When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  “De Gaulle sleepy?”

  It took a minute for the soldier to understand that it wasn’t him she was calling by the French general’s name, but his bangala.

  “The Marshal not so-o tired,” she said.

  She pointed to the place between her legs, which he thought he had already given a good workout. She took his de Gaulle in her mouth and, right then, Hebga, in surprise, uttered the name of his mother, like a prayer. That didn’t bother the Marshal. She massaged his testicles, and soon our man felt a line of fire rush through his dick, igniting his belly, his whole body. He had closed his eyes. When he reopened them, his terrified eyes met those of the exultant Marshal.

  “De Gaulle standing tall,” she said.

  He stared in disbelief at his rock-hard erection—harder than he’d ever been before.

  “Vive de Gaulle!” said the woman, quite pleased.

  “Vive de Gaulle!” Hebga repeated.

  Those words that had shaken up the capital, those words that had echoed through the depths of the poor neighborhoods, to the far reaches of the French Empire—in that moment, staring at his furious bangala, the Marshal by his side, they came out as a whisper.

  There are women who turn the whole world upside down. Hebga would have stood up to salute his own erection. This Marshal was one of those Mamy Wata whom men talk about in hushed voices, for never had his penis stood so tall. He didn’t dare tell this story to his buddies when they met up again several hours later, back in the bars from which they had disappeared. The Saras, they never stopped talking about their exploits. Their exuberant faces beamed and they blessed the Second World War, Cameroon, Yaoundé, and Briqueterie, all at once.

  “Cameroon women, gnoxe-gnoxe,” they said.

  Bilong seemed to have found his calling once more, and Aloga the rhythm for his first authentic Hilun. Even Philothée was, for the first time, able to speak without stuttering. As they walked past buildings in the city where the French flag and banners proclaiming “Vive de Gaulle!” flew, Hebga thought about the Marshal. In his uniform pants there was an immediate reaction, and his eyes clouded over with shame. The day after the liberation, he walked through the city he had dreamed of for so long, his head hanging low and his hands in his pockets. He felt naked and longed for his ax, which a French officer had taken from him when he’d signed up. He thought of the forest and the surprises it held. He thought of the Marshal. The memory of that woman was beginning to haunt him.

  26

  Nemesis

  Yaoundé does not harbor such a vivid memory of General de Gaulle. Yet he came to the city when the Central Post Office still bore his name: “Vive de Gaulle!” He was trying hard to prove to his English interlocutor that the French Empire was worth the bet—trying so hard that he landed in Douala only a few days after the putsch in Ongola. One of history’s ironies: this visit likely had more impact on Fritz than on Churchill. Yes, on Fritz. By that I mean, it left a mark on the young man who was there watching in the crowd. Douala didn’t erupt in celebration as Yaoundé had done for the colonel, but the Blenheim bomber in which he arrived was met by parades of bureaucrats who were thrilled to see and speak with him. The general shook all the hands that reached out toward him, but never bowed his head, standing bolt upright, as if he were marching, as erect and as indifferent as a priapism. A colonial cap on his head, he ran his eyes over the faces that crowded around him, people who looked so much alike and who mattered so little. His man Leclerc was waiting for him in Yaoundé.

  Fritz saw him for the first time when he was addressing the traditional chiefs. Fritz was in Douala on business and he found himself, along with some others, rounded up by the order of their traditional chief. Douala’s neighborhoods were then, as today, organized along tribal lines. The Bassas were, for the most part, housed in Akwa. When Fritz came to Douala, Akwa was where he ended up. He stayed with his older brother, who worked for the railroad. And it just so happened that it was in Akwa’s reception hall that General de Gaulle spoke to the people. Do I need to add that several years later, in this very same hall, Um Nyobè will ask the crowds to put a stop to the Gaullist colonial enterprise and that, no joke, de Gaulle’s forces will condemn him to death? Ah, history and its reversals, history and its detours!

  History’s chiasmus! Yet another example! For the moment Fritz couldn’t know what the future held for Um Nyobè, or for de Gaulle, for that matter. He watched the general cut a path through the crowd, take a seat in front of a wall where someone had put up a white flag with the Cross of Lorraine upside down. He heard the city administrator introduce the man, speak of his exploits during the Great War, about the Resistance—a fancy, formal speech, full of adjectives—but one phrase alone echoed in Fritz’s mind: “He has been condemned to death in France.”

  Soon, while the administrator’s speech dragged on, de Gaulle stood up, cleared his throat, and, waving his arms, began to speak. His hands were very long; for a moment Fritz allowed himself to be distracted by his gestures—or was he distracted by the people, all those blacks who were following the scene, glued to the windows, but who just couldn’t keep quiet?

  “Continue! Perservere!” the general repeated. “Do not listen to bad rumors, to propaganda, to discouragement.”

  Fritz turned toward his neighbor, who wouldn’t stop gushing.

  “That’s de Gaulle!” he said.

  “So who is de Gaulle?” a voice asked.

  “France has only lost a battle.”

  “He’s the white man, the one who’s speaking.”

  “Shut up, you idiots!” snarled a colonist.

  Ah, that colonist, he would have liked to give everyone there a good whipping! But right then, the general was hammering out an important phrase:

  “France has not lost the war.”

  “What?”

  That made Fritz jump. And the menacing colonist, forgetting his anger, applauded with everyone there, while de Gaulle continued speaking of France and her empire.

  “A great empire, an empire overflowing with courage, with resources, with force—the black force. Native soldiers,” he continued, “our valiant tirailleurs, have taken part in all of France’s battles.”

  That’s why he wanted to meet all the city elders, Fritz thought: they’d be like amplifiers, sending their sons into battle and dragging Cameroon along with them.

  “England,” de Gaulle declared, when Fritz came back to the speech, “is promising to buy six thousand tons of palm and all your stocks of cocoa, at the highest price. And that’s not all, that’s only the beginning.”

  “That isn’t de Gaulle,” insisted suddenly the guy next to Fritz, a guy with a bald spot and red eyes. “That’s Pétain.”

  “De Gaulle has been condemned to death,” another agreed, “a condemned man wouldn’t be greeted like this. Pétain’s the President of France.”

  “You clearly don’t know what’s going on,” another objected.

  Ah, Fritz thought of his village, of the conscripts and the convicts, those forced into labor. Never had he seen a convict treated with such respect.

  “The coffee harvest,” de Gaulle was saying.

  “That’s Pétain, I’m telling you,” grumbled the fellow next to Fritz.

  “How much do you want to bet?”

  “The war effort,” de Gaulle went on, “requires the marshaling of all of the empire’s resources.”

  “Ten francs,” said the voice next to Fritz, “he’s not worth any more than that.”

  “Cameroon will prove its usefulness by providing the neighboring colonies and our allies with certain foodstuffs, for example, meat, or certain mineral resources…”

  “Shut up,” one voice bellowed.

  “… tin and gold…”

  It was the colonist who had screamed; now he waved his fist in front of Fritz’s face and glared at him, straight in the eyes.

  “… manganese…”

  Fritz was beginning to regret his choice of window.

  “…
cobalt.”

  He realized that he couldn’t make sense of anything being said by the general—this man who had brought together so many patriarchs, who were now sitting in that room, fanning themselves with flyswatters and clapping from time to time.

  “We must mobilize all possible forces for the universal struggle of the civilized universe against the barbarians. For democracy and peace,” de Gaulle said.

  The fellow with the red eyes responded with a curse in his language and his friends burst out laughing.

  “Shut up,” shouted the colonist inside the room, “shut up, you sons of bitches!”

  The next line of the speech was drowned out in rounds of applause, punctuated by the cry, “Vive de Gaulle!” Some rose to their feet to applaud even louder. Fritz took the opportunity created by the chaos to move away from his neighbors, for the ceremony wasn’t yet over. Now it was the traditional chiefs’ turn to speak. The chiefs rose, one after the other, dressed as if for a ball. Some spoke in their native language, citing numerous proverbs, which were translated slowly, each phrase stretched out, by a man with the face of a duck, who worked for the Baptist church.

  Some spoke in French, embellishing their speeches with extravagant turns of phrase, moving words, caressing the French language as if it were the only real treasure Africa had to offer General de Gaulle, each diluting their French with the accent particular to their native language. Fritz noticed one local chief—perhaps the head of a section of the city—whose speech was overflowing with sentences in the imperfect subjunctive. After mentioning his medals, he spoke of Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter, before giving vent to his indignation: those places he had known so well when he was a student were now under occupation—people there were speaking German! At the sixth speech, Fritz realized, like everyone else, no doubt, that the general was bored stiff. He sat there rigidly, not moving except to wipe the sweat from his brow; he never even looked at the administrators sitting beside him. You’d have said he was on another planet. Fritz would have liked to see de Gaulle suddenly pound his fist on the table, as the colonists so often did, and tell the long line of speechmakers, “Stop this monkeying around!”

  Obviously then the Africans would have cried racism. Some chiefs would have swallowed their long harangue. And just maybe then the outraged city wouldn’t have sent off its contingent of tirailleurs or contributed to the war effort? De Gaulle would have gone back to England and confessed to Churchill that he knew nothing about the colonies. France, like Cameroon years before, would have become a German colony. And if the putsch in Ongola—which took place two years before the better-known one in Algiers—hadn’t taken place, would Paris have been liberated in 1944? Fritz would have been the only one to applaud that scenario. Yet he suddenly felt that he could see things from General de Gaulle’s point of view. He understood him, that’s what he realized, and from then on he always felt that way. You see, never had any French authority visited any African country as often as de Gaulle did during those years, for he came back to Cameroon in November 1940, in May 1941, and again in September 1942. At no point did Fritz change the opinion he had formed on that first visit, on that twelfth of September, 1940: This guy is poison.

  The general did not pound his fist on the table, no, he did not. But Fritz remained convinced that deep inside he was thinking: Those assholes!

  Alas, I will never be able to verify that hypothesis, but so what! Um Nyobè sometimes spoke of the closed fist that de Gaulle held firmly on the table. Fritz had told him the story. The image of the French general sitting politely in Akwa’s overheated reception hall, suffering through the staged ceremonies of Douala’s chiefs because he realized that their sons would liberate Paris—that image stayed in his mind for quite some time. De Gaulle had the nerve to call those chiefs “members of the Resistance.” He would always hold that against him.

  27

  History’s Missed Connections

  But let’s get back to Yaoundé. Leclerc’s entrance into the city had made Pouka’s life unbearable. If the sacking of all the pro-Vichy administrators, including his boss, had suddenly deprived him of a job, his vacation in Edéa had saved him. He had had the good fortune to have already served as Leclerc’s translator. And on top of that, he had carried that historic letter, the deceptive letter that had brought down the capital: he was a member of the Resistance! He would never forget it—he always considered himself “Cameroon’s very first Gaullist!” He had presented himself at the governor’s office the next day and been given a job in offices attached to the palace. The colonel no longer needed a Bassa translator, but there was other work for Pouka to do. The chaos of war, the confusion that reigned in the capital since the abrupt regime change, the lack of necessary food supplies, all complicated daily life and kept the colonial civil servants working overtime.

  Then the arrival of de Gaulle made everyone frantic, for they had to show the general how the situation was improving—moving in the right direction. The recruitment of soldiers, the launch of the new colonial radio service, setting aside war reserves, writing up lists of European volunteers—all these tasks had the few remaining employees of the colonial administration running like mad. It was easier to dissolve an administration than to build up a new one starting from practically zero. Never had Pouka worked as much as he did in the months of September and October. Yet if anyone had asked him what he was doing, he couldn’t have given a clear explanation. War, war—that was the only answer anyone could give.

  Yet war is sometimes a perfidious excuse.

  Three weeks went by before he could put together just how he had been separated from Hebga, before he remembered that his cousin was in Yaoundé, just like him. This shameful lapse struck him like a slap, and at the first opportunity he ran to the barracks. Inside, the tirailleurs were busy at work. In one corner, some were doing drills. In their brown uniforms, with their red chechias and bare feet, covered in dust, they all had the same look on their faces, the same demeanor. It was as if just one man were marching back and forth across the courtyard, a wooden rifle on his back, or standing guard at the gate with a bayonet on the end of his rifle. Only, that man, he wasn’t Hebga.

  “Hebga?” the soldier who met him at the gate asked.

  He spoke in the clipped phrases of an illiterate.

  “Yes, Hebga!”

  “First name?”

  “He doesn’t have a first name.”

  “Tirailleur?”

  The column to which his cousin was assigned had already left the city for the north. Pouka collapsed. How many times had he wished he could show Hebga the capital—the city that had been his obsession? And to think he hadn’t looked for him. Worse, he hadn’t even wished him farewell. For the first time he realized that an excuse deceives only the one who gives it. Hebga, well, he had stopped waiting for his cousin. The barracks hadn’t given him time to think. And he had pushed aside his troubled thoughts and his regrets once Captain Massu had announced to the company that their bivouac in Yaoundé was over.

  “Children,” he announced, “we’re going to Paris!”

  Pouka realized that the war was uniquely able to tear friendships apart. Fritz in Douala, him in Yaoundé, Hebga who knew where: history scatters bits of life in a thousand places—that, for sure, is true.

  THE BATTLE OF KUFRA, 1941

  1

  The Ax of Witchcraft

  The Tibesti desert, September 1940: Leclerc recognized his perfect soldier and gestured for him to come in. He never would have thought that this brave soldier’s first exploit would be an act of insubordination. With the sun streaming in behind him, all Leclerc could make out was his muscular build. That man, endowed with a physique he wished for himself, had found a place in his heart, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on when or why.

  “What’s the problem, Captain?”

  Leclerc spoke to Massu, who’d just arrived. He was there because two of his men, two Cameroonians, disregarding the chain of command, had voiced thei
r complaints directly to the colonel.

  “These idiots don’t give a damn about the hierarchy.”

  “They don’t yet understand it, Captain.”

  Behind Hebga stood Philothée. What nonsense! Was the stutterer going to translate the words of the illiterate? Yet, that’s what happened. With vivid gestures, Hebga described in his own language the guiding principle of his training. He explained to the colonel his metaphysics of muscles, and how he needed to keep his body in shape in order to feel good. He spoke with such passion that he didn’t notice that Leclerc hadn’t understood a word he’d said, and neither had Massu. The two men turned to Philothée.

  Philothée’s mouth gaped open. “He says,” he began. He took a gulp of air. “He says…”

  Meanwhile, several other white officers, including Captain Dio, had come in to discuss the needs of the camp and preparations for the Battle of Kufra. They took their places beside Leclerc. Hebga didn’t look at them, entirely caught up in his own testimony. He stared, his eyes wide open with indignation, stressing the ugliness of the coupe-coupe, the machete he knew all too well and that could, at best, cut grass. He said that the rifle was no better than the musket he already had. He preferred to use an ax, for what mattered most with it wasn’t strength, but technique.

  “No ax,” Philothée translated, with a broad swing of his arm. His glazed eyes froze everyone there in their tracks. “Him, march no pants.”

  I am not going to reproduce his comical stuttering. The whites stared at one another and, as if of one mind, all smiled. The two black men stood there speechless. Especially the woodcutter, who didn’t understand what there was to laugh about in his explanation. Philothée fell silent, fearing he had already said too much.

  Leclerc stood up and walked toward Hebga. With his characteristic paternalism, he gently patted his cheek.