Joseph Ngono had lived through those painful, leaden years, I could prove that, and that was enough. I could also reassure her that while the mud and rain of the trenches of the Marne and Verdun provided the world with ample memories of savagery, the domestic front offered her father a seemingly limitless freedom. He was lucky that the war had taken thugs like Adolf off the streets of Berlin—that they were much happier at the thought of fighting in the Great War than brawling with Communists and blacks.
“To war!”
In their drunken zeal, they shouted across the city. They threw their hats into the air and kissed girls.
“To war!”
“Thank God!”
“To war!”
Their noses had ferreted out new species of prey. They raced frantically to join up.
“To Paris!” they cried.
“To Paris!”
“To Moscow!”
History books overflow with their demented cries, their demands for vengeance; their hysteria fills the archives of Europe through 1918. Amidst the chaos of this loud descent into hell, I’ll keep asking my question: Who then took over the streets of Berlin? Ngono had never seen himself as a hero, that I knew for sure. I bet that if they could talk, many of the cities, many of the houses and beds of those absent heroes, could have told stories of Ngono’s volcanic passage. I could see Sara’s father traveling from the north to the south when Germany was at war, a pack on his back and nothing else to offer but his love, hoping for just a little warmth in return. I imagined him sleeping under bridges when necessary but preferring to find shelter for the night in the secretive beds of temporary lovers. He felt free, free and carefree, for the first time in his life. He feared only the thunderous quarrel that was playing out far overhead.
His fate wasn’t the worst, if you compare it to what happened to others. THE FRENCH ARE DONE FOR read the headline of the Saarbrücker Rundschau. “They’re recruiting niggers to fight for them!” Thank God, Ngono could say, thank God the Germans don’t think I’m worthy of dying for them!
In Leipzig, he met Ludwig M’bebe Mpessa, a compatriot, built like a boxer, who worked as a bartender and dreamed of starting a black theater troupe. Later Ludwig Mpessa took the name of Louis Brody, better suited to his dreams of grandeur. Sadly, his film career was limited to playing crazed tribal chiefs caught in the nets of racist plots.
Ngono became his companion. Together they founded the People’s Theater. Ngono excelled in the role of the African, which paid rather well. The Germans liked it; the domestic front was starved for entertainment. Wives and single girls, who feared their husbands or lovers would come back missing their essential parts, took their minds off their worries in the company of these black men who were playing at being actors.
This was the first time Ngono worked together with other blacks. Had the reader of Mann and Rilke undergone some sort of change? Had he gained what could be called “race consciousness”? Only the outcome of his story can tell us that. What is certain is that belonging to the People’s Theater made it easier for him to travel. At the same time, it was the first way he’d found to earn money since quitting the institute; in short, it freed him from the kindness of bosses who were too happy to put the police on his trail.
In 1917 he married a woman from Saxony, but I’ve found no record of any children. Luckily, that is, because I would certainly have had to tell the doyenne that her siblings had been arrested and sent to concentration camps, where they disappeared. Endlösing, the Final Solution. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Sticking to her father’s story, the vice squad’s records indicate that in 1918 he belonged to a League for the Defense of the Negro Race, founded along with “a certain Louis Brody.”
This league, with only a handful of members, was classified along with the groups of radical ex-soldiers who were cut off from the blood and action, shunted into the unemployment line when they returned from the front, and kept political activism alive in postwar Berlin. A rather dubious analysis, for how could one seriously imagine the few blacks who could be found in Berlin meeting in a cellar to plot a Bolshevik-style revolution? Maybe some of them had read Marx, their ears abuzz with what had happened in Russia in 1917, and maybe there was a poster of Lenin on their wall as well. But all the same, let’s not exaggerate.
Yet it was in the notes left by these young men, notes peppered with rage as well as optimism, that I found Ngono’s trail: for the first time, he found a way to give meaning to that sense of emptiness that had once made him laugh and cry and rush into the first corner bar he found for a strong drink. Alongside his new friends, he formulated a few ideas that would play an important role in his life back in Cameroon.
“Run, black man, run!” It was no longer his father’s voice or the lampposts that urged him on, but his joyous friends from the People’s Theater. Maybe it was the league’s forceful resolutions or daring quotes culled from books that swayed his mind; clearly, the echo of the brawls that burst out in the streets of Berlin in 1918 played their part.
And Joseph Ngono would rebel once again: “I am not running anymore!”
Like many others during those dark years, the Ngono who emerged from the war was a changed man. But the question that keeps coming up in the police notes—Did he become a Marxist?—misses the point. Alas, a subsequent war destroyed the documents that might have provided an answer. I read that Sara’s father was in Berlin on November 9, 1918, when the Republic was proclaimed. Perhaps he was part of the crowd of ecstatic young men who, just as in 1914, threw their hats in the air, kissed girls, and screamed, “Long live the Republic!”
“Socialism!”
“Democracy!”
“The Socialist Republic!”
“The Democratic Republic!”
Maybe, sickened by this collective madness, Ngono turned back to his friends, Brody for example, who dreamed of being a movie star after the war, and who in 1918 was impatient for change. Maybe together they calculated their chances of finding happiness in the Germany of the future, imagining that the new life afforded blacks in that Germany could only “be better,” as Brody the optimist put it. For Ngono, it would have been enough that the streets of the capital were rid of thugs like Adolf. That would have sufficed to make him happy, yes. How to think otherwise?
Maybe Sara’s father ended up instead in the home of Mandenga, the Landlord, as he was known in Berlin’s black community, because he was the oldest and most established. The ex-lecturer told him the story of the brawl he’d been in, about his assailant’s crushed testicles and bloody mustache.
“I can’t even lift my hand to eat without thinking of that idiot—”
“The real problem,” someone interrupted, “is that you can’t wave at the ladies as you’d like. Come on, tell us the truth!”
“Whoever did that to you…” Mandenga started, but a wave of nausea kept him from finishing his thought.
Everyone understood and nodded in agreement.
Whatever may have happened, on that ninth of November Ngono certainly listened to his friends talk, eating cakes and drinking coffee as the Landlord’s children played around him; meanwhile, out in the street, the mad world grew calmer. In one corner of the living room some compatriots were in a heated debate.
“A republic?” one said.
“Not one, two,” replied Theophilus Wonja. “Two republics, my dear.”
Wonja was another Cameroonian soul lost in the winter.
“You’re joking!”
“Check for yourself.”
“The same day?”
“The same day.”
“What a country!”
Ngono swallowed a bite of cake. “So what?” he said, exasperated.
He had underestimated the Landlord’s political drive.
“So what?” Mandenga shouted. “It should mean something to us, shouldn’t it? That’s the problem for us Africans. Nothing that happens ever matters to us! How can Africa have a future if nothing ever matters to us? If we have
no faith in our actions, can anything really happen on our continent? If we Africans don’t do anything, will anything happen to Africa other than what the Europeans decide?”
And that was the start of another endless discussion, just like always in this House of Exile, a discussion where the people of the diaspora ripped into one another. Did these exchanges send lost black souls flying out of Mandenga’s door? Ngono felt empty; he had no more arguments to make. He was tired. Or was he suddenly disappointed by the futility of these gatherings? In any case, he decided to go back to Cameroon. With no tam-tams, and far from Berlin’s inflamed crowds. There, holding a cup of coffee and a piece of cake in the home of Mandenga the Landlord, who was talking about “action” and “political action,” but who stayed in his seat.
Just like that.
12
Arabesques of Times Gone By
I broke off my story about Joseph Ngono because Sara had begun to draw in the dirt. I hadn’t noticed sooner, I was so caught up in her father’s story. She was tracing small figures with her fingers. I felt an unfamiliar sense of self-doubt. Was it the self-doubt of the historian before the eyewitness? That was my daily fare. Or maybe the old lady didn’t want to listen to my story any longer.
Sara had her own way of interrupting my story, and I knew, yes, I knew that she’d never fail to tell me what kind of father she preferred. I watched her trembling hands and read:
Which means, Now I see my father.
I tried to be circumspect. It was as if, by some sublime necromancer’s trick, Sara had turned the father I had discovered under a pile of papers into the child she said she’d never had. Her maternal need to protect that child in his darkest hours had burst forth from her belly in arabesques of love she traced on the ground. As much as her assertion, the way she wrote it left me speechless. It was Lewa writing, Njoya’s very first alphabet, invented by the sultan between 1895 and 1896, before the whites set foot in his territory.
I looked at Sara in surprise, for it had taken me a lot of work and five years to learn to read these pictograms that no other Cameroonian still understood. It was an American friend who taught me, a professor in New York who was researching precolonial writing systems—“those that aren’t just oral literature,” as he put it.
And there we were, half-illiterate me sitting in the dirt in front of the remains of Mount Pleasant while the doyenne scribbled on the ground signs that would have remained cabalistic were it not for my American friend! Happiness lit up our faces. I was certain that we had reached the chthonic knot of this jumble of disparate stories that bound us together. Tears rolled down our cheeks. Sara reached out to me and I clasped her hands. She was trembling. For a moment we were both the happiest, most transparent people on earth.
“He survived,” Sara murmured, “after all.”
“He survived,” I said in turn, but I was thinking of Njoya.
Sara understood and told me how the sultan had regained the use of his hands and taught her to write.
“Step by step,” she insisted.
I could see the monarch waking up from his death, lying in his bed, a visitor behind him telling a story to keep him from falling back asleep. Njoya opened his eyes in surprise, and greedily entering this miraculous world, he let the story flow into his ear and flood through his body; he opened his mouth the better to eat it up. Little by little he regained his strength; little by little he built up the strength in his hands so he could write down what he wanted to remember on the slate Nji Mama had brought him, as if his slate were the memory of a long-lost butterfly. Njoya wrote, without knowing that behind him a silhouette watched every move of his fingers, committing them to memory!
Ah, memory is an archive!
“It’s too bad he didn’t write during all those storytelling sessions,” Sara said, sighing. “Then I would have learned even more.”
I imagined Njoya struggling to follow the stories that came out of his translators’ mouths, our country’s two hundred (and more) languages bursting out in an unending shower of tales. Wasn’t he disgusted, since he had in fact combined the languages spoken in his kingdom—Shüpamum, Fufulde, Haoussa, Bali, along with elements borrowed from French, German, and English—to invent a new language, Shümum, that was spoken in his palace? He who had wanted a language that incorporated all the earth’s languages, a truly global language—how could he not be disgusted by this backsliding, despite his lifelong efforts?
Sara recalled that day long ago when he had sent his principal master artists, Nji Mama, Ibrahim, Nji Kpumie, to the home of that polyglot teacher Fräulein Wuhrmann, to “steal the white man’s words,” as he put it. His advisers described for him how the woman pronounced such words as “schwimmen,” “rainbow,” “flour,” “mission,” and “Ordnung,” among others. “It was as if she owned these words,” Nji Mama said.
How surprised the lady was when they returned two days later, accompanied by Njoya, to show her the first “Bamfranglais” dictionary, as they called it, where Njoya had given new meanings to the colonialist teacher’s words!
“‘Mission’?” she asked.
“In Shümum,” Njoya explained with a smile, “that means ‘to see.’”
“And ‘flour’?”
“We say farinsi, which means ‘to spend the night.’”
“‘To have’?”
“Awar, or ‘full.’”
“‘Kommst du’?”
“‘Tree.’”
Miss Wuhrmann seemed disoriented. Njoya went on, “‘Links’ means ‘children.’”
She couldn’t believe her ears. The sultan had turned her universe upside down, just to suit himself. He had made parallels between her words and his own understanding of the universe. He thought it was funny.
That’s when he gave her back a letter she had written to him that he had reinterpreted in ways she never could have imagined. Ah, our Wuhrmann!
And what about the day Njoya read her pages from the Bible, which he had rewritten using words from the Koran so that it fit the religion he wanted. What a scandal! The missionary’s face made it clear that as far as she was concerned, there was a Christian limit to this kind of language game. She turned for support to Nji Kpumie Penu, who was sitting next to the sultan. Nji Kpumie Penu didn’t have a chance to open his mouth.
“In Shümum, his name is Monlipèr,” Njoya stated simply.
“Which means?”
This time Monlipèr answered, “Professor.”
Old Monlipèr was proud of this name, you could see it in his face, and from then on he asked everyone to call him just that. Fräulein Wuhrmann turned to another artist, the carpenter Nji Shua.
“Laponte,” Njoya said.
When she looked at Nji Mama, Njoya announced, “He is still Mama.”
The woman was almost disappointed.
“Why?”
Yes, why not continue the game? But our Wuhrmann didn’t suspect Nji Mama’s rebellion.
“And what about me?” she asked. “What is my new name?”
Njoya had thought about that, yes. How to forget the shock on our dear Wuhrmann’s face when he replied, “Fräulein Wuhrmann, your name is Lasisvenère Pristenawaskopus.”
“A little long, don’t you think?”
Later she’d shorten it to Lasisvener.
This took place in 1911. That’s what Njoya did when he was still young and agile. Was it now up to him, there in the bedroom of his exile, to combine all the protectorate’s languages and come up with Camfranglais? Or all the languages of Africa and of the world, just so he could understand the madness of the universe that the storytellers had laid out before him? It was a daunting task, especially since he was sick.
NEBU AND NGUNGURE
But the truth is so dear to me, trying to create something true …
—Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo, February 12, 1890 (translated by Sue Dyson)
1
The Artist Revealed
There was a time in Foumban when princes,
freemen, and, of course, the nobles who served the court—the Mbansi, palace pages—had the right to take whatever they wanted from the back of a slave. Walking up the Artists’ Alley dressed in his black European suit coat, a handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket, a top hat on his head—all of which he had purchased from Herr Habisch—Nebu caused a bit of a stir, and he knew it. Still, not one noble moved a muscle. Only their amused eyes followed him as he went by. One of the sultan’s magistrates would soon place limits on the greed of the Bamum ruling class, but on that day, what mattered was a young boy provoking whispers as he passed and staying the nobles’ hungry hands. Murmurings followed him to the end of the alley, where he entered the darkness of a blacksmith’s shop.
“I want to become an artist,” he said with determination.
He emphasized “artist.”
The master blacksmith stared at Nebu, noting that he was dressed just like his father, that madman who until recently was begging for death in the city’s streets. He smiled. Nebu removed his hat respectfully, as a Bamum child was expected to do.
“Are you trying to blind me, son?” Monlipèr teased.
Monlipèr’s smile revealed teeth reddened by kola nuts. Behind him, dozens of boys working with gold and bronze lifted their burning eyes to stare at Nebu and whispered jokes to one another. He seemed to have come straight from the moon.
But on that day it just so happened that Monlipèr needed day labor to fill a number of pressing orders. Besides, a master craftsman would never have sent a young man so eager to learn the trade away from the Artists’ Alley.
“To become an artist,” the old engineer began, “it does no good to dress like a Christian … Just be faithful to your own truth.”
When Nebu undressed in front of Monlipèr, the old man understood the wild stories that circulated about him in the city. Bertha’s son was a handsome young man, well shaped, with impressive muscles, virile, but with a hint of femininity because of his thick hair, his beardless face, and his smooth chest. Oh yes, he was handsome. The old man, whose hands knew how to create beauty, was not mistaken. Nebu had the body of a clever wrestler, an imaginative hunter, a spiritual soldier. The top hat, still perched on his head, made the apprentices burst out laughing.
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