Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  “A spoiled child,” that’s what they wrote about her when they weren’t expressing their exasperation at this “overly pretentious Negress.” News that she had a copy of Madame Bovary would, I think, have spread like wildfire through the colonial ranks and certainly led to the classic being banned for a second time, now in France’s overseas territories. Of course Ngutane would have sympathized with “poor Emma,” as had many others before her in Paris and the other European capitals. For the moment, however, Ngutane’s dreams weren’t hitched to a swallow’s wing, but rather to the sweetly scented seats of a Golden Car. No lover: it was her father who sat beside her. Once around the courtyard—vroom!—and the surrounding crowd broke out in hymns of joy. One more time—vroom! vroom!—and the crowd went wild, lost in ecstasy and a cloud of dust.

  Sara began to see the sultan differently because of the car, for after this, the heartiest laugh heard in the corridors of Mount Pleasant was Njoya’s. The sultan was happy, yes! How had Charles Atangana done it? That evening Charles was telling jokes—about his car, his life, everything. As usual, he seemed to be talking to everyone at once. This time, however, he also talked about his trip to Paris for the Colonial Exhibition. Ah, will this story ever end? Everyone in the lively room could clearly envision the fat woman he described, “an overly perfumed countess, with red lips” who was left speechless when he told her that he wasn’t polygamous. The chief imitated the countess: “Not polygamous, really?”

  Carried away by his own comments, he forgot that the man to whom he was telling this story had more wives than anyone else in the protectorate.

  “A Negro and not polygamous!” he continued, then changed voices once again and, bowing aristocratically, added, “And Catholic, my dear lady, Catholic!”

  He was the only one laughing, of course, for none of the men listening were Catholic or even Christian, and certainly not monogamous. But who would have thrown cold water on the chief’s pleasure when he had a story to tell? More important, who would have reproached him for his lack of tact? After all, he was the only real friend Njoya had in Yaoundé, the one who understood best the sultan’s weaknesses. He was also the only one in the protectorate’s capital who could tell jokes like that! That’s surely why his last words were met with polite laughter. But maybe it was also because Njoya had responded to his friend’s anecdote with a quip of his own: “Well, if you ever want to become pagan again, just call on me…”

  14

  Friendship’s Twisted Secrets

  What was it that had thrown these two men into each other’s arms? They had so little in common! Collaboration, according to some evil tongues; a similar position of authority in the protectorate, according to others. But when he was driving that infernal car of his, Charles Atangana, a committed monogamist, always had his “very dear Juliana,” his wife, by his side. Njoya, on the other hand, might have chosen a favorite from among his six hundred and eighty-one wives—except that his impatient daughter would never have given him the chance. So, was it their similar temperaments?

  Well, maybe not. The chief’s voice and his alone always dominated the conversation, for he had a way with words … or rather, he talked a lot. Even if his title of paramount chief was only a flattering translation of the German Oberhäuptling, he owed his power to the force of his voice alone.

  As for Njoya, who had a low voice and was more of a listener, it was his family’s hegemony over the Bamum (a note: the colonial archives make mention of “the criminal intrigues of his mother, Njapdunke”) that was the basis for his authority in Foumban. The chief had seen the world, and not just what lay beyond the borders of the protectorate. He had toured all around the colony with the Germans. By contrast, Njoya’s only trip, in 1908, had taken him no farther than Buea. His exile to Yaoundé was the biggest move he had ever made, and merely his second excursion outside Bamum land.

  So what had drawn these two men together? Let’s see. Their love of fine, expensive clothes? The fact that they were both, without a doubt, the best-dressed men in the protectorate? Njoya’s collection of sculpted canes was on a par with his friend’s cigars and brightly colored outfits, I can vouch for that. Except that vanity doesn’t draw men together; on the contrary, it divides them. Maybe what made Njoya and Charles Atangana friends was the feeling that “they had been through it all.” They had seen the faces of all the colonizers.

  Or maybe it was their playful habit, which they never lost, of speaking to each other in the first language that came to their lips. A strange game, one that amused those who heard them. The chief would say something in Ewondo and his friend would reply in Shüpamum, then continue in German and be answered in French. Ah, how did they understand each other? Even today, how do Cameroonians, with their two hundred languages, understand each other? The fact remains that their friendship began in Mantoum in 1920 with a burst of laughter. Charles Atangana had paid a visit to Njoya in the residence where the sultan was spending the first months of his exile, and their conversation turned, seemingly of its own accord, to the colonizers who had spent time in their respective cities, and who had been on opposite sides of the war.

  “So,” Charles Atangana began, “which are the best? The French, the Germans, or the English?”

  “That’s not fair!” the sultan protested. “You can’t ask me such a thing.”

  “Believe me,” the chief continued in a conspiratorial tone, “never compare a Frenchman to a German.”

  “Or a German to an Englishman.”

  “An Englishman to a Frenchman.”

  “A Frenchman to anyone at all.”

  The chief thought for a moment about what Njoya had said.

  “You are right,” he said with a great guffaw. “Whites are such tribalists!”

  Then Njoya burst out laughing. It was so true!

  Cameroon, such as we know it today, wasn’t yet born. For Sultan Njoya, the word had for so long referred to a city, Cameroon City, the present-day Douala, that it couldn’t mean anything else. As for Charles Atangana, this country—if one could speak of it as a country—would only be important once his hometown, Yaoundé, where he had convinced the Germans to set up a camp, had become the city of his dreams: the Cameroonian metropolis.

  That, at least, was his reputation: he wanted Yaoundé to become a second Rome. According to some, his plan was insane for one simple reason: the land itself was too poor. Only groundnuts grew there—although in abundance, it’s true. People snickered and said that the only thing the chief could trade on to realize his wild dreams was the future. A visionary without the funds to make his dreams come true, Charles Atangana knew he had to make compromises and, above all, to make as many friends as possible. He invited everyone to Yaoundé; Njoya was only the last of a long list. The Germans were the first to let themselves be convinced, mostly because of the friendship between the chief and their hero Dominik. The French came along later because he had sworn he would transform the forests of Southern Cameroon into endless cocoa plantations. In terms of megalomania, it was a plan so wild it even amused the French high commissioner, Marchand. But Marchand was too astute a politician not to recognize this chief, with his steady gaze and his quirky habits, as a kindred spirit. “This guy is a genius,” he told his colleagues. “No joke, he has dreamed my dream.”

  Thanks to Charles Atangana’s ability to dream the colonizers’ dreams, in 1921 the Cameroonian capital was moved from the mountains of Buea to Yaoundé, and he was chosen to supervise its construction. Ongola, the city center, was his home base. What more could he ask? Still, it wasn’t enough for him; he spread his arms and told the streets of his hometown—bush tracks, really—that he imagined a “City of Seven Hills.” Those who still share his dream have clung to the nickname he gave it, trying to keep the chief’s fantasy alive in our poor neighborhoods, to invent a different future for this stupid, chaotic city that is, in reality, so sad and so dirty. Mount Pleasant was itself a name plucked from the chief’s flamboyant vocabulary. Curiously, over t
ime, people forgot it. I’ll come back to that. (Yes, I promise.)

  Charles Atangana and Njoya? Whatever it was that made the men cross paths—the coercive borders of a nascent country or the intrigues of a chief who invited both local and colonial authorities into his hometown to secure his own place in the heavens—it was friendship that exploded in the sultan’s chambers each time Charles Atangana was there. There was laughter, raucous voices, a whole rosary of debates—too many to number, and yet never too much for the chief. It was life at its best.

  Still, it was always the chief who had the most to tell: how hard it had been to get a license plate for his car (“Do you know why? Because it’s an American car!”), his trip from Yaoundé to who knows where (“But not on horseback, like when I traveled to Kousseri with Hans Dominik, you know…”), and so on.

  Finally, late at night, the car disappeared, leaving behind it unlikely tracks, words that bloomed in phosphorescent dreams.

  15

  Talking About Hell …

  After the chief’s departure Nebu couldn’t close his eyes. He was entranced, and far into the night, the symphonies of Lisbon and Hamburg rang in his ears. That evening he hadn’t had to help undress the sultan. Two of Njoya’s wives, Mata and Pena, his current favorites, had stayed with him. So the child headed back to the matron’s, whistling as he went. He lay down on his mat and covered his eyes with the palms of his hands, the better to see far-off places.

  The day had left a smile on his lips that he couldn’t quite explain; a taste of happiness surged sporadically through his veins. Bertha was already asleep. Her rhythmic breathing filled the room. Nebu thought about what it meant to be a slave. He wondered why the joy of two powerful men came at the cost of a little girl’s damnation. He also wondered what would have happened if the sultan had refused to come to Yaoundé. Would Sara have had a different life?

  Would Yaoundé have been different?

  And history? Would its course have changed?

  Ah, history! Is it inevitable? A series of knots in the weaving of a gigantic braid, isn’t that what it is when all is said and done? Terror flooded his mind. He saw Uncle Owona’s dark eyes again and understood that he would have to accept the truth of his life: Sara. Nebu heard the little girl crying. A shout. He felt his uncle’s hot breath in his ears and suddenly opened his eyes. What was it? One thing was certain, it wasn’t Sara who was screaming. The boy shut his eyes again, but the cry kept coming: strident, scattered. Then there were hurried steps. And someone calling, “Ngosso!”

  It was the sultan’s voice. It kept going: “Ngosso! Samba! Manga!”

  Nebu jumped from his bed and ran outside. In Mount Pleasant’s main courtyard he met a terrified Pena. Her head was bare and her face panic-stricken. She ran toward the house of Mount Pleasant’s chief doctor. The boy immediately understood that something awful had happened. Without even thinking, he suddenly found himself in Njoya’s bedroom. The monarch was stretched out on the ground, one hand clutching his chest. His breathing was labored.

  “Manga!” He was yelling, his eyes like milky ghosts.

  Two men were working away at his body. They were holding him, repeating incantations Nebu didn’t understand. Their frantic actions didn’t drown out Njoya’s confused words. “Samba!” Njoya shouted, his hands and feet spread out, his mouth open wide in the chaos of the room. “Ngosso!”

  Standing beside him, Mata looked lost and helpless—each frantic gesture canceling out the one that had come before. Nebu ran back to his room. Bertha wasn’t there. She must have joined the other servants who, alerted by the noise in the sultan’s room, were running around or forming groups of curious onlookers in the hallways. The image of the fallen sovereign filled Nebu’s mind with every imaginable horror. He suddenly took off backward and bumped into a man coming from the courtyard: it was Nji Moluh, Njoya’s son and successor.

  “What’s going on?” asked Nji Moluh, who was still pulling on his clothes as he ran.

  No one answered him, because no one knew.

  Njoya’s cavernous voice broke the silence.

  “Manga! Samba!”

  “Alareni!” A voice in the darkness repeated this flattering title, chanting it like an incantation. “Alareni!”

  It was Nji Mama.

  Nebu kept walking backward. He knew the path out of Mount Pleasant well. He didn’t need to search for his way through the labyrinth. In the courtyard there was only the skeleton of the sultan’s pickup truck to answer the sky’s song. There were no children, no one at all. Even the heavens were empty. Soon the boy found himself outside the compound. He ran between the trees of a misty forest. He hurtled down Nsimeyong’s hill as if he had wings. He made his way along the rocky paths. Dogs barked. He cut a path through the brush. Voices cried after him, describing a destiny he didn’t recognize as his own. In his mind, the grimace on the face of the fallen sultan revealed the disaster he was fleeing: the face of his father as he fell. Nebu ran to escape those misty visions of the fall, to escape Sara, to escape Bertha.

  In the distance, a light let him know he had reached the church in Mvolyé. He was out of breath. He beat on the door with both hands.

  Silence was his only reply.

  He knocked again, and finally a feeble voice asked, “Who’s there?” A woman’s scared voice.

  Nebu banged on the door even louder.

  “Who is it?”

  A white man opened the door. He held a wavering lamp in his hands. His face, lengthened by a beard, identified him as a priest, even if he was wearing pajamas. His voice was familiar.

  “Who are you?”

  Yes, it was the priest. His outfit made him look strange. Seeing the child standing there, he responded in a fatherly way.

  “Come in, my son,” he said in Sara’s language.

  Nebu moved toward him, then stopped. The heads of two women appeared behind the man. Maybe the priest thought it was another dramatic case of a native child fleeing the clutches of paganism. Isn’t that how so many girls came to him—in the night, fleeing forced marriages, pursued by bloodthirsty spirits, ancestral traditions, and curses, by abusive uncles or violent husbands? The church was a refuge and Catholicism a heaven for these hopeless souls. No need even to attract them with candies; it was easy to convince them to become nuns, to offer their lives to God.

  This time, however, it was a boy. And this boy—although the bearded man didn’t know it—suddenly thought of Njoya, abandoned, covered in his own spit, his two favorites, who had no idea how to save him from death, by his side.

  “Come here and tell me what’s wrong,” the priest repeated.

  Instead of obeying the man of the cloth, Nebu backed up, waving his hands left and right, tripping over himself in his confusion.

  “Wait,” the prelate cried, for he had guessed what the child couldn’t say. “Wait, I’m coming!”

  He didn’t even pause to get appropriately dressed. He raced off after Nebu. What good luck that he was a doctor in his heart, even if a priest by vocation! He had come to Cameroon to escape the constraints of a small Alsatian village where no one told any stories he didn’t already know. That was ten years ago. Before he perfected his strategy for hunting down pagans, he had already run out of people to whom to distribute his circulars. Since he had decided to found a little church on the spot in the forest that the chief had graciously allotted him, miraculous events kept happening, one after the other. He refused to believe that the sweets he gave the children had anything to do with it. He summarized the situation with a phrase that has since become famous: “Faith is exploding in Ewondo land!”

  One word said it all: “Miracle!”

  He couldn’t walk down the street without crowds of children at his heels. Sometimes he was seen coming down the hills on his bicycle, followed by dozens of kids who thought the Catholic Church was a kingdom, a kingdom where they could eat nothing but sweets. They were enthusiastic about becoming catechumens. Most did so against their parents’ wishes,
which didn’t bother the priest; his goal was to separate the good seed from the bad.

  Still, he could see the fear in the eyes of a child who knocked on his door at night. That’s how he saw all Cameroonians: children waking him so that they might free themselves from the darkness of night. He heard their knocks as a call to his faith. Hadn’t he come here to find an answer? That’s the story I found in a circular signed by the man I can now identify by name: Father Vogt. Yes, the very one whose name now adorns a school in the capital, and of whom the Ewondo still speak with reverence. If Father Vogt’s pajamas contributed to his reputation as a saint (the two nuns who were with him that night made sure to note to the Catholic hierarchy how he was clothed—a significant sign of his zeal), on that night his outfit also made it easier for him to make his way through the dark corridors of Mount Pleasant and into Njoya’s room.

  “The doctor!” many voices shouted when he appeared. “Let the doctor through!”

  Servants cleared a path for him. Njoya’s wives stopped crying. Nebu’s footsteps guided the priest, who was deaf to the premature keening.

  “Let him through!”

  That was an order from Nji Moluh. His father’s medical team moved back. Oh, I can’t imagine how the people of Mount Pleasant would have reacted if the bearded man had come dressed in priest’s robes to the bedside of the sultan they thought was at death’s door. From then on, Father Vogt was known as the doctor who saved Njoya’s life.

  “Make way,” he ordered. “He needs air.”

  He demanded all sorts of things, none of which were refused. The news of the sultan’s fall echoed across the city’s hills, although the name of his illness remained shrouded in mystery.

  When Sara told me this story, she still wasn’t convinced that the bearded man she had awoken wasn’t polygamous.