When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  Then suddenly he called out “Hebga!”

  There were tears running down his body, or over the sand, because sand he had become: crying sand.

  “Hebga! You mamy pima!”

  At once Fouret and the other soldiers began to shoot, and shoot. He had the advantage of sitting behind a piece of heavy machinery, and he kept shooting like never before, the machine spitting out a constant barrage of fire. He shot and spat curses, shot and spat curses. But if he was shooting and cursing that much, it was because after Philothée’s shattering explosion, Hebga had heard his name over the whistling din of the bullets and broken ranks. Ah! Fouret was shooting, not to kill Italians but to protect that “son of a bitch,” that “shithead,” with his weapon from 1866 held out in front of him, who was jumping through the sand, zigzagging around the bullets: Philothée was still calling for Hebga.

  What would you have done in his place? Hebga ran to where his friend was buried in the sand, where he found his brother chopped to bits, where he found the essential parts of Philothée, his trunk, or what remained of it, and the bellowing mouth. That’s where the versions of his death diverge, depending on whether you were a real true Senegalese tirailleur, meaning a black man, or a so-called Senegalese tirailleur who was actually Camaroonian, and also a black man, or a white man, which means not a tirailleur at all: three distinct mathematical possibilities, each mutually exclusive.

  22

  Two Sorts of Tirailleurs, Plus One

  In the first version of events, told to me by a real true Senegalese tirailleur—you see, Senegal had until the end of 1942 sent its soldiers to back Pétain, and had only just shifted to the Gaullist camp—anyway, according to that real true Senegalese tirailleur, he swore he’d never seen anything like it—“Cameroonian, they strong, huh.” He said Philothée suddenly began to talk, to talk, just as he’d been screaming and screaming before. Then, grabbing on to Hebga’s neck with the stump of a hand he had wrenched out of the sand, he started to tell him, in a jumbled rush of parched words, what had just happened, and then summarized all he had learned about this Second World War, starting with his introduction to poetry, then on to French philosophy, and his introduction to Gaullist ideology.

  He first spoke about the little poetry circle in Edéa, where he read poems about love, and also about war, those of Apollinaire, for example. He moved on to the ndolo, the love found in Briqueterie, where, in the bed of his first wolowolos, he swore that the Second World War was the best thing that had ever happened to him. This led him to what he had seen when crossing the desert, including the tirailleur whose head had been torn open, lying there in the middle of all the bodies and repeating, “War not good! War not good!” He told the story of the Italian cut in two by a French shell, and noted the irony of the story, since hadn’t he just been cut down by an Italian shell?

  “Except in your case it was a mine,” Hebga noted.

  For the woodcutter had learned to distinguish among the instruments of death Free France made him face.

  In a rush of words, he explained his recent conversion to Marxism-Leninism, thanks to Fouret the revolutionary—or was he more of an idealist? Then he said that Leclerc, he wasn’t worth the trouble. And Philothée spoke on and on, trying to catch up on all the years when he hadn’t been able to express the thoughts churning in his belly before inevitable death caught up with him. He spoke and he spoke, his torrent of words giving the Italians time to reload their rifles, using up the cover the French forces provided Hebga, who, now unprotected, took a bullet right in the back because he’d crouched down to listen to Philothée’s long tirade. Hebga spread out his hands, as soldiers do as they fall. Another bullet hit him in the neck, propelling him forward; he landed on Philothée, shutting his mouth for good.

  As I’ve said, this is one version of events. According to the second, the one told by a soldier idiomatically labeled a Senegalese tirailleur, but actually from Cameroon, everything that happened there that day was just another Bassa story—pure witchcraft, you know! And you can understand that that Cameroonian tirailleur—referred to as Senegalese—wasn’t himself Bassa, because he said that Philothée began to talk—both versions are in agreement there—but added: the Italians had retreated and left their treacherous mines behind in the sand in hopes of slowing the advance of the Free French. The soldier who told me this version added that Philothée had grabbed Hebga by the neck and pulled him in close to whisper in his ear, laughing as only someone whose body has just been cut in two and who knows they’re about to die can do, “It was me, the Man who had done that!”

  Hebga’s eyes grew wide. It made no sense. Philothée couldn’t have managed to cut his own body in two with an Italian mine—even if Hebga thought the Man who had done that deserved nothing less.

  “I’m the one who screwed your mother!” Philothée went on.

  And he burst out laughing. At that point I asked the tirailleur who was telling me his version of things: “What man could swallow such a lack of respect?”

  “Cameroonians are strong,” the tirailleur telling me his version of things noted succinctly.

  “I’m Cameroonian, and I’m not that strong.”

  “Bassas are strong.”

  All that remained of Philothée was his trunk, stuck there, with his face peering out from beneath the sand—all, that is, if you don’t count the stump of a hand with which he held on to Hebga’s neck, so that he could whisper right in his ear and tell him how back in the woods he had taken his mother in so many ways that she’d been torn to pieces.

  “I’m the Man who had done that,” Philothée kept repeating.

  Hebga couldn’t believe his ears.

  Philothée explained that the best place he’d found to hide had been right next to Hebga—becoming his shadow, invisible in the bush, and stuck to his side everywhere else. After he’d done that to our Sita, to avenge the humiliation her son had inflicted on him in that boxing match long ago, Philothée had come out of the forest and taken a seat at the bar in La Seigneuriale, certain that Hebga would show up there for a beer once he’d given up on his futile quest. That’s what happened. Being part of Pouka’s little poetry circle made his hiding place all the better. By putting himself in Hebga’s shadow, he forced the woodcutter to look everywhere but right behind him.

  Oh! He certainly paid a price for sticking that close, because Philothée had to enter into the Second World War, still trying to avoid Hebga’s ax. He’d lived through everything we’ve seen till now just to stay hidden, because it was really him who had done that to our Sita: he was the Panther. Hebga was determined to look the Panther in the eyes before slitting his throat. Philothée knew that, so he kept hidden. As an added layer of camouflage, he decided he’d no longer speak, only stutter, so he could keep control of his story, keep it from spilling out like a bad bout of diarrhea. Hebga couldn’t believe his ears.

  “I’m the one who did it,” he repeated. “Hebga, it was me. Charles is my witness.”

  “Bilong?”

  “Even the old man M’bangue is my witness.”

  “Pouka’s father?”

  “Close by, but invisible. You remember?”

  “And I thought you were my brother.”

  “I am the Panther.”

  “Your own brother is the one who kills you.”

  “There, we can agree.”

  “Schouain!”

  Hebga drove his bayonet into Philothée’s mouth and the blade cut right through his head, which only then fell silent.

  “Schouain!”

  Then Hebga raised his rifle, suddenly useless there in the middle of the Second World War, and then turned it back on himself—him, a Cameroonian-Senegalese tirailleur—and sent a bullet right into his head, stunning everyone around—especially the other Cameroonian tirailleur, aka the Senegalese tirailleur who told me the story, who swore he’d never seen anything like it.

  “An assassination and a suicide right on the battlefield!”

  “Bel
ieve me, Cameroonians never miss a chance to tear each other apart.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s ndoutou.”

  “No, only a Bassa could do that.”

  Clearly he wasn’t a Bassa—my guess is he was Bamiléké. Don’t ask me why I thought that, my dear reader, it would take too long to explain and, really, it’s beside the point.

  Now let’s move on to the third version—that of a Free French soldier, but not a tirailleur—Fouret’s, to be clear. Obviously, he stressed what the French were doing—and to bring them into focus, he needed the Italians, who were on the other side of the scene. “So,” he said, “we provided perfect cover for Tirailleur Second-Class Hebga, who, overcome with emotion, had rushed into the barrage of enemy bullets to reach Philothée, his very close friend, and mine, too, who’d been killed by an enemy mine. That sort of thing happens because war, it’s not just a hunting party, you know. It’s war. Sometimes soldiers crack. In short, that’s what happened, he cracked. His comrades did everything they could—so did I, I want to make clear—to provide him with cover. Alas, the only fault to be found lies with this damned war, because had Hebga ever even learned to use his rifle?” The Free French soldier recalled that for a long time Hebga had used an ax that belonged in the Middle Ages, and what’s more, that he called it de Gaulle.

  “Strange, isn’t it?”

  So, positioned there in front of the enemy with a rifle he didn’t know how to use, the soldier—people called him a woodcutter, but that was an insult, wasn’t it?—was really executed. Looking carefully, it was clear the poor guy hadn’t even cocked his weapon!

  “Really?”

  “No joke! France uses black soldiers for cannon fodder.”

  “But they’re the ones who liberated … France.”

  “What a joke! With their machetes? No, really, the only thing that could have saved that soldier,” Fouret went on, “was speed. Speed.”

  “Explain that, sir.”

  “You need to conjure a clear mental image of the enemy, find him, take aim, and pull the trigger. Boom.”

  “But the enemy there was invisible, no?”

  “Sir, the enemy is always invisible.”

  Obviously, after the war, Fouret stopped believing in the revolution of his youth. Tired of waiting for Stalin to become a socialist, and the USSR truly Communist, he had replaced his library of Parisian idealism—which he hadn’t found after the war, since the Nazis had destroyed it in his absence—with the little anthology of Gaullist principles, and the image of France it put forth. In other words, the war had unintended consequences for everyone. As for me, the narrator, I wasn’t impressed by all the details of his tale, and even less so by the fact that he’d had the good fortune of surviving to write the whole story. I hope you won’t be, either, my dear reader. But let’s move on.

  23

  Truth’s Infinite Probabilities

  You see, if we take our set, Ω, of the primary events that took place in the desert, which correspond to the three tales told by soldiers from Leclerc’s column who witnessed the deaths of Philothée and Hebga, but were unable to intervene (x1 = the real true Senegalese tirailleur; x2 = the actually Cameroonian Senegalese tirailleur; and x3 = the white soldier), we can associate a number x to one of the values—x1, x2, x3—to describe how the central event took place. The number x is called the random variable, and for us, it is the equivalent of the truth—truth being contingent upon one’s perspective, as we all know.

  A random variable is defined once you know the probabilities—p(x1), p(x2), and p(x3)—that correspond to the different possible values of x, such as we have defined them in chapter 22. These probabilities are evidently the following:

  p(x1) + p(xi) + … + p(xn) = 1

  x = 1

  Therefore, x is the variable of truth, but this can only be random, because it depends on the individuals that I’ve chosen from among all those in Leclerc’s column to tell me their version of the facts, and on the probability of their surviving the Second World War, and the probability of their actually witnessing the events firsthand, when they were part of an army of more than five thousand men, both black and white, including real true Senegalese tirailleurs, Cameroonian-Senegalese tirailleurs, Chadian-Senegalese, Gabonese-Senegalese, etc. So we agree that establishing the truth of what happened to the Senegalese tirailleurs must perforce be complicated, with the version that is told of their participation in the Second World War and in the liberation of France contingent primarily on the nationality of the narrator of the tale. And I am, after all, Cameroonian.

  Let’s get back to Pouka. After calculating all these probabilities, the next step for him would have been to write the first draft of a poem. The draft would be written hastily, with no real sense of form: the formless forms of a feeling, with structure coming only later. He wrote a poem, of course, to tell of the drama that had just taken place in the middle of the desert, but in the end what he had wasn’t the stuff of pure alexandrines. This manner of dying, far too strange, had unhinged his poetical-mathematic reasoning. His poem was addressed to “those who died in the Sahara.” It’s well suited to that moment, which, when I think about it, is really beyond explanation.

  Sahara, Sahara, O arid and somber plain

  Where brave soldiers

  Seeking honor now sleep, stoic, in great numbers

  After battles so punishing.

  You saw them die, submerged by great numbers

  Of Attila’s warriors;

  Now they sleep among those vile ruins

  Left by bombs exploding.

  I won’t try to establish the correspondence between the alexandrines of some of this poem’s verses and the formula for calculating probabilities that I laid out above, even if I know that the theory of the correspondence between mathematics and poetry is precisely the Germanic theory of poetry, and the reason why Pouka defined himself as the maestro. I’ll concede it is so, but let’s move on.

  24

  The Desert Campaign

  Or rather, let’s get back to the matter at hand, yes, to war. It had consequences for everyone. Except, of course, for our four Cameroonian tirailleurs, because they have died, and death awaits us all, regardless of the Second World War. The Sahara swallowed up their lives and, more than their lives, their stories. In that way the desert is like memory itself. A story exists only when it is told. Do with that what you will: if no one talks about you, you’re nothing, as we say in Yaoundé. Do not ask the dunes to remember the battles that have taken place there; do not ask the sun that endlessly scorches the earth to recall the dead, even if it has turned its gaze away from them for no more than a few nights; and most of all, do not ask French history books to recall just who inscribed Liberation, with a capital L, on their streets and pages from 1940 to 1943! Ah! The Sahara is more brutal than the most forgetful of men, for Leclerc’s troops pushed on to Tripoli, on to Paris, on to Strasbourg. There are still those who can prove that the four Cameroonian soldiers did in fact parade under the Arc de Triomphe in August of 1944, and not only in their dreams, although Leclerc’s historians celebrate the fact that he raised the French flag in Strasbourg as he had promised several of his men back in the stifling heat of Kufra.

  History is a whore that everyone screws in their own fashion. What is certain is that the desert campaign was decided on the battlefield as much as in offices in London and Brazzaville, and soon thereafter in Algiers and, later, Paris. At least twice, the outcome of that African campaign was decided in the place where de Gaulle had relocated the French government—so, in what was then the French capital. It’s enough to remember his tirailleurs’ entrance into Yaoundé to know what happened in Paris in August 1944. In the City of the Seven Hills, the plums are ripe. That month of August is described with delectation, not because of Parisian joy, which soldiers entering the city, including Leclerc himself, had already encountered several times before and, therefore, no longer held any particular historic significance for
them. But because of the succulence of those fruits that you squeeze in your hand to loosen the pit, those plums that taxi drivers eat while driving, tossing the pits out the car window as they go.

  If you visit Yaoundé, ask any taxi driver—like Fritz way back when, they are all defrocked intellectuals, unemployed college graduates, sometimes even university professors trying to round out their salary—and he’ll remind you that France’s African war, far from being over, still rages on as a cold war. And the tirailleurs who disappeared in the Sahara on that day in 1942 still make their voices heard in the hubbub of the roundabout in front of the Central Post Office, which is still awaiting a statue of its hero; in the depths of the former gubernatorial palace that winks at it from the neighboring hilltop; and all across this city of Yaoundé, which has since then known only defeats. Yet, in those moving universities, those moving lecture halls that are the taxis of Cameroon’s capital, just ask any of those town-criers who are the intellectual taxi drivers of my hometown, and who, as they talk to one passenger after the other, deconstruct the universe; who, as they drive along the streets and through the poor neighborhoods, explain to you the reasons for France’s massive, ongoing military presence in Chad, in Gabon, in Senegal, “although, for England, colonization has long ended”; who list off the reasons for the eighty coups that have taken place across Africa since 1960, most of them in the French sphere; who trace out for you the Parisian ramifications of the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire; the Elysian sources of the war in Congo-Brazzaville, of the dictatorship in Burkina Faso, of the military coups in Togo, in Niger, in the Central African Republic, of the war in Chad; who reveal to you how the French were implicated in the genocide in Rwanda, as well as in those of the Bamiléké and the Bassa; who can explain to you why France holds the mineral rights in Francophone Africa, even though the International Organisation of La Francophonie includes Africa’s poorest nations; who tell you plainly and without metaphor the reasons for Paris’s unflagging support for the likes of Senghor, Bokassa, Eyadéma, “all former tirailleurs,” and for men like Biya who really don’t give a damn; who know everything without ever actually telling you how they do; in short, just ask any Cameroonian, and they’ll tell you that de Gaulle would have been nothing without Cameroon, and most of all, yes, most of all that: