in the eyes of the Bamum people,” and concluded, “Njoya is a two-faced man.”

  Did he mean that Njoya had the gift of being everywhere at once? Oh, he certainly wasn’t suggesting that the sultan’s power was so great that he could be both in front of him in a crowd of more than a thousand and, at the same time, in his palace killing the sculptor whom he had promoted to the rank of Nji just a few months earlier. Maybe Ripert only put into writing the threat that he had already articulated out loud, because whatever a colonial officer has already said in public will sooner or later become a decree from the colonial administration.

  Deafened by the noise of all these stories, speculations, theories, and likelihoods, no one suspected that Nebu himself felt defeated when he finished his statue, that he had failed as an artist to bring Ngungure back to life, even though he had re-created her in a perfect statue. So no one suspected his despair at having achieved artistic perfection only to discover its limitations. Had the theoreticians of his death thought about it, they would have understood that in his suffering, the sculptor had decided to follow his beloved to the kingdom of death and to throw himself out the window of the Palace of All Dreams alongside her. For death is the limit of art, isn’t it? Yet how could people have thought about suicide? And why should they have? After all, and here the French officials and their adversaries in Foumban would certainly agree, a Bamum man simply couldn’t kill himself for a reason like that.

  15

  The Multiple Faces of Powerlessness

  Njoya had never felt as powerless as on that day, when faced with Ripert’s accusation; nor had the Bamum. In their reports and declarations, Prestat, Ripert, Martin, Marchand, and other colonial officers had called him all sorts of names. “A despot.”

  The Bamum had put up with it.

  “A man who doesn’t respect human life…”

  They had put up with it.

  “… who keeps hundreds of women prisoner in his harem.”

  They had put up with it.

  “A Negro king who controls the life and wealth of his subjects.”

  They had put up with it.

  “A tyrant.”

  They had put up with it.

  “A multiple polygamist.”

  They had put up with it.

  “A slaver.”

  They had put up with it.

  “A rapacious potentate.”

  They had put up with it.

  Even “a black,” they had put up with it. But “a murderer”?

  The Bamum had thousands of responses for that. Yet everything they had to say was suddenly meaningless in the face of this bald accusation. They proposed thousands of theories for Nebu’s death, but all their explanations were shot down. They had filled the palace’s main courtyard with their surprised faces, but it was as if the space had remained entirely empty.

  “Njoya, a murderer?”

  They had a tragedy on their hands, and even their tears were as weak as a rain in the dry season. Foumban—no, all of Bamum land—was crying for the dead artist and soon discovered that the land’s most ardent defender was toothless. When the mourners spread out through the city, carrying Nebu’s body, when they gathered in Bertha’s courtyard to mourn the sculptor as he deserved, all that remained among the debris at the Palace of All Dreams was a profound silence.

  Back in his office, Ripert had signed a decree forbidding any sort of public assembly. Even the children knew better than to cry. Lizards no longer lifted their inquisitive heads to the sky. Dogs no longer barked, no. In the deadly silence that clothed the city, had you listened carefully, you would have heard only the throbbing of an undercurrent of rage. It was the fury of a city, of a world some four hundred years old, of an ancient continent, of a timeless universe that had been trampled and had silenced its ire. It was an anger too large for a burning body. This fire had taken hold of Njoya’s body—foreshadowing his fall, yes, his fall—its flames searing his body, licking his chest, veins of fire inflaming his heart, ready to consume him whole, like a mad volcano.

  The sultan hadn’t yet fallen victim to his treacherous body. He could no longer control his hands, that was all. They trembled, trembled. Suddenly all his inventions had become useless, yes, useless. Hi
s life had no direction. When he, now a wreck, returned to his palace, when he walked into the artists’ workshop—the dead artists’ workshop—he was slapped by the silence. In this place once so full of life, he was confronted by the absence of the young man he had met only four times and yet who had shown him the grandeur of what Bamum land could create. He suddenly evaluated the infamous price of all his compromises. It was as if his own son had been killed. With his cane, he struck the wall.

  “Shit,” he shouted. “Shit!”

  Everyone froze; Njoya had never used the foul language of slaves.

  “Shit!” he said again.

  The sultan couldn’t control his tongue, couldn’t stop his hands. His cane fell on the weaver’s loom.

  “Shit!” the weaver cried.

  Njoya’s mouth was creased. It could only come up with the same word, which he repeated endlessly. Had he shouted, had Njoya exploded, the sultanate would have understood. His hundreds of wives would have understood and his children, too. Looking on silently, everyone there knew that their land’s fate had taken a tragic turn. Had he cried, the sultanate would have found a container for their sovereign’s tears. Even his ancestors would have supported him.

  “Shit!” said Njoya, striking a figurine.

  He was destroying the work of his own artists. He threw out their manuscripts. The thousands of words in the palace library flew away. Calligraphers and miniaturists saw him coming and hurried to protect their work. With books hidden beneath their arms and on their bellies, they snuck away from his frenzy. Even today, the books they saved from the palace are scattered throughout Bamum land, hidden in boxes, stashed under the beds of the inheritors of that night of unequaled defeat, far from Njoya’s endless wrath.

  The sultan’s cane came down on backs, but the wounded artists didn’t cry out, their suffering bodies too busy protecting the work of their hands. They would have preferred to die in order to save their art. Alas, an anger that doesn’t reach its target can only be self-destructive. It is born in the gut, takes hold of the throat, and, smoldering, dissolves all words. The body becomes its prisoner, for such a rage is like a strangled sneeze. The chaos that was unleashed in the palace workshops was the reflection of Njoya’s silence, which had let disorder spread through Bamum land since the arrival of the first whites in 1902. Violence lives in powerlessness—it was twenty-two years of powerlessness that defined the trajectory of the sultan’s cane.

  “The rats!”

  Suddenly his eyes fell on Monlipèr’s printing press. Instead of protecting his work, the old master had sought to calm Njoya. Let’s forget the usual titles, the master said to himself. This time he called the sultan Nji Ma Yuam.

  Njoya didn’t respond.

  “Mfumbaam.”

  The old engineer knew that those two names that had been given to Njoya by his grandmother always made him smile. They were his own praise names. This time, however, they had no effect.

  “Menkulashun.”

  This was the name given to Njoya by his father, Nsangu. It did nothing to calm the sultan either. The master blacksmith tried proverbs.

  “Fran Njoya,” he said, “even during rainy season, the river keeps its name.”

  That didn’t work either. So the old man moved on to stories.

  “Menkulashun,” he began, “do you remember what the lion did when he was hit by an arrow?”

  “What?”

  The master began with a series of sentences, each repeated by the chorus of his colleagues, who rushed to join in, each adding his own bit: Nji Mama, Ibrahim, Nji Shua … It was a folktale.

  “Shut up!” Njoya ordered.

  The sultan spoke to them as if to apprentices, and his voice echoed through the silence of the whole palace. Who would have dared to say another word? An anger that has grown for as long as Njoya’s, an anger as vast as the suffering of the Bamum couldn’t be calmed by verbal tricks alone. It needed to re-create the destruction that the Bamum sultan had always refused to see “in hopes that common sense would prevail”; in order to be calmed, his anger needed to reinvent the chaos of life these past years in Foumban. It needed to find release in the crack of a thunderbolt, like the one that had struck the baobab that had stood for hundreds of years in the center of town. Yes, it needed to give voice to the silence of all the conscripts Njoya had torn from their families and given to his colonial friends for their njokmassi, their forced labor projects. Born of impotence, this supreme rage needed to be lived out fully. The masters cowered like children before his violence.

  “Shut up!” Njoya shouted in their silence, again and again. “Shut up! Shut up!”

  It was as if he were speaking to spirits, as if his crude and violent words, as well as his destructive cane, had all been roused by history, by the story of the three Bamum youths who had been under his orders and, by his fault, taken prisoner, suffering because of his bad judgment.

  “Ngbatu! Muluam! Nebu!”

  But also it was as if instead of their names, Njoya was calling “Samba! Ngosso! Manga!”

  And then “Ngbatu! Nebu! Muluam!”

  History doesn’t lie. It just keeps repeating itself. The sultan’s spare words were a hammer, a hammer raining down everywhere, as far as the eye could see: “Samba! Ngosso! Manga!

  “Manga! Ngosso! Samba!”

  Njoya’s hammer broke everything in its path, everything. Soon it rose up over old Monlipèr’s printing press. The machine had filled the master with immense pride, even if it hadn’t yet produced the desired results. It was the fruit of several years of work by the best blacksmiths in the region. It was the precise, detailed work of a nearly blind master. This machine had undergone many changes, but Njoya’s real vision, that the thousands of books in the Library of the Future would be produced by simply rearranging letters, had remained intact in the minds of all those who had worked to realize the project. The printing press was the pinnacle of the sultan’s intellectual project, of his work as a writer. It was supposed to occupy a place of honor in the Palace of All Dreams, the grand salon; from there it would spread History, providing a new center of gravity and reproduction for all the world’s tales. But now this limitless printing press was suddenly offered up for sacrifice, emptied of meaning.

  At once, the machines Njoya had built, all his machines, appeared to him as the private ailment that had made his heart always accept compromises. Art became the umbrella of his unhappiness, the wall he had built around his existence to forestall his own death, and writing was transformed into a cowardly bargain. Writing—isn’t it a way of fleeing from the complexity of life to hide in the aseptic realm of alphabets, in the magic of words? Letters draw us into a putrid dance: a dance with zombies! Writing compensates for life itself; it is disengagement, child’s play. Njoya realized that his experiments with pictograms and phonemes, with syllabograms and words, with tales and histories, with lives and dreams—all those experiments that had led him from anecdotes to a printing press had been possible only because, from the very start, he had given up when confronted by History’s forces. And these forces were now tightly clenched around his neck. He had abandoned his people and taken refuge in the workshops’ promise of eternity.

  Death was revealed to him in the form of the Invisible Book he had always been writing, and the printing press became the most vicious component of his own political resignation. It became the most visible sign of the factory of shame he was building within his Palace of All Dreams. Writing became Njoya’s real nightmare and the printing press its foulest feature. So he lifted it up with all his strength, stood silent for a moment while all around him his master craftsmen, the master artists, and their apprentices were frozen in the sharpest of silences by the unexpected sight.

  “Shit!” cried Njoya.

  And he smashed the machine on the ground.

  Metal pieces scattered around him by the thousands. He raced out of Nebu’s workshop. It was as if this one definitive, determined, barbaric, inhuman act had wrung his ang
er dry. The stunned silence of all the artists was heard throughout the city, rushing through the alleys, into houses, and flowing into the Nshi River along with pieces of the word machine and the tears of Monlipèr, who had leaped toward his machine but had been unable to prevent its destruction. Now the old man collected bits of debris, and with his trembling hands he tried to put the lost printing press back together. The despair of the master craftsman could only flow into a larger river, the much larger river of tears Bertha shed for the son whose shattered bones he had previously tried to mend.

  To the tears of the old man were added those of all the Bamum, beginning with the tears of all the artists who were unable to complete the phrase that would have expressed their suffering. Those men cried because their master was crying, and he cried because somewhere in the city a mother was crying for her dead son. “What a loss!” everyone said. “What a loss!”

  For posterity’s sake, this is how Madame Dugast described the suffering of old Monlipèr in her book, L’Écriture des Bamum: “He is now a man with a white beard, but he still cries when telling this tragic story.” I never understood why Njoya didn’t come out of his palace to express his rage for everyone to see. For many people, his withdrawal was an enigma. There are those, however, like Nji Mama, who were convinced that Njoya was mourning his own loss. In truth, however, the sultan was mostly angry with himself for not having sufficiently defended the Bamum. He was drowning in guilt and in a heavy feeling of remorse that would surface again later in Yaoundé and knock on the doors of his soul.

  Just a few months after these events the population of Foumban was again woken up by exclamations coming from the palace. People jumped out of bed and gathered in the main courtyard of the Palace of All Dreams.

  “Wombo-o!”

  “Again?” some said.