When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  The sun was gleaming. It was the most beautiful day, more beautiful than the fantasies of luxury that had captivated him when he leafed through the pages of La Gazette du Cameroun and calculated his odds of winning the grand prize in the lottery. Oh! It wasn’t just the prize of a million francs and a trip to Paris that always drove him wild. Hebga imagined driving down the Champs-Élysées, a victor in full glory: a Senegalese tirailleur in his uniform. No signs of war, Paris ecstatic. The walls covered with thousands of French flags and banners. It was just like what he’d experienced in Yaoundé, but bigger, more festive, more thrilling. Most of all, there was no more Leclerc, but rather General de Gaulle himself leading the parade. A very orderly parade of tirailleurs, the first ones who had answered his call. On his shoulder Hebga held the long rifle Captain Dio had given him, with an equally long bayonet on its end. It was a compromise. He had needed something that combined a rifle and a machete to allay his feeling of being stripped bare when they took away his ax; it was the only thing that had convinced the virtuoso to give up his weapon of choice. He marched in step like the perfect soldier he was: head held high, eyes fixed on the future he knew he had given back to this city that now celebrated him, to this country that thanked him. Hebga was proud. There were faces peering out of every window of every house and in each shop door. All of France had come out to welcome the tirailleurs she had wrested from the distant forests of Africa, who had crossed the Sahara to fulfill a promise they had made silently to themselves when they were still far away and dreaming of this Paris that they had never seen, but that had become their obsession. The inhabitants of such a beautiful city had no right to be unhappy!

  Paris, Hebga thought, we liberated you!

  Gratitude is a virtue, and it finds expression in love. The liberation of Paris had filled the city with women who blew kisses at him from a distance. They brought their hands to their lips and then held their palms open, smiles lighting up their faces. The men were ecstatic too. They threw their hats in the air. The whole street shouted words of joy that transformed into garlands as they fell at the soldiers’ feet. What am I saying, garlands? Roses, stars that spun through the air and covered their shoulders.

  “Hurrah!”

  “Hurrah!”

  Hebga didn’t turn to look, certain that behind him spread out the column of Senegalese tirailleurs with whom he had crossed through the antechamber of hell and who, therefore, deserved to be welcomed into this paradise. He knew how each man had struggled, the fear that had taken hold of all these brave fellows, whose every action was a heroic feat. Most of them had known nothing but the forest, but now, what stories they could tell of the twists and turns of their travels through unbelievable lands. They had never left their villages before and now they could talk about countries, about continents! Africa! Europe! They had known only people of their own ethnic group, and now they had discovered a new sense of continental solidarity, a new racial solidarity, a new human solidarity! Hebga didn’t need to look at his comrades because the eyes of the happy city reflected the humanity for which each of them had put their life on the line. He discovered that the goal of the most bloody of wars was to make a city smile again. Sometimes a woman rushed from the crowd to give him a real kiss. She held tight to his chest. She opened her mouth to tell him about the hours, days, weeks, and years of the Occupation. But the column kept marching on, dragging him along with it. Still, she managed to utter one phrase that he caught midair: Thank you!

  “Thank you, O Children of Africa! Thank you!”

  Soldiers do not cry. But if Hebga had lifted his hand, he’d have wiped away a tear. Alas! But Paris didn’t let him. A woman threw herself into his arms and marched along with him, keeping pace with his steps.

  “Don’t you recognize me?” she asked.

  He looked at her.

  She didn’t give him a chance to find her face among all the adventures that had filled his life, where admittedly women’s faces were less common than those of his fallen comrades.

  “I’m the Marshal. Don’t you remember?”

  And Hebga relived the fervor of that night, back in Yaoundé. He revisited all the details of the room in Briqueterie, of the love that had shown him a very clear definition of ecstasy.

  “Marshal,” he shouted as he gave her a kiss. “What are you doing here?”

  He learned that happiness has the same face in every liberated city.

  “I was looking for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Come with me!”

  She didn’t give him a moment to think. She pulled him from the ranks and dragged him off into the crowd. Hebga did not regret it for a moment. He knew that Paris, now liberated, would forgive him this escapade after all the dangers he’d come through. The thought of what the Marshal promised him was enchanting. He thrust his hand in his pocket to bring his impatient bangala back in line.

  “Wait for me,” he cried in the chaos of the cheering crowd.

  The Marshal didn’t wait. Out of breath, he stopped and watched her swim away through the crowd. She looked back at him and her smile translated her words, though they were drowned out by the crowd’s cheers.

  “Don’t you want to screw?”

  Hebga stood up straight, then hurried after her as she made her way through the growing crowd. Sometimes he could only make out her head, which bobbed up as if from the depths of the sea, only to disappear and then reappear farther off. He zigzagged between the people who offered him a kiss, a wave, or a phrase that touched his heart and soul: “Thank you!” His memory of the things she had done to him back in Briqueterie was clear enough that he pushed his way through the shoulders, freed himself from the arms seeking his embrace, the hands expressing their gratitude. He thought about her specialty, the whirlwind: she’d take his testicles in her mouth and spin them around and around until his eyes glazed over. He remembered many other things, too, surrounded by the joyful crowd, the crowd that went on and on endlessly, that grew into a thousand, no, a million forms of ecstasy. He saw exactly how he was going to ball the Marshal, how he would gnoxe her, how he’d fuck her, and it was as if he were back there in the middle of the Sahara: marching over dunes, his feet sinking into the sand—nyaka, nyaka, nyaka—his soul open to the whole long path ahead, to the expanses they would cross. His mouth was dry and his eyes were fixed on the tantalizing oasis that remained ever out of reach.

  “Marshal!” he begged.

  “Vive de Gaulle!” came the shouts from all around. “De Gaulle!”

  He’d wake up trembling, surrounded by laughing tirailleurs.

  “We look for that Marshal!”

  “This time, you no cry ‘Mama’!”

  His dream of our Sita—that he didn’t share with Philothée. It was far too personal.

  3

  The Whitening of the Black Force

  If defeat is an orphan, victory has many sets of parents. In fact, the tirailleurs had quite a rude awakening after their victory. For the victory at Kufra had repercussions that soon became evident to the soldiers who had fought there. Suddenly contingents of young men began to arrive across the desert, vagabonds of the impossible, determined to take part in the battle for the liberation of France. They were for the most part young Frenchmen who, now that they had left the country to join Leclerc’s forces, were ready to make the tirailleurs forget that they had been the first ones to put their lives on the line. Others came from neighboring countries: Belgians, Spaniards, and even Germans; there were Poles, too. A cosmopolitan band, but all white, although they were joined by a scattering of Libyan goumiers. They were united by their shared hatred of Hitler, by the goal of breaking his last ball, and also by how poorly equipped they were. Like castaways in the desert, they explained how they’d been moved by the news of the victory at Kufra broadcast on English radio. The youth of a continent ground down under Hitler’s boots seemed to find its lost pride, and those who joined up with Leclerc were drooling at the idea of soon dying for France. Soon,
but with dignity.

  Defeating the Italians, that meant they’d beat the odds in death’s lottery. The results were clear: now there weren’t just machetes to distribute, but rifles, grenades, machine guns. From the United States and from England, Free France soon received many all-terrain vehicles, and even bomber aircraft. Since they wanted to die with dignity, as some of them put it, the only thing they still needed were uniforms. But really, the uniforms didn’t mean that much because, unlike the tirailleurs—some of whom had received their first pair of underwear as a gift from Free France—these mercenaries for freedom arrived fully dressed. Integrating them into the ranks added a surprisingly multicolored hue to Leclerc’s troops. Soon the growing waves of men who sought a dignified death swamped the tirailleurs, who were now in the minority. I’m sure you recall that when Leclerc left Douala, his troops were comprised mainly of the twenty or so tirailleurs Dio had placed at his orders, to which were then added the hundreds of Cameroonian recruits picked up along the way, as well as the Senegalese tirailleurs they’d found at the base at Faya-Largeau. That gives you some sense of how his column, and its firepower, had grown. Now add up the number of those who died along the way, most of whom were black. From his five thousand men, he had chosen two hundred for the Battle of Kufra, where many tirailleurs fell, just as they had at Murzuk, where Bilong had been wounded and later died. I have already mentioned the consequences of several of Leclerc’s decisions, whether practical or just misguided, which resulted in a high proportion of deaths among the black troops.

  Do the math and you’ll see that, if the total number of tirailleurs was falling—because the colonel wasn’t getting any more reinforcements from Félix Éboué—the number of white volunteers was rising. I won’t trace out the two curves here, because the math is quite obvious and easily understood. The whitening of Leclerc’s troops modified the composition of the battalions and, consequently, delayed the new recruits’ face-to-face with death. Why was it the tirailleurs who complained about this? Listen: The time when white soldiers would automatically outrank the tirailleurs had passed. The new white recruits needed to start out at the beginning, at the bottom of the ladder. But that wasn’t how it always happened. And the tirailleurs who had proven themselves on the battlefield had often been promoted. For example, after the feats of courage witnessed by Captain Massu, Hebga had become a tirailleur second-class. Even if rank meant nothing to him—a sentiment common among the black soldiers—many tirailleurs found it unacceptable that the new recruits be treated, or even promoted, as if they had fought at Kufra.

  In fact, the majority of the tirailleurs had been assigned to the infantry, while the new white recruits were more likely to be placed in the artillery. The color differential was so obvious that the Nazi press expressed its indignation, as we well know: the front lines of the French army were dusky, while the rearguard was rather white. Schwarze Schande! Rather than facing whites, Nazi soldiers were battling against blacks. In his “psychological training” speeches, as he called them, which he gave each morning, pounding on the ground with his cane, Colonel Leclerc insisted on the courage of the tirailleurs who braved the enemy cannons. None of those whom he called “valorous warriors” would have raised even one little finger to say, “Pardon me, Colonel, sir, valorous warrior means shit, I prefer artillery.” The capacity to handle military equipment, the glaring technological advantage of Europe over Africa: those arguments would have quickly silenced the complainer. What’s more, while a breach of military authority might have been dealt with diplomatically at the start of the desert campaign, there was no room for debate about it at this point. “Court-martial!” Some tirailleurs, confident because they were the ones who had taken control of the desert, gave vent to their surprise, and even grumbled about it to each other. “Oh, get a look at the whiteys there!” But still they believed the new recruits were ready to die for their homeland—and quickly! Yet a simple survey would have revealed that some of those white men who had come out of nowhere had been assigned as mechanics, even if they, too, had never seen a truck motor. As for the few Africans who were assigned to the artillery, they were relegated to such menial tasks as brushing away the tracks left across the desert by the motorized troops—and for that they were called tirailleurs-balayeurs—sweep-shooters. And then there were those tirailleurs like Hebga who just didn’t give a damn about any of this and who always volunteered to be on the front lines: for there was nothing that made the woodcutter—the Ax!—happier than the idea of cutting down Germans one after the other. Even if they chose to attack him barehanded—like the Italian Daniels he’d fought before—that would be no problem for him.

  But Hebga, he was in the minority.

  That’s when the German word Kanonenfutter made its way into the tirailleurs’ vocabulary. I won’t say that they actually used the word itself, because no one, whether they’re a tirailleur or not, can describe themselves that way: cannon fodder.

  Time passed. There was a vague cloud still hanging over the camp, a mood difficult to describe, something that no one could pin down. In any case, the tirailleurs felt their lives were being sold short, in terms of the cost of Rommel’s bullets. No, they weren’t blind to segregation or racism. But to them, this was just more of the same: life in the colonies had made them expect and put up with the worst whenever they had to deal with whites. The more I think about it, the more I tell myself that the toxic atmosphere created by the progressive whitening of the troops, and by the concentration of all the black soldiers in the infantry, produced a tension that put all the tirailleurs on edge. In short, the cohesion that had characterized the Leclerc Column up till then disappeared. I’m sure you’ll say that the desert and geography imposed their own logic on the way history is understood. After all, the tirailleurs in question were used to Africa and the heat. Okay. You’ll ask me if I’ve forgotten to account for the anxiety produced by waiting for the Germans to attack. And you’re surely right. But let’s not forget that, much later, when de Gaulle himself makes the decision to keep the soldiers—the very ones who had crossed the Sahara to liberate Paris—from marching under the Arc de Triomphe, he will cite geography, except in that case he’ll take the cold as a pretext. The cold! “Since the winter weather in the Vosges presented risks for the health of our black troops,” he wrote in his memoirs, Mémoires de guerre, volume 3, page 33, “we sent 20,000 soldiers from Central and Western Africa who had served in the first DFL and in the 9th Colonial Division to the South of France. They were replaced by an equal number of maquisards who we were then able to arm.”

  Those tirailleurs, it was understood, would soon be sent back from the South of France to their home villages. Heat here, cold there, the results are the same: doubts about the tirailleurs. Because, of course, it wasn’t just the action of one stupid new recruit—one wearing eyeglasses—who refused to drink from the canteen Philothée handed him, preferring that of the white soldier beside him—it wasn’t his stupidity that was the cause of what happened one day.

  4

  The Stutterer Speaks

  Okay, here’s what happened: Philothée threw the contents of his canteen in the fellow’s face, clearly that was going too far. It’s difficult for me not to take sides in the brawl that ensued, black soldiers on one side, white on the other. I am Cameroonian, after all. Except that I maintain Philothée did it for reasons other than skin color. For you are my witness, dear reader: I have carried this boy through this book all the way from Edéa, when he was just another member of Pouka’s little poetry circle. The fellow with the eyeglasses with whom he was fighting, well, I don’t even know his name. He’s just made his way into my story now. And besides, why did he start with that racist move?

  I can assure you of this: Philothée was shocked—with that shock a child feels on hearing a racist insult for the first time. In Edéa he didn’t often run into whites … I can also clarify that if he threw the contents of his canteen in the face of the fellow with the eyeglasses, it was less beca
use of the whiteness of that white man than because he was unable to pronounce the insult. That insult, it was a word in Bassa. Don’t ask me which one, because what matters is the battle that followed.

  Everyone came running as soon as they heard the first blows. The soldiers made a ring around the fighters and placed bets. Some bet their mess kit. Others their shoes. Or their caps. No one bet their rifle—that would have been too much. It was only a fight, after all: un chaud blo.

  “Give it to him good!” said Hebga.

  For the first time he was playing the cheerleading role that Pouka had always filled for him in the past: he was the ambianceur.

  “An uppercut!”

  All the tirailleurs were rooting for Philothée.

  “Cut balls worthless shit!”

  “Smash face him!”

  “Mamy nyanga!”

  “You see that?”

  “Kid’s strong, huh?”

  “Cameroon!”

  “Cameroon!”

  “You givin’ up? Givin’ up?”

  “I bet underpants!”

  “No joke!”

  “One!”

  “Again!”

  “Destroy potato!”

  “Come on,” said the young soldier. “Come on, destroy me, then!”

  And Philothée kept coming. Hebga’s voice rang in his ears. It rang everywhere, really: in his balls, in his hands, in his neck. Don’t ever make the mistake of doing your warm-ups next to an old athlete! Hebga kept telling him, in very clear terms, that there was no Bassa—and the tirailleurs added, no-o, no Cameroonian, the Senegalese said no way, no African, and then all the tirailleurs said as one, there was no, no, no, and no, not one black man—who had ever been beaten by a white man in a boxing match. And Hebga knew something about that—he was the champion of Cameroon!