When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  “Show him you’re a Bassa!”

  “You’re a black, ain’t you?”

  “Show whitey there that black man no potato!”

  And Philothée showed him. Well, no, he was actually taking hits from the French soldier. One right in the face. Blood flowed from his nose, but he had blackened his adversary’s left eye. It seems there’s pleasure to be found in making the son of a bitch in front of you suffer.

  “Is that all?” said the soldier.

  So Philothée gave him some more.

  And more.

  Philothée was only making sounds. Little sounds. Animal sounds. Each of his blows emerged from a double stutter. A triple stutter. It grew louder, starting down in his belly, where unpronounceable trisyllabic phrases were jammed up, phrases like: “worthless shit” and “dumb jackass,” along with the tetrasyllabic, like “dirty racist,” or even more complex phrases, like “you mamy pima!”

  Ah! This wasn’t a battle, but a fight between the word and someone who wanted to see his adversary dead. Because if it was a battle—here this is Hebga talking—of course Philothée would have won! Don’t ask him what he based his analysis on, because you haven’t forgotten who he was: the Ax! But in any event, he didn’t have time to elaborate a Bassa metaphysics of muscle, or to recite the thirty-one lessons a boxer needs in a critical situation. Loud as a thunderclap, Philothée hammered home one powerful phrase: “You mamy pima!”

  “Stop this nonsense now!”

  That was the voice of Captain Dio. He was responsible for training, for whipping all the recruits—wherever they came from—into shape. A passage opened up in the ring of excited spectators and there was Dio, in full uniform, cap on head.

  “Stop that now!”

  Of course, in that far-off corner of the desert, it wouldn’t have cost him anything to hold back his orders, to join the soldiers and enjoy a free boxing match. It wouldn’t have cost him anything to organize this sort of contest among his recruits, either, a black boxer against a white boxer. The soldiers of the company, white and black alike, surely would have loved it. Everyone was truly crestfallen when Captain Dio put an end to the group’s entertainment.

  “Ah!” they sighed together, whites and blacks.

  But they were divided when the score was tallied, because there was a score to settle after all. Captain Dio declared in fact that Philothée was in the wrong.

  “And now,” he added, speaking to Philothée, “Tirailleur Second-Class Philothée, apologize.”

  It would have been easier to get a nice, polite apology from a meharist’s camel. This was cheating, a swindle, and all the blacks rebelled.

  “Whitey there started it.”

  Except that Philothée’s porridge was still dripping from the face of the fellow with the eyeglasses. No joke, it was porridge Philothée had in his canteen!

  And it was hot, too.

  “Philothée, apologize!”

  Philothée tried one syllable but was interrupted by the tirailleurs’ loud chorus of protests.

  “I…”

  Expecting an apology, his adversary puffed out his chest and, with a smile on his lips, cleaned his glasses.

  “I…”

  “Tirailleur second-class Philothée, we won’t wait all day for your apology!”

  “I…”

  Was he giving in to the tirailleurs who were pressing him not to apologize to that ruffian?

  “Tie him to the post,” declared Captain Dio, “one week.”

  An uproar among the tirailleurs.

  5

  Sporting Friendships

  Oh, yes. It’s a classic part of boxing matches. The spectators are always surprised that the boxers who bloody each other’s faces are actually buddies. Tirailleurs and white recruits alike were therefore shocked when, a few days after the battle, they saw Philothée and the bespectacled soldier walking side by side. They figured that Captain Dio had gotten the apology he demanded. But it was the young French recruit who had retracted his complaint, since his “eyeglasses weren’t broken.” In all his time in Africa, Louis Dio had never met anyone like him. Anyway, the volunteers who made their way to Leclerc’s camp from the homeland, so eager to die in order to liberate France, all behaved quite strangely, at least that was what Dio and the others like him who “really knew Africans” thought. These new arrivals spoke with the blacks as if the era of colonization were over!

  Bah!

  The fellow with the glasses, Alexandre Fouret, was a young Parisian who dreamed of being a writer—with several manuscripts in his bag and, I’m sure, several rejection letters from editors. A fan of the Russian Revolution, as he soon revealed. He had always said he’d been born too late for Spain, and then the Second World War had knocked on the door of his little studio, at #3 rue Saint Jacques, in the fifth arrondissement. He kept a journal of his adventures in which one could read of his disappointment that the black man with whom he’d struck up a friendship stuttered. Yet he will come to recognize the many advantages of Philothée’s silence. And, by the way, just where did you get that strange name, Philothée? It’s a rare one, even in France. Fouret was the only one who recognized the name from the poetry circle: “Philothée O’Neddy?”

  The guy from Edéa couldn’t remember anymore. What interested him was the discovery that you could say something to a Frenchman besides the usual, “Yes, boss,” “Yes, Colonel,” “Yes, Captain.” That really changed things, even if he still preferred to listen. Every Marxist adores an audience. Fouret didn’t complain about having Philothée’s ear. He explained that his own first name was rather reactionary, but oh well, there was nothing to be done about it. His parents were Catholics, fanatics, really. Had his tirailleur friend ever heard about Lenin? Fouret stressed that he had joined up not to rebel against his Catholic parents who had named him, but to prove that Lenin’s theories needed to be adapted to the historic moment.

  “Capitalism’s final stage,” he said, “is Nazism.”

  He fell silent for a moment, just to make sure Philothée had really understood.

  “This war is necessary,” he continued, “even if it’s not the solution.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, having understood how to keep the conversation going. “Why? Because it fails to get to the root of things.”

  “Roo … roo…”

  “Yes, the root, that’s capitalism. Our real war is against capitalism. This war is a distraction, but we don’t have any choice: Hitler forced it on us!”

  Obviously, they only had such conversations during their breaks; the rest of the time they were busy doing drills, checking their equipment, marching across the desert, standing guard, being alert. In short, being a soldier in the Second World War that didn’t address the root of the problem and that, moreover, according to Fouret, was financed by capitalists. Philothée discovered that he and his friend had something in common: they despised the war for which they had volunteered. The Cameroonian remembered the soldier who kept repeating on the battlefield: “War not good.” What had happened to him? Oh! War’s true self was revealed in little, veiled signs floating in the timelessness of memory. He called them “the Truth,” according to the general theory of life and death that he was patiently elaborating, in the silent puzzle of his wordless mind and its confrontation with the brutal reality of things.

  * * *

  Philothée couldn’t know it, but the relationship between capitalism and war had been examined back in Yaoundé only a few days earlier by another Frenchman: Jacques Delarue, whom Um Nyobè had met at the neighborhood soccer field. He went there each weekend to train with his friends and referee games. Marc had introduced him to Delarue as his “colleague,” and Um Nyobè hadn’t failed to pick up on the irony when his friend, that ardent defender of Cameroon’s interests, suddenly adopted a deferential attitude toward a Frenchman. Delarue was a rather well-built guy—he looked like a policeman, but with an engaging smile, and he was a good defender. To everyone’s surprise, he opted to tr
ain with the blacks—usually the colonists played among themselves—explaining that he didn’t live far from the native quarter, “so why cross the whole city just to play soccer with your boss, huh…?” Everyone thought it was a reasonable decision. Still, he was something of a curiosity, especially for the children who cried out, “Nta’ngan! Nta’ngan! Nta’ngan!” as soon as he got the ball—not to mention when he scored a goal. They gave him a month, “no longer,” before he’d adapt to the reality of this country where playing soccer had made him the butt of the children’s jokes.

  Sporting friendships quickly overcome barriers of race, nation, and even war: Um Nyobè’s fellow soccer players soon learned this simple truth, the same one Philothée’s comrades had learned on the battlefields of the Sahara. One Sunday after a game, Um Nyobè invited Delarue to come back to his house, as his friends Marc, Ouandié, and Etoundi usually did after practice. He was the first white man to cross the threshold of the house in Messa. To tell the truth, he made a very different impression on Martha than he had on her husband.

  “He’s a spy for the governor,” she said after he’d left.

  “Very well,” said Um Nyobè, “he can tell the governor how one of his subaltern employees lives.”

  “I don’t like his face.”

  “Well, since you at least like his hands and feet, that’s enough to make me, your husband, happy.”

  “Did you see his eyes?”

  “Oh! I was looking at his mouth instead.”

  “And that goatee?”

  Both of them agreed, however, “He talks a lot.”

  Delarue had Marxist tendancies, too, as he put it. He preferred to call himself a “union man,” even if that really didn’t mean anything in Cameroon in 1942, when there weren’t yet any unions.

  “There aren’t any in France, either,” he clarified, “they’re illegal over there, too.”

  Illegal? There he made a mistake, one that Marc—ah! Marc!—was quick to correct.

  “Here,” the man who always knew better than anyone else added, “there’ve never been any unions.”

  “Well, then,” Delarue replied, “you need to start some.”

  That’s how the friends discovered the Frenchman’s practical side, always coming up with the most rational solution to life’s problems. For example, why cross the whole of Yaoundé to play soccer with whites when there’s a team in your own neighborhood?

  And why let some imbecile rap you on the knuckles with a ruler when you can organize and show him what’s what?

  And why head off to war when you can get transferred to a colony and live the good life?

  “Pacifism’s rational, right?”

  Conclusion: Delarue was a pacifist.

  “There’s no more room in France for bastards like me,” he admitted one day.

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  Thus, another side of his personality was revealed. Beneath his apparently easygoing demeanor, he liked to be the center of attention. Martha was waiting for the day when her husband would clash with “that Delarue,” since the two men’s personalities were so similar. Yet they became very good friends. Another of life’s surprises. Since his visits were attracting too much attention, especially from the children who celebrated each time he came by, and no doubt the colonial administration would soon notice as well, Delarue suggested a practical solution to Um Nyobè. He’d no longer come to the friendly gatherings, or to Um Nyobè’s house at all, for that matter; they’d only see each other at the soccer games, after which, under the guise of talking about sports, he’d offer advice on the matters that were troubling them and about which Delarue knew a thing or two. If there was something urgent, Marc could pass along the message. They learned that he’d been trained as a lawyer, but had never practiced in France: to his mind, defending criminals was useless because it was society that produced the crime. And the foundation of that society was capitalism, which found its definitive expression in colonialism. He had come to Cameroon as an observer, to gather research for the book he was writing on the political economy of colonialism. “And, it goes without saying, because of the war”—he preferred to stay out of that altogether. To cut short a story that would be much longer and more detailed than what I’ve said here—for Delarue also believed that he was being tailed by “the dogs”—he became the shadow adviser of our Sunday soccer-playing politicians.

  6

  Friendship Above All Else

  But Delarue didn’t really know that colony known as Cameroon! On January 3, 1942, Um Nyobè’s boss wrote the following explanation of why he’d given him a rating of 18/20 in his last performance review: “An agent who knows his job well, but who is inconsistent in his service; a good agent; a little too pretentious; not promotable.” Since until this point the writer had only received high praise, in this lower-than-expected evaluation one can discern the consequences of his nighttime meetings with his soccer friends Ouandié, Marc, Jérémie, and Etoundi. One can even recognize the enactment of Leclerc’s directives, given when he was still governor, and that no-good Cameroonian could ever forget: “I have seen others already more aware of their rights than of their duty; they must be firmly put back in their place. We are not afraid of them.” In any event, Nyobè was learning the cost of his growing political responsibilities. Could it be that his boss was afraid of him—the agent?

  The fact is that our man was paying for a friendship far older than the one that linked him to the soccer-loving French lawyer: Fritz had told him that he was going to have a Christian wedding to make his marriage with Ngo Bikaï official and that Father Jean said he needed someone to stand up for him.

  “So,” Fritz concluded, “I thought of you.”

  Obviously, Um Nyobè couldn’t give his boss that reason: the marriage of a childhood friend, especially since it was a second wedding to the same woman—even if it was a Christian ceremony this time. That just didn’t sound serious, because what does the French administration care about a childhood friend? Is he a relative? Even taking into account the broader sense of family in Africa, there were limits! Of course, Um Nyobè and Fritz had known each other since their first years on schoolroom benches. But if that was his argument, his boss would certainly have replied that if he needed to go to the weddings of every one of his friends from grade school, as well as take part in the funerals of uncles and aunts, he’d have no more time for work. And Um Nyobè had already run through his list of dead uncles—the one every good Cameroonian keeps on hand for such situations.

  When he was standing in front of his boss, with words of his “father’s serious illness” on his lips—a bad excuse if ever there was one—his boss went into such a rage that he pounded on the table.

  “No, no, no, no, and no!” he cried. “Mr. Ruben Um Nyobè, would you kindly do your work before you bury your whole family?”

  What could he say?

  “There is no excuse,” his boss went on, “for such unprofessionalism!”

  There the writer made the mistake of arguing.

  “My father isn’t dead,” he clarified. “I’m just asking for leave so I can take him to the hospital.”

  Between you and me, you can’t let anyone mention the death of their father like that without reacting. That’s the sort of thing that brings bad luck. I can assure you that any good Cameroonian would have done what Um Nyobè did. But do we need to say that the French colonial administration really didn’t give a damn about good Cameroonians? It preferred those who didn’t ask for leave—even just a few days—in the middle of a war. As for Um Nyobè’s boss, as far as he was concerned he preferred employees who didn’t talk back, even if he would have done the same thing in similar circumstances. The last straw was that despite this, the writer went back to the village for his friend’s wedding! Ah! Um Nyobè, you, too! Later you’ll try and talk to us about man’s exploitation of his fellow man! As if you didn’t already know enough about white men!

  Um Nyobè had his reasons. He knew that his bo
ss couldn’t do without his best writer in the middle of the war. Who was there in the pension office who could have done his job as well as he did? Certainly not that boss of his! Um Nyobè could take off work because he was a workaholic. In short, his father’s illness did the trick, and Um Nyobè had no regrets about it because the wedding of Fritz and Ngo Bikaï really stood out in the annals of Edéa. People often say that you should wait a good while before getting married. Those two, it seems, had taken that advice to heart. The marriage coincided with the start of the rainy season, and on that day a fine mist of rain fell from the sky. It was taken as a sign of the spirits’ blessing. The first rain of the season.

  The wedding couple wore their finest clothes. Never before had anyone seen Ngo Bikaï wearing a dress with a low-cut neckline. Fritz had bought her what the women were wearing in Douala, that is to say, fashion from Paris. He himself wore a tie and a three-piece suit, made to order at the boutique Paris Comes to You; the shop’s tailor, newly arrived, was the talk of the town. The couple were stationed behind a long table decorated with flowers and lined with bottles of all sorts of liqueurs. Their living room was aglow with their obvious happiness. The guests formed a line, first offering them words of blessing and then moving down the gigantic table, where a whole array of dishes were displayed, crowned by a succulent African threadfish—a real captain—and an assortment of condiments.

  Let’s skip over the church service, because no one really paid any attention to Father Jean’s sermon. No one—not even Ngo Bikaï—saw his benediction as anything other than a social formality. He read the text from his Bible. He might just as well have read from the Book of Nature itself, because the sky showed more inspiration than he. He stressed the couple’s happiness, the warmth of their home, the lifelong love they would share. Yet these three things were nothing new for the couple that stood before him. The walls of their home were like a museum dedicated to their life together; their three children, also dressed in European-style clothes, sat beside them; and their happiness was there for all Edéa to see. Father Jean had come into their lives rather late with all his benedictions. But good manners require that you listen to a priest until he decides to stop talking.