Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  The boy whose gaze had frozen her own asked no questions. He stared at Bertha silently, desperately.

  This is what happened: Sara had gotten confused. In the darkness where she sought refuge, she had put on clothes that didn’t belong to her. Her mind was filled with thoughts of escape: escape from the matron, from Uncle Owona. Escape. Obviously, in her panic, she hadn’t realized what she had become. But Bertha saw the boy she was from then on, and she immediately recognized him as her son. Yes, the matron recognized the young girl struggling in her arms as the son she had lost in the far-off, swirling mists of her life in Foumban. Her face turned to clay. Covering her mouth with her hand, she smothered a cry; she wanted to be sure of what she was seeing.

  “Who are you?”

  Bertha took a step back but stopped in the doorway, thus blocking out the light that could have revealed the truth.

  “What’s happening?”

  She pressed hard on her belly to calm the kicks she had never expected to feel again.

  Bertha shivered with cold, squeezing her dripping breasts and pushing on her aching belly. She knew her questions were of no use. Sara wouldn’t answer any of them. The matron stripped this accidental boy with the violence of a disappointment felt by her alone. She raised her hand to strike but let it fall, having finally understood the limits of her anger. She didn’t ask the girl to go get the whip for her punishment. On the contrary, her eyes were filled with tears when she finally managed to stammer, “Why?”

  On that day, the relationship between Sara and Bertha was radically changed, retreating ever further into the labyrinth of lies. The matron, who for an instant had seen her son come back to her, wiped her eyes and discovered instead a terrified Sara. The shadows held nothing more for her than a mute and disoriented young girl. From then on, Sara noticed that Bertha eyed her suspiciously, looking for something only a mother can see.

  Poor Sara. She had no idea about the crazy plan beginning to take shape in the mind of a matron whose maternal instinct had been abruptly awakened. She was truly dumbfounded when, after her attempted escape, Bertha burst into tears and stood frozen in front of her, holding a whip she suddenly lacked the strength to wield. The matron’s lips were murmuring the words “my child.” Like a butterfly caught in a spider’s web, the girl collapsed against the mats of the old woman’s chest. Bertha cut the girl’s hair, leaving only one lock on the top of her head, like a boy.

  Since the Bamum prefer boys to girls, Sara had no trouble wending her way through Mount Pleasant’s courtyards in her new apparel. Only the children on the sultan’s car gave her any trouble: she distracted them from their games with the stationary automobile. As Sara passed by, they’d shout out invitations to play, but when she turned away, they’d taunt her with this annoying rhyme that hit the mark each time:

  “Cluck, cluck, cluck! went the hen! Oh my!

  See the little boy come by!

  Tonight is the night I’m gonna die!”

  Happily, the little devils were taken in by the cross-dressing. Nothing about Sara alarmed them. And in any event, Bertha quickly set them straight: children couldn’t make fun of the sultan’s shadow like that. As for Sara, she was happy to be left in peace at last, although she would have liked a chance to play with kids her own age.

  “If walking around with a shaved head was the price to pay for being free from the matron’s whip, that was a good deal,” the doyenne added, her grandmotherly pragmatism reflected in the set of her jaw.

  But that wasn’t all: Bertha also ran hot stones over Sara’s chest to delay the development of her breasts. To tell the truth, this routine was no surprise to the girl: her mother had done it to her several times, too. Except that the matron wasn’t trying to slow down the rapid growth of a woman. She wanted to bring her son back to life. She wanted to turn Sara into the boy she had become by chance: Nebu.

  “Why did you go along with it?” I asked the doyenne.

  Sara told the saga of her life without losing her smile; she took another pinch of tobacco, as if there were nothing strange about her story. She was thrilled that she had tricked the omniscient Sultan Njoya, and she still laughed about how a simple garment had changed the life of a little girl.

  “Even the witch was completely taken in by it,” Sara told me. “I was a perfect little boy.”

  “And did you like that?”

  “What do you think?”

  Her transformation into a boy had freed not just one but two women from the tragedies of their lives. If the tears that streamed down the matron’s face each time she raised the whip to hit her allowed Sara to guess what was going on, only later would she really understand what it meant for Bertha to call her, forever after, “my son.”

  9

  The Labyrinths of Childhood

  The exquisite pleasure of being someone else, that’s what finally freed Sara from her suffering. The girl entered into a house, excuse me, into a life, where she didn’t meet any children her own age, but where her ears were filled with a thousand stories. She entered into an existence where a specific task was assigned to her. Sara entered, in fact, into a house of mystery, a house of a thousand whispers, where silence was always menacing, filled with invisible ghosts. By an absurd stroke of luck, the sultan was in need of a shadow—the previous one had quit, preferring to live out his exile in the city’s poorer quarters.

  The little girl had to get used to the name Bertha gave her. Happily, her entrance into Njoya’s inner circle was facilitated by her decision to remain silent. The sultan’s secrets, along with her name, would remain buried in her mouth as if in a tomb—just as Bamum tradition required.

  “Ah, I was only a slave,” Sara told me. “Nothing but a slave!”

  Was she serious? I could have replied that since slavery had been abolished in the protectorate by colonial decree, her status was rather ill defined. There are questions that must be asked, especially if one has spent time in America.

  “Tell me,” I asked her, “what did it mean to be a slave in those days?”

  “I was the sultan’s property. Only,” she added, raising her finger to emphasize her point, “he wasn’t my master!”

  Did Sara realize I didn’t understand her answer?

  “Your silhouette doesn’t belong to you, does it?” she continued with a smile.

  “No.”

  “But it follows you everywhere.”

  “Yes, it follows me everywhere.”

  “Except that,” she added, giving a quick look around, “sometimes you don’t see it. Well, that’s the kind of life I had. The life of a shadow.”

  Sara might have saved herself a lot of trouble had she answered Bertha’s calls with less impertinence. The matron was exploring the unexpected consequences of her renewed motherhood. Breaking with tradition, Bertha insisted that the sultan’s shadow spend his nights “at home.” What a strange demand! Yet there were ears to hear it, and hands willing to make it so. I had some trouble, I’ll admit, imagining a woman who had been introduced as a witch suddenly shedding a mother’s tears.

  Sara reminded me of this simple truth: “Bertha always called me Nebu.”

  The matron insisted, “I want the right to see him.”

  The right? You have to understand how affection grows in the belly of a woman when she belatedly discovers the child that could have been her own. Could anyone have imagined that after her breasts’ sudden reawakening, Bertha would vow to give birth to her son once more? Could anyone have suspected the pains she felt in her belly whenever her boy left for Njoya’s chambers? Was there anyone who didn’t hear the cries of a woman in labor coming from her room each time he did?

  Only Nebu could have known it had all started the day Bertha took in a girl given as a gift by the chief. If a boy was seen leaving her house every day, who could swear it was a girl who had entered? As for the chief’s men, they had come there only once and then disappeared, lost in the endless mystery of
colonial violence.

  “Nebu!” Bertha called. “Nebu, come here!”

  Everyone found it funny to see her chase her boy with the shaved head through Mount Pleasant’s courtyards. Everyone laughed when, out of breath, she called the child by his full name: “Nebuchadnezzar!”

  But call she would, until her son’s face appeared at her door. Sometimes an adult offered a helping hand and brought the recalcitrant child back to her: “Here he is!”

  Bertha also tried flattery: “Do you know that when you were a child, you ate a lot?” That’s how Sara knew that Nebu hadn’t died in childhood, but when he was an adult. She understood that ultimately, Bertha dreamed not just of giving birth again to the child she’d lost, but of giving him an entirely different life. Bertha thought that life would be possible if she could just tell her newfound son the full story—bit by bit, anecdote by anecdote—tell him all the twists and turns in the life of the one she had lost; if she could just breathe into this miracle child, word by word, the life of the one who had fallen on the path through hell. It wasn’t a problem for her that Nebu was the sultan’s shadow. No, far from it.

  From the doyenne’s story I deduced that the matron needed her son back in order to love the work to which she had sacrificed her life. A mother’s love has no limits, right? But Bertha rediscovered her purpose the moment she no longer had any girls to care for. Sara was the last one entrusted to her. She didn’t want to dwell on that. Like all the others, that girl had failed the virginity test—and in the end, she’d just as soon forget that, too. Her son, Nebu, on the other hand, gave her back an energy she thought she had lost for good. She told him all the details of the other one’s life: “Do you know that…”

  Here’s how it went. Sara would sit on the ground, with Bertha on a bench behind her, as if she were going to braid her hair. The matron would squeeze the little girl’s body between her knees and hold her head with her hands. She would speak directly into her ears, whispering and singing. She would tell her about Nebu’s life, all the details of his remarkable epic, his life in Bamum land, his travels in and around Foumban. She spoke to the child, but it was really one long monologue. She spoke until her voice gave out, until her words were emptied of life and burned her lips. She spoke as a mother speaks to her child, nourishing him with words and milk. At the end of her tale, it was as if suddenly someone else began to move within the little girl’s body, in her limbs. The long-lost Nebu had come back to life, and suddenly a new destiny opened up for Sara. Hard to believe that Bertha’s son was just one of the faces of the thronging crowd I discovered under the shell of Sara’s face!

  10

  Symphony of a Colonial City

  In the 1930s Yaoundé wasn’t a city, but a town with a population of barely 150,000, whites and blacks included. In those days, the high commissioner’s palace, the central post office, the police stations, the French bakery, the café La Baguette de Paris, the church in Mvolyé, and the palace of the paramount chief were the only signs of the capital city that Yaoundé has since become. These touches of European-style urbanity let everyone know they were in a colony. The many shops that spread out along the main road, including a pharmacy and even a pet store, gave the area—already known as Ongola—the feel of a place where things were looking up. Mount Pleasant, with its ornate bamboo walls and its raffia roof, adorned with geckos and two-headed snakes, stood out starkly, even among the disparate architectural styles. There were some compounds built in the Fulani style, especially in Briqueterie, the Muslim neighborhood, but they were becoming less common.

  The truth is that the group of native Ewondo families that today claim the history of Yaoundé as theirs and theirs alone was already outnumbered by the Fulani shepherds who had settled in the valley, on both sides of the Mfoundi River, and by the Bamiléké who had immigrated to Yaoundé from the western plateaus or from Nigeria. The Bamiléké weren’t yet talking about putting down roots. Their peregrinations across the Ewondo swamplands dated back to an invitation from Charles Atangana himself: he had needed workers for his cocoa plantation. I’ll get back to that later. If the town didn’t yet have the shops run by Indians found elsewhere in Central Africa, it’s because the French administrators had placed their bets on the Lebanese they’d brought to the region. There was a rumor that Yaoundé’s “Lebanese” were actually Indians—that is to say, decommissioned British colonial soldiers who had settled there at the end of the First World War. Some even claimed that they were actually Egyptians, but what does it really matter?

  Among the whites, several different nationalities were represented: the French, of course, but also Englishmen and Greeks (actually, the Greeks were Cypriots who owned trading companies), and even Germans, almost all of whom had “gone native” under the leadership of a collector of flowers, birds, and butterflies named Zenker. This eccentric, who hid away in the depths of the forest with his compatriots, had refused to return home and, no joke, insisted on being called “Cameroonian.” Most of the white colony was made up of Frenchmen who owned the best stores in the city, as well as the bordellos, which were off-limits to the black population.

  Despite its two-tiered cosmopolitanism, Yaoundé kept traces of its original seven villages; these had been transformed into neighborhoods, some might even say slums. Most of the natives’ houses had mud walls and roofs covered with palm fronds, despite an order from the French high commissioner banning the use of such materials in the city and insisting on cement-block houses with corrugated metal roofs. Was this order followed? Hmm. The authorities had no means of enforcing their decrees save the force of the law, as always. But, well, the law …

  Even then it was impossible to live anonymously in this city, especially if, like Nebu, you were the sultan’s shadow. The child’s red pagne made him stand out, as did his shaved head. To think that the boy was the only person in Foumban who could have stripped bare and become an entirely different person, yes, a girl who could come down the hill from Nsimeyong and disappear!

  So what kept him from going back to where he was born? Yes, what made Nebu stay among Njoya’s men? Bertha, or rather … Ah! that’s it! It was Uncle Owona’s eyes—Sara could never forget them—the wild flames in those treacherous eyes that, even when she was ninety, she still described as horrifying.

  “He gave me to the chief to forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  The voice of the doyenne was again that of a young girl. “His crime.”

  No, she’d never gotten over it.

  “There are things that even a whole life can’t erase,” she added in a muffled voice.

  “Did your mother know?”

  “She knew my uncle went crazy when he was drunk.”

  She paused thoughtfully before continuing.

  “My mother knew Uncle Owona did things he would regret for the rest of his life and that he kept drinking more and more to forget.”

  “Like every drunk,” I added tentatively.

  Was agreeing to incarnate Nebu the young girl’s own way of escaping Uncle Owona’s grasp? Of getting rid of him once and for all? Even after all these years, her uncle’s face still burst violently through her words as she told me her story.

  11

  What a Man!

  “What a man!”

  Yes, what a man! That’s how many German and English texts speak of Njoya—with repeated exclamations. Though French texts usually do tend to minimize his genius. Some call him a “Negro king.” Of course, Nebu couldn’t know what the colonial chroniclers had written, much less grasp the implications of what they said. How could he have? Thankfully, before my trip to Cameroon I had visited the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and then the German Staatsarchiv in Berlin. The Cameroonian National Archives came to my rescue in moments of doubt, spreading before me the totality of the words, the mountains of correspondence that the monarch exchanged with the colonial authorities of his day.

  From this unending supply of confidential reports and books filled
with admiration and hatred, I was able to reconstruct an image of Njoya as he invented the writing system that had fueled his dreams, as he toiled away in flickering lamplight for twenty years to perfect it. I saw him, Njoya, dressed in his caftan, awake at five in the morning, already eager to get to work. I saw him standing in front of his table in the half-light of his workshop, imagining model pictograms, then moving on to phonograms, and then to phonemes. Making calculations and sketching drawings of his printing press with Monlipèr, the master blacksmith he had brought with him into exile so that the traditional Bamum heraldic banners might keep flying high. I saw him crumple up his designs and start again. I saw him poring over his plans for his new palace, the “Palace of All Dreams,” which he wanted to finish building as soon as his exile ended and he was allowed to return to Foumban.

  I saw Njoya examining the sketches, despite the painful distance of his banishment, and finding them lacking. Assessing disdainfully these manuscripts that Western archives now guard so jealously, wanting to tear them up, and staying his angry hand because of a noise behind him. “You must maintain control of time,” he said to the man who had just entered, focusing his anger on him. “You are always late, Mama.”

  And Nji Mama would bend his head in shame. He was the sultan’s closest collaborator. The occasions when Nji Mama angered the sultan were rare, for after all, it was he who had built Mount Pleasant. He had done it in just one month, though he didn’t brag about it too much. In his haste he had reused sketches drawn up for the old palace in Foumban that he had constructed in 1917. Njoya’s arrival in Yaoundé had caused some turmoil. The vast entourage that accompanied the monarch needed to be housed somewhere. That Nji Mama had had to copy his own sketches was humiliating for a man who took such pride in his art. And yet, who was unaware of his talent?

  Here are the presumed plans for Mount Pleasant:

  Copy of the plans of the former palace in Foumban, drawn in 1917 by Nji Mama