“I’m not a coward!” His voice echoed in the depths of the night. He spoke in Ewondo because he was talking to his father, his ancestors, his tribe. His cry echoed in the far reaches of 1913 Berlin like a declaration of tribal war.
“I’m not a coward!” Ngono shouted again, and threw himself at his pursuers. He head-butted one, hitting him hard in the jaw and sending him flying. Later he’d recall that the man had a mustache. But then he just saw him fall like a tree. Ngono’s sudden offensive, his war cry, his “call for tribal warfare,” the madness of it all stopped his assailants in their tracks. They hadn’t expected Ngono to react so savagely. Ngono himself was unaware that deep inside his head hid a warrior just waiting to smash the face of a German racist.
“You want to play cat and mouse?” taunted one of the men, putting up his bare fists.
“Let’s get out of here,” suggested another. “It’s not worth it.”
“No,” said a third. “Let’s stay here!”
“Let’s civilize him!” said the one with the smashed face.
Ngono heard the trio of his sad fate. He remembered his father’s lessons: “Go after one of them, just one, and make him rue the day he was born.”
“Cowards!” the lecturer shouted. “Imperialistische Feiglinge! Imperialist cowards!”
The man with the bloody mustache said to his friends, “He’s calling us cowards? Did you hear that?”
He pointed at Ngono and laughed.
“Cowards?”
“Us?”
One of the three, a small guy with a large bald spot, dove at Ngono, hitting him right in the stomach. The police report had no words to describe the chaos that followed. Ngono was hit in the stomach, on the back, on the head; feet, words, and fists all came at him. He was hit with chunks of asphalt and slurs; he saw blood. Ngono took a thousand blows; he was abandoned by the polite lampposts and by the moon herself, who shut her evil eye when his assailants left him for dead. His father’s words filled his mind, contradictory bits of advice offered in both Ewondo and German at once.
“Did my loins produce this coward, this Feigling?”
“Cowards!” Ngono shouted in German.
The one with the mustache stopped dead.
“A coward, me?”
He brought his hand to his mouth and spat out blood.
“Adolf,” said the little bald one, “let him be, he’s just a nigger.”
“A monkey,” said the third.
Clenching his fists like a boxer, Adolf came at Ngono, who was barely able to stand.
“Are you insulting me?”
Just then, Ngono thought of his father’s words: “Go after one, just one, and make him regret that a woman ever gave birth to him! Make him wish his mother was a whore and regret that his father had balls.”
Ngono answered his father, and in his language, his words sounded like a magical incantation: he kept asking his father to “let him finish off the bastards.” His assailants stopped, speechless. The old man of the night kept spurring his son on: “Make that son of a bitch eat through his own asshole! Make them all fuck chickens!”
The Ewondo lecturer danced to the rhythm of his father’s angry words, and he pointed his fingers at each of the three faces, one after the other.
“One by one!” he said. “I’ll take you on one by one, that is if you are men!”
The men stared at him in amusement, unable to believe their eyes.
“One by one!” Ngono repeated.
Laughing, the three lined up, the one with the mustache in front. But they didn’t laugh long. Ngono picked up a rock and threw it at them. He missed the bald spot of the little fat one, and a shout rang out. It was the cry of an animal, a dog or maybe a man. The rock landed on the asphalt in the distance. The men stepped aside.
“He is crazy,” one said.
“Ilang nuazut!” shouted Ngono. “Your asshole! Come one at a time and I’ll make you fuck your own cat!”
“Let’s finish him off!”
As he spoke, the mustached man covered his bloodied mouth.
“What are you waiting for, belobo lobo?” shouted the lecturer in the dark. “Invaders! Come and finish me off!”
This was his death dance, and he knew it.
“I’m going to civilize you!”
Ah! If words were all it took! The fat bald one struck the first blow. They surrounded him, attacking from all sides. Ngono didn’t seem to care. Should he have? All traces of the ensuing fight have disappeared in the German police archives, lost among the thousands of brawls that broke out in prewar Berlin. Ngono defended himself valiantly, oh yes! He protected his gut but left his face open. He doubled over, leaving his back exposed. He bit someone’s ear, whacked another’s shin, broke Adolf’s balls, but all to no avail. He couldn’t hold up against the horde and was soon left for dead.
“Ilang nuazut!” the lecturer stammered in the hollow silence.
He took another blow to the head. It was Adolf.
“Schweig!” he cried. “Shut up!”
“Feigling!” Ngono replied.
“Schwein!”
The mustached one hit him in the eye. But even with just one eye, the lecturer refused to shut up. “Son of a rat!” he spat.
“Let’s get out of here,” a voice shouted. “Let’s just leave him and get out of here!”
But Adolf couldn’t stop. Maybe his aching balls were screaming for revenge. Or maybe an evil spirit had melted away his brain and turned his eyes and his voice red, telling him that this monkey tale needed a final solution. Maybe he’d never before been called a “son of a rat” by a “nigger.” There was no end to his anger; he’d become a vampire, a Nosferatu who, with his own teeth, bit two fingers off the lecturer’s hand and spit them out in the gutter. The shriek from Ngono’s lips shattered the darkness, sent a black cat scurrying away, woke up the whole street. Sirens were heard in the distance.
“The police!” a voice called out from the corner. “Hurry!”
They had to drag Adolf away.
“I’m going to burn him alive!” he yelled, searching his pockets for matches. “I’m going to burn him!”
“Mensch, die Polizei! Let’s get out of here!”
Ngono was the only one arrested. How could he have hidden? Even if he had fled, in those years all the blacks living in Berlin could have fit into one phone booth. Still, the German civil servant didn’t get a ticket on a boat back to Cameroon, as the law required. No, he was released the day after his arrest. Later he learned that it was because a certain Dr. Mult, who preferred to remain anonymous, had stepped in and paid the fines necessary to free the “imperial subject who was wandering around drunk in the night.”
“You’re really lucky,” said the officer as he opened Ngono’s cell.
Ngono couldn’t believe it either.
“Weg damit, get the hell out of here before I change my mind,” snickered the policeman. Berlin is unbelievable, isn’t it?
In his report, no mention is made of Adolf. That name wouldn’t have led the police anywhere anyway. Adolf, Rudolf … all those sorts of names were very popular at the time. And German men really liked their mustaches, too, because they made them irresistible to the ladies, or so they thought. So there’s no way I can check out what Sara added to round out the story or her description of an “Adolf with a mustache”—“the cannibal who didn’t even have the courage to fight like a man, but who left my father with a shameful scar on his heart.”
“Is he the man who…” Arouna asked. His friends wanted to know, too. “Adolf?”
What to say? The archives, and especially the fact that I had gotten my information from Germany, gave me such authority. There are details that would change a story entirely. I admit it: I wish that the blow Ngono gave Adolf on the chin had left his irascible mustache mute. We all know that this would have spared all humankind from a savagery that the Ewondo lecturer didn’t live long enough to see. Would anyone blame me for going a bit too far? It’s true
, faced with the dusty silence of the colonial archives, I let the historian in me get carried away. Good sense requires that we opt for the cold, hard truth. So let me hurry back to the chambers of truth, to Mount Pleasant, you understand, because now it’s the doyenne’s turn to talk. And what she told me next, she had lived through from start to finish.
7
The Art of Being a Sultan
Yaoundé, 1931. Ngutane decided to ensure that her father awoke each day in a bed of words, because listening to stories was giving him back his strength. Tucked into bed with the world’s surprises, Njoya glowed with newfound health. Ngutane also wore her most elegant clothes, “to stimulate his eyes,” she said. Her fashion show caught everyone’s attention and made them smile. People wondered what she would wear the next day. Her wardrobe ranged from Bamum styles to those of the Fulani and the Bamiléké, not to mention styles popular in Germany, France, and England. She even wore retro styles, yes, Retro Ngutane, just to keep everyone guessing.
One might have thought she was trying to seduce the most handsome man in the world. She knew her father hated dreariness most of all, that he sucked greedily on the mangoes of happiness. The man was never badly dressed, because, as he loved to say, “life is too short to not be stylish.” Njoya’s good humor was his true gift to his court, and he warned his advisers that he didn’t want any sullen faces around him. So his daughter put pots of flowers in the windows of his room, and a ray of sunshine spread over his face each morning. Ngutane assigned one slave to care for the flowers and another to pick fresh ones in the fields around Mvolyé every other day. That’s how she kept her father’s room in a continuous state of exuberance. “Happiness is the true essence of the world,” she declared—this was, in a few words, her life’s philosophy—“it keeps us alive.”
Ngutane forbade European visitors from taking photos of her ailing father. Njoya had been the colonial photographers’ favorite subject, their star, and his voice had been recorded, too. But it was out of the question that his misfortune be turned into a spectacle for those who, she was sure, had pushed him into this stupefying lethargy. One day Nji Moluh’s son shocked them all by reciting a poem—“Waterloo”—in a language no one understood, but which was thought to be English. The kid had marched like a soldier around Njoya’s bed as he declaimed the poem, his hands spread out before him. To conclude, he clenched one fist behind his back and pushed his stomach out, striking a pose that made everyone laugh. After that, Ngutane had all the children of the house, including Njoya’s grandchildren, come and recite poems at his bedside.
From then on, each child—often egged on by their zealous parents—had their minute in the limelight at the sultan’s bedside. Ngutane wanted them to recite the most beautiful verses they had learned. Ugliness would kill their grandfather, she warned. After that she brought in the cousins, and then the Nji, the heads of the most illustrious Bamum families. She enlisted the scribes, the copyists, the illustrators, the miniaturists, the sketchers, the hagiographists, the potters, the ceramicists, the weavers, and, of course, the blacksmiths. Everyone had a turn and, in the end, all of Mount Pleasant paraded before Njoya.
Yes, everyone.
Why? Well, because no one wanted to be forgotten! Everyone dressed in their finest, did their best to impress the sultan. The shimmering agbada—a robe in the style of the Yoruba of Nigeria—that one woman showed off one day certainly got the most attention. More than the scarf another woman tentatively wrapped around her head in what the whispering gossips judged to be a poor imitation of the more artistic Fulani fashion. There were outright failures as well. How could anyone forget the long tresses sported by a woman from Douala, recognized as a wig by the chattering noblewomen. Ngutane, whose braided hair made everyone stare, mouths agape, called it simply “disgraceful.” The women who appeared in Njoya’s chambers were so well dressed—no, let me use Sara’s own words—they were so mami nyanga-o, so cute, that one might have suspected that all the women were trying to compete with the mistress of ceremonies, and even outdo her on her home turf.
Njoya’s daughter had too many other things to worry about to get caught up in such nonsense. All too quickly the visitors at her father’s bedside began to gossip about their neighbors. They turned from telling pleasant stories to tragic tales and grievances. That’s why Nji Mongu called on singers, drummers, bards, and town criers. Their memories contained all the stories of the sultanate, or so she thought. She soon realized there were limits to their resources. Oh, Ngutane didn’t waste time bemoaning the death of the spoken word; she just summoned the heads of Yaoundé’s seven original families. She would even have invited all the most important chiefs in the territory if they hadn’t, in some sense, already invited themselves when they’d first heard “the awful news.”
The chiefs had come running; they’d arrived out of breath. They told the sultan the stories of their families and their animals, stories of life and death, sometimes more fiction than fact, but who cared? The sultan already knew some of the stories, but how could these enthusiastic storytellers have known that? And really, it didn’t matter, because each gave the story his own personal twist. Bowing down on bended knee, Ngutane welcomed them all; her gratitude was all she could offer them in return.
“Do you have peace?” she asked.
The storytellers always replied in the same way: “Peace only.”
They adjusted their gandoura, their caftan, whatever garment they had chosen especially for the occasion, and began to speak.
“And your children, do they have peace?”
“Peace only.”
Then they’d start talking about their children.
“And your wives?”
“Peace only.”
Then they’d talk about their wives.
“And your servants?”
“And your animals?”
Stories about animals always went over the best. These storytellers transformed Mount Pleasant into a House of Words. They turned the sultan’s court into a marketplace of wonders. With his illness, Njoya’s home became a compendium of humorous and serious tales, the site of a storytelling competition that went on from morning to night. It became a chain of anecdotes, where men and animals shape-shifted and were remade, where plants and things, dreams and lies were combined—a logorrhea in multiple languages, something even the sultan’s daughter never could have anticipated. Some added unexpected spice to their tales. Knowing that the sultan’s senses were foggy, they told their stories backward, juggling with reality and having a good laugh. Ngutane, though, kept an eye on her father; his expressions were, for her, the only way to measure a story’s success. She judged the tales by Njoya’s appetite for more.
One day, before the first storyteller had arrived, Ngutane said to Nji Mama, “The world’s secrets are medicines that allow life to be more than a defeat.”
“Sometimes you have to face your own suffering head-on,” the master architect replied. “Suffering makes us strong.” There are invalids who have regained the use of their legs just by listening to the story of someone in worse shape. This idea fueled Ngutane’s optimism, but she would have preferred that her father hear only stories of greatness. Nji Mama should have known that Njoya’s memory was as long as that of an elephant in a field of calabashes. In her despair at seeing her father locked in an endless coma, Ngutane had turned to the chief architect, certain that he would help her find the right path. He knew her father better than anyone. But Nji Mongu didn’t yet know how exile had changed Nji Mama. He had never been a simple man, that’s for sure.
After reading Hugo’s The Art of Being a Grandfather to her father, and then a detective novel brought by a British officer (in the archives in Yaoundé there’s a copy of Agatha Christie’s The Mystery of the Blue Train, but we can’t be sure it was that one), Nji Mongu turned to comedies. In her rather pragmatic mind, since her father had regained his breath (after Father Vogt’s miracle) and his smile (thanks to his children’s and grandchildren’s p
oems), not to mention his powers of logical deduction (the joys of reading a detective novel!), all that remained was to make him laugh. So she asked the French high commissioner to find her a good book. But his bookshelves, filled with administrative tracts and studies about educating the natives, were of no use. For a moment Ngutane thought about contacting Madame Dugast, her French friend who had stayed on in Foumban. The schoolteacher had, on her own initiative, reopened one of the sultan’s schools in Foumban after they’d all been shut down by Lieutenant Prestat, the local colonial official. Ngutane had thought about asking her, “What is the funniest European novel?”
Ngutane would have happily taken Madame Dugast’s advice on many things; she was, after all, the only person who still called her by her Christian name, Margaretha, after her conversion to Islam. Ngutane also called her friend by her first name, Idelette. Our Nji Mongu was not unaware that this question was one wiser minds would have avoided, a question that would not fail to provoke endless debates in educated circles. On top of that, she wasn’t sure about her friend’s state of mind. Ngutane knew that Madame Dugast was a voracious reader. The Frenchwoman had a collection of every book written in the sultan’s workshops. In her passion for all things Bamum, her friend would certainly suggest that the ailing sultan be told fantastical stories from his own culture rather than read chapters from a witty book. Madame Dugast would draw from her own immense library of Bamum tales and from the stories that praised Njoya’s illustrious family. As if Ngutane hadn’t already run through all of those. And it went without saying that our Dugast would surely have intoned a hymn to the griots and the oral tradition, as if the sultan had anything to learn about that!
Because those newly convinced of the grandeur of African civilizations are difficult to cut off once they start talking, Madame Dugast would propose stories that Njoya himself had dictated to his scribes. She found them delightful, she who considered herself a Bamum specialist. Ngutane had no doubt that her father would have suffered a fatal heart attack if he had to hear his own story from a French colonial mouth, even if it was the kindest in the sultanate, or that of a very friendly lady. So Ngutane decided to forgo Madame Dugast’s advice.
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