Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  “She was still bleeding from it,” Sara told me. “It was plain to see.”

  To tell the truth, the whole Bamum sultanate never really got over that business. Even if its fall from grace had actually begun long before, on the sixth of July, 1902, to be exact, when the first whites, three German representatives—Lieutenant Sandrock and Captain Ramsay, accompanied by the Swiss merchant Habisch—knocked at the southern gate of Foumban and Sultan Njoya asked his archers, who were ready to kill them, to lay down their arms.

  Let me clarify, if I may: the fall of the Bamum sultanate formally occurred on the April 13, 1903, when Njoya himself, carrying a plate of eggs, greeted a certain Lieutenant Hirtler—how could anyone forget that awful name?—at the gate of his capital city. Ah! Did the sultan even realize that he was opening his court to a never-ending slew of calamities? First, the lieutenant had the eggs boiled and shared them with his men; second, when he arrived at the royal court, the stupid officer actually went and sat down in the sultan’s own chair, the Mandu Yenu, which had been waiting all this time for his colonial behind, or so he seemed to think. Of course, Sara couldn’t have known all the ins and outs of this shameful history—1903, 1914, 1931 …

  It was now 2000. How could she have known what happened back then?

  Yet Sara discovered that all these wounds that cut so deep into the back of the Bamum people were quite personal to the matron. The violence of her grip, just like her refusal to listen to the litany of complaints from her girls, was proof that she no longer believed that others felt pain. The scar on her neck revealed enough of the violence she had suffered—of which she never spoke—even if it failed to explain her cruelty. As for the car that back then stood dead in the courtyard of Mount Pleasant, it didn’t even answer the songs, shouts, and tears of the children who pretended to drive it, trying in vain to get it back on the road: vroom, vroom!

  1914, 1931 … The car’s engine gave a little leap, as did the history of the Bamum—and that of the world itself. Whatever Bertha had lived through, it was terrible. One day Sara would realize the same could be said of her own life.

  1931. Her day began early in the sultan’s compound, at an hour when the sun’s rays were still timid. How could Bertha not see that that alone could make a girl smash her head against the wall?

  “Your mother spoiled you,” that’s all the matron had to say about it.

  That was what she thought of all the girls who came to her: spoiled children. She hadn’t had a daughter, but a son, Nebu, about whose tribulations Sara would soon learn. Still, Bertha considered the girls she trained, and the babies that they in turn offered to Njoya, as her own.

  Training the sultan’s wives was no small task, oh, no! Even back in Foumban, the work had eaten up her life, although she could only glimpse that truth reflected in the eyes of others. Sara became her eyes, though it did her no good. Now in Yaoundé, Bertha never imagined anyone had a past outside the walls of Mount Pleasant, and it is no exaggeration to say that she lived as if she had no future: that was the price paid for the right to see the sultan naked.

  Then one day the matron read that same absence of a future in Sara’s frantic, unfocused eyes. How could they have been friends? If the girl had opened her lips, her mouth would have spoken words the matron couldn’t understand. It was already bad enough that Sara hadn’t passed the virginity test she had been forced to undergo. But when Bertha saw the layers of silenced stories spread out before her eyes, questions she had previously thought necessary only for Bamum girls were unleashed.

  “Who did you sleep with, you hussy?”

  Followed by: “Just one man?”

  Girls from Yaoundé don’t have enough fingers to count the number of men who have been between their legs. How sad that virtue is lost so quickly! Sara flinched at each of these remarks, especially since Bertha screamed them in her ears. Yes, the matron was shouting, convinced that that was how to get through to a person who didn’t speak her language. The girl’s frightened eyes sought refuge in the dark from the thousands of images that haunted her past. The matron shouted, and Sara kept quiet. For the girl more than for anyone else, the beginning was also an end.

  7

  A Mean Woman

  “Didn’t you try to escape?” I ventured.

  “Of course I did. And not just once,” Sara confessed. “I always wanted to go back to my mother.”

  One day she left the matron’s rooms and set off down the corridors of Mount Pleasant. She walked on and on, passing sleepy-faced guards, family homes with their whispered secrets, happy invitations to come play in the sultan’s dead car. She walked on and on. She didn’t run, so as not to attract the attention of the men sitting on the ground in the inner courtyards, busily playing ngeka, the mathematical game so popular among the Ewondo. Finally she found herself back in front of Bertha, who was standing in her doorway wrapped in her blue pagne. Bertha, whose anger was evident in the fists propped on her hips.

  “Where did you think you were going?” the furious matron shouted.

  Sara kept silent. Even on that day Bertha couldn’t wrest one word from the girl. Not one! The matron turned away from Sara, who thought the episode forgotten; she would soon learn the price of her refusal to speak. Bertha disappeared into the main courtyard and quickly returned, a stripped eucalyptus branch in her hands. She tested the elasticity of the whip, bending it in front of the terrified little girl before grabbing her by the arm. The old woman grimaced as she raised the whip. But then her hand froze. She couldn’t seem to make her body inflict the punishment. Again she raised her whip, and again she froze, her body thrust forward, her hand above her head. Tears ran down her face.

  “Where were you, you miserable child?”

  Sara didn’t answer. The matron tried again.

  “Never run away again, or I’ll really have to show you!”

  “I want to go home to my mother!”

  These words reduced the woman to silence. She threw down her whip and walked away in defeat. Another time, she got so angry she sent Sara herself to the courtyard to pick the whip for her punishment. Some of the children from the compound helped the girl to complete her absurd task, reveling in the opportunity to turn from their simple games to actual violence. But once again the matron was unable to mete out the threatened punishment.

  Later she admitted, “I looked everywhere for you, did you know that?”

  Her voice grew gentle, and she asked, “Where did you go?”

  That day Sara realized that Bertha’s anger wasn’t just surprising—it was strangely inconsistent. After each of her attempted escapes the girl would find herself once more in front of the blue silhouette of the matron, who stood waiting in the doorway of her house of suffering, hands on her hips. Flabbergasted, Sara would let herself be dragged into the bedroom by a Bertha who raised an impotent whip—a Bertha whose mouth spit out angry flames but whose hands only waved the whip and never used it. Once, at the sight of Bertha’s seething face, Sara began running backward, terrified by the lady’s silent defeat. “I am tired of chasing after you,” Bertha exploded. “I am worn out, do you hear me? Don’t make me chase after you ever again!”

  “Didn’t you ever ask her why she couldn’t…,” I started to ask one day, regretting the phrase as soon as it was begun.

  “Why she couldn’t what?”

  Sometimes Sara dreamed that a woman was coming through the shadows to take her away. The woman would open a door leading into the forest and Sara would rush right after her. But soon all the paths would fade away beneath the little girl’s feet and she’d stop dead. She’d watch the woman disappear in the distance. Once or twice she ran to catch up with the elusive woman. Sara ran but soon grew tired. Although she never saw the face of the woman in her dreams, Sara was convinced it was her mother. This faceless woman haunted both her nights and her days for quite a long time. Sara never saw her mother again, except in her dreams. These became moments of real torture, from which she’d awake screaming i
n terror.

  “Why do you cry out in the night?” Bertha scolded her. “You should speak during the day, not at night.”

  “I thought she had sold me,” Sara admitted, her voice filled with despair. “To think how I hated her for that!”

  No, her mother couldn’t have sold her. Looking deep into her empty eyes, her deep wrinkles, and her enigmatic silence, I told her so: “That’s just not the kind of thing a mother would do.”

  Sara seemed to accept what I said.

  “You’re right,” she replied distractedly, scratching her feet, lost in her own thoughts.

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “I always thought,” Sara confessed another day, her hands spread open to include me, “that my mother was a prisoner of her woman’s body, too.”

  Even the loss of her virginity hadn’t opened the doors of freedom for Sara. Had she first met Bertha in Foumban, the situation would have been dealt with differently: shame would have sealed the girl’s fate, and she would have been sent back to her mother’s house, her body bearing the scar of rejection. A cousin or some other young girl in the family would have taken her place; Bertha would have bribed the Tangu, the chief of the sultan’s police, and the whole thing would have been resolved quietly. If her impurity had been discovered on the eve of her introduction into the sultan’s bed, chicken blood, instead of the girl’s own, would have stained the royal bed …

  The archival documents wax eloquent about this period of Njoya’s life, although they are quiet about the ins and outs of his bedroom and antechambers. Colonial modesty? I have found notes from bureaucrats, as well as from priests, botanists, veterinarians, and even anonymous travelers who had spent no more than one night as Charles Atangana’s guests, but who still found the words to fill page after page of their notebooks. Yet about Njoya’s intimate relations, these scribes said precious little.

  Still, isn’t it interesting to know that the chief, Charles Atangana, never failed to furnish these colonial travelers with a girl for the night, just as he did for Njoya? Only one of these mad scribblers mentioned the “sinfulness” of the night he’d spent “in the valley of the Ewondo, which only a miracle could save.” The author of these lines was a Catholic priest! I’ll come back to him soon enough. Of all of these men, however, not one seemed indifferent to the charisma of Charles Atangana.

  In the records, the differential treatment accorded to Njoya and to the chief didn’t stop at the bedside. Charles Atangana had redefined his relationship with the French in a twist that even the sultan found difficult to understand. And how! Atangana is still mentioned in history books as the only person in the protectorate who, between 1914 and 1920, right in the middle of the war, was able to change his name, to shed the Germanic Karl and become the English Carl and then the French Charles without any uproar from the colonial public. The few scattered documents in the French archives that do draw attention to his hypocrisy, his duplicity, and above all his humble origins—they actually use the word “slave”—hardly count.

  When Sara arrived at Mount Pleasant, Charles Atangana had just returned from a trip to Paris, where he was the guest of President Gaston Doumergue and attended the opening of the Colonial Exhibition in the Bois de Vincennes. Oh, but Paris wasn’t the first European capital he had visited! He already had seen Madrid, where he had spent two years, and also Barcelona and Rome. So he could gauge his opinion of the French capital by what he had seen elsewhere in Europe, just as he could compare the French president with the German kaiser, the Spanish king, and the pope. Of course, for obvious reasons, he didn’t ever make these comparisons when he was in Cameroon.

  The friendship between Charles Atangana and Njoya dated from the period of the chief’s disgrace when, in 1920, after his return from Spain, he was stripped of his title as paramount chief by the French, who were then administering Cameroon. He was sent instead to work on the construction of roads in the region around Foumban. That’s how he found himself in the city where Njoya was struggling to maintain his former authority in the face of a new and overly capricious political force. One little word would soon rewrite the chief’s destiny, restoring the powers that had been his under the German and British administrations: the word was “cocoa.”

  I’ll come back to this later.

  Njoya’s trajectory, on the other hand, would follow the path—first torturous and then shameful (not to mention tragic)—of those who put all their eggs in the Germans’ basket: the path of collaboration. Sometimes I think that Charles Atangana, a professional translator, had relied for survival on his tongue’s gymnastics when the whole world turned topsy-turvy. Initially he had put himself squarely in the Germans’ camp, for they had named him an Oberhäuptling, a paramount chief, and he had acquired a taste for giving orders. He had followed them to Europe after the war, had testified for them before all the tribunals, where, at the end of the conflict, German colonizers sought restitution for their lost plantations. Yet the chief hadn’t hesitated to change camps, for he understood that it was the only way for him to get back home to Cameroon.

  For Njoya, colonization had been simply a game of chess, one he hoped to win with a final flourish. Yet, and this I swear, he never could have imagined that Sara, the nine-year-old child who had been offered to him by a friend, would be the one to trace a path through the labyrinth of his colonial redemption. But again, on this point the colonial archives remain silent. And that is why the doyenne’s words must pick up the slack, although the little girl who entered Mount Pleasant, shivering as she passed through the corridors of the compound, could never have imagined that she’d come to play such a role.

  How could Sara imagine it, especially when, in the matron’s darkened room, she spread her legs and discovered that her vagina would swallow up an egg that was supposed to be too big for it? When she got up afterward, she met Bertha’s glowering, shame-filled eyes. There are falls from which no one expects to recover. Happily, the world also holds the secret of bounces.

  8

  Girl-Boy

  Here are the facts: if Sara hadn’t swallowed her tongue, she might have found the words to express her emotions. Every time Bertha’s hands touched her legs, she bit her lips. She stomped her feet. She tore at her skin. She felt as if a hand were going right through her flesh. Oh! She didn’t cry out, but her eyes just filled with tears all the faster.

  If Bertha had shown a little compassion here; if she had asked one or two questions; if, in short, she had opened her own ears, she certainly would have opened the floodgates of this most frantic of silences: the silence of Sara’s uncle Owona when the chief’s men came to drag the girl away from her mother; the silence of that shadowy man who hadn’t held on to his niece, but had instead used his hands to trap Sara’s mother’s, to keep her from protecting her daughter.

  And what of her father?

  What father? Hadn’t Uncle Owona become Sara’s father after her own father died? Hadn’t he inherited Sara’s widowed mother? Ah, let’s forget about this father for a moment: it would have taken just one word, one step, one move—yes, with one simple move Bertha could have discovered the depth of Sara’s trembling silence. But all girls are liars: that was her opinion. Only a mother’s ravaged face could have understood the horror Bertha was unable to comprehend. It wouldn’t have cost Bertha a thing to get to know her girls a little more, that’s what the doyenne told me.

  And yet, and yet:

  “What did anyone really know in those days?”

  There are families that offered up their youngest born to the sultan in the hopes of a reward. For whom a daughter was merely a step on the ladder of their slow ascent to power, a tree that grew in order to protect them with its generous shade. Fathers who dreamed of moving closer to the palace, whatever the cost, certainly advocated most eloquently in defense of this convoluted logic. Sara’s story, however, differed from the classic scenarios someone like Bertha could imagine among the Bamum in Foumban, for the girl was from a different ethnic
group—a different world. She was Ewondo. And the sultan’s matron, who had grown old watching over and judging the Bamum girls who were brought to her on the basis of their potential alone, would have benefited from being just a tad more curious in this specific case, from pushing a little harder on the locked gates of the girl’s whispered words, from, in short, asking questions in the past tense.

  “People are strange, but that’s an argument with very short legs, isn’t it?” Sara said to me, shaking her head.

  Because Sara went from silence to wild convulsions, the matron was forced to pay closer attention to her. Soon her eyes began to follow the girl along the corridors of the house. And often Bertha’s voice was heard calling Sara’s name through the passages. When the old woman let go of the girl’s legs on the day of the infamous egg test, Sara ran and hid, naked, in the first open room she found. Only a mother is able to cover up a shameful story under a cloak of love. And so the boy, yes the boy whom Bertha dragged from the room where Sara had disappeared would soon understand that the reason for the matron’s increasingly labored breathing was that she had suddenly, and unexpectedly, rediscovered her maternal instincts.

  Oh, was there any way to explain what had suddenly misted Bertha’s pale cheeks and filled her sleepy breasts, except to say that he had been recognized by a mother’s body? Had he shown just a little more curiosity, this boy would have discovered in the body of this maternal latecomer the tortured story of a loss, the story of a life linked to the end of his own.

  Bertha asked the only question possible in this situation. “What’s happening?”

  She furiously wiped her hands on her rear end, as if she had just touched excrement.