Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  Of course everything made in Monlipèr’s workshops was destined for the palace, but those two boys had let Nebu understand that it would be different if he actually worked there. He would have the free rein all true artists dream of; a worksite of that size was the perfect place for him to test the limits of his audacity. For Nebu, it would also mean freedom from his two advisers, for he knew their darker side all too well. In truth, his actions had been triggered the day he noticed his two-headed snake adorning the palace entryway. Monlipèr didn’t even tell me, he thought, feeling let down.

  Clearly, he wasn’t seeking full credit for the work, which he had been able to realize only as a result of his master’s teachings, even if he had taken them as far as his imagination would go. It was a brilliant work, yes, the result of all he had learned from Monlipèr. In a way, the old master was right to present it as his own, even if it hadn’t been made by his hands. It was the reflection of his ideas about art, even if seen from a perspective he hadn’t really explored.

  The influence of a dispassionate aesthetic was increasingly evident in the work produced by Nebu’s hands, guiding their creation of sculptures like that one.

  “It’s mine,” he had murmured.

  An unknown feeling rose up in him, a feeling he knew was outrageous. Yet even after he returned home, he couldn’t keep from telling his mother about it; she tried to temper his artistic sedition.

  “It’s mine.”

  After that episode Nebu stopped discussing aesthetics with his master. He just watched Monlipèr work, smiling at the master’s ever-closed eyes and the “yeses” that peppered the old man’s language. Bertha’s son knew that his master could see only the vulgar side of reality. But you don’t contradict your master; you just quit. The problem is that a slave can’t do that. Joining a workshop meant accepting the master’s unquestioned authority. Only he could free his apprentices—he or someone in a similar or even greater position. The boy’s status prevented him from finding someone capable of freeing him in Foumban. The only option was to throw himself at the sultan’s feet, as Muluam and Ngbatu had suggested. Nebu knew that he was breaking a thousand barriers and taboos. He was lucky. That day, instead of punishing him, Njoya heard his prayer and put him under the tutelage of Nji Mama.

  In the palace, he met other artists, the best in the country and even in the world. There were Fulani, Bamiléké, and even Germans working on the new palace. Nebu was amazed by the ease with which these men reached heights he’d never dreamed of, making connections between things he had seen as unrelated. Sometimes he felt once again like a baby playing with clay, unaware that one drop of dirt can give birth to a man.

  This is where he discovered the grandeur, no, the genius of Nji Mama and his younger brother Ibrahim, the sultan’s two closest collaborators. People said they slept on either side of the monarch, that they were his “twin spirits.” Some tongues hinted that Njoya preferred to turn toward Nji Mama as he slept. The two brothers were the only master artists who had accompanied the sultan on his trip to Buea in 1908, when he had tried to explain the symbolism of the Mandu Yenu to the Germans, who were very impressed by the sultan’s dynastic throne. Their real mission was to observe the white men’s tools, to see if their ideas could be used to further the ideals of Bamum art. Nebu had the good fortune of being apprenticed to Nji Mama, and he quickly learned that he couldn’t hide any of his thoughts from his new master. “I know it’s your work,” Nji Mama said to him one day as they were passing by the palace’s main doorway, which was adorned with the two-headed snake. “I know it’s yours.”

  Of course Nebu didn’t reply.

  “A masterpiece,” Nji Mama continued, caressing his goatee and bending his head, as he always did when he was thinking. “A real masterpiece.”

  Following custom, Nebu denied responsibility for the work and instead began praising Monlipèr. Nji Mama smiled. He was a man of few words, but everything he said was worth its weight in the gold the young man had used back in the Artists’ Alley.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the master added. “Even Monlipèr knows he’s from the old school. He’s proud of you.”

  Why did Nebu’s cheeks grow hot all of a sudden?

  Nji Mama reassured him. “There aren’t many artists your age who’ve been accepted at the palace, did you know that? Very few young men take art as seriously as you do.”

  Thankfully, Nebu’s urge to confess the thoughts that racked his belly was stifled by Nji Mama’s didactic penchant for repeating himself: “Just a few young men.”

  Nebu kept walking, his shoulders bent. The master’s words weighed on him like an elephant. Nji Mama went on to say that to be an artist, a real artist, he would need to sacrifice something.

  “Something you really love,” he added. “That’s the truth in your art.”

  7

  The Palace of All Possible Dreams

  The construction of the new palace was thrilling. It wasn’t the first big project undertaken by Njoya’s artists, but the one that required all their talents. Like any other project, it brought challenges, pains, joy, and it was the largest ever undertaken in Bamum land or, according to the sultan himself, “in all of Africa!” Njoya truly wanted it to be a Palace of All Dreams, the amalgamation of all the best dreams ever dreamed by the best master craftsmen of his time.

  Accidents occurred, of course. When a worker fell from the wall he was building, worry was written on everyone’s face, even if the man didn’t die. “An evil spirit pushed him,” they said.

  As the man remembered it, he had done nothing wrong, nor seen anything strange around him. Nebu remembered the words of Nji Mama. When an artist whispered to him that a worksite that big required a “great sacrifice” to attain perfection, he trembled. Bertha’s son wondered, Have all the artists working here sacrificed something they love? He was afraid.

  Yet the worksite didn’t seem cursed to him. In his eyes, the shapes of the palace emerging from the ground were the materialization of a vision. He worked all the harder to bring forth his own dreams. His master had showed him that art is an ethos, and that was enough. Ngungure’s happy face was the guiding principle of his work, and he was grateful for it. He finally understood that the road between dreams and death is the path of destiny itself, and also that art is a victory over fate. He wanted his art to bring life back into being, a true testament to love.

  Death arrived in Foumban’s courtyards in a very unexpected way. One day the palace couriers ran through the city announcing that the whites had gone to war. No one—not Nebu nor anyone else—thought the whole world was at war. Especially since the sultanate lived in perfect harmony with its Bamiléké and Fulani neighbors. Let them fight, Nebu thought. It’s not our war.

  He wasn’t the only one to think so. Who would have believed that a war between whites, fought in lands beyond the borders of the sultanate, would be met with anything but indifference by the Bamum? Still, Njoya had sent hundreds of men to join the columns of German colonial soldiers, and there was word of similar recruitments in the English colonies and especially in those of the French, where the African soldiers, commonly called tirailleurs, were known for never taking the time to aim. But that certainly didn’t impress the sultan’s archers, quite the contrary. Nebu thought this talk of war was no more than rumors. No one in Foumban imagined that a war between whites could result in battles pitting armies of black men against each other. Nevertheless, all the Bamum helped the Germans dig trenches around the sultanate’s capital and barricade entryways with sandbags; and all the Bamum smiled softly when the German officer explained it was “to protect us.” Us?

  One afternoon the askaris, who had always behaved disrespectfully in Foumban, were seen running into houses to hide.

  “They’re coming,” shouted the soldiers, tearing off their uniforms so they could die naked. “They’re coming!”

  “They’re coming!”

  Everyone hid, but no one asked just who “they” were. The hardest t
hing, of course, was hiding Herr Habisch, as well as the missionary Göhring and his white companions. But it was funny, too, for it was the first time the Bamum had seen the merchant Habisch, known for his habitual arrogance, shivering like a baby. Even Fräulein Wuhrmann, so used to giving orders like a man, trembled with a fear similar to the one she so often inspired in the German school’s female students. The world is falling apart, Nebu thought.

  “They” didn’t come that day. But no one forgot the panic “they” wrought. The Cameroonian campaign went on for a whole year before war actually arrived in Foumban. For Nebu, who’d been ordered to bring food to the hiding Germans, it was a revelation. He’d seen Herr Habisch filled with despair as never before. Surrounded by his merchandise, which now felt like a burden, since it kept him from fleeing, the Swiss merchant was giving away for free what he previously would have sold or traded.

  Let me note in passing that this is how Nebu acquired the portrait of Ngungure that he never could have afforded. War does have its virtues! A plate of kpen, corn with peanut sauce, was all it took. Herr Habisch soon transferred his wares to Nji Mama’s attic only to realize that “they” weren’t ever going to come. Still, Herr Habisch didn’t go back on his decision, but kept his goods stored away and, from then on, spent every night with his wares, much to the amusement of everyone in Foumban. That’s where he was, surrounded by mirrors, jackets, shoes, and bottles of whiskey when the English soldiers finally arrested him. He didn’t resist, but simply said, “You’ll need me, too.”

  To which the British soldiers replied, “Don’t be so sure of it, old friend.”

  “Never fear,” Habisch announced to the whole city. “I’ll be back.”

  Fräulein Wuhrmann told the soldiers that she wasn’t German, but Swiss, so neutral. An English soldier corrected her.

  “I’m sorry, love, but there’s no neutrality in Africa.”

  Later she’d change her story, claiming to be Belgian. But the British officer for whom she traced her complicated genealogy wasn’t listening.

  “Are there any more Germans in the city?” he asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

  The arrival of the English in Foumban had been announced by the sound of machine-gun fire. That was in December 1915. Njoya’s reaction was the same as when the Germans had knocked on the door of his city in 1902, and again when Lieutenant Hirtler—yes, that was his name—had arrived in 1903. Njoya greeted them at the main entrance, accompanied by all his advisers as well as soldiers, bearing a plate of eggs. His soldiers were unarmed, and the sultan warned Foumban to show no hostility “to the new arrivals,” since, he said, “this isn’t our war.”

  The English, however, had a very different understanding of their arrival in a conquered city. They thought that filling the sky with fire, smoke, and the sounds of gunfire, destroying the walls of the palace under construction instead of accepting the greetings of the local sovereign, would establish their authority in everyone’s mind and erase all memories of the Germans. At the sound of machine-gun fire—ratatatatatatat—a sound they’d never heard before, the inhabitants of the city ran to hide, scattering frightened chickens and dogs. No soldier fired back. Only two people were wounded. A woman fell as she ran, jostled by the panicked crowd, and a child stubbed his toe on a rock. Oh, I forgot: a dog was killed, too, squashed when one of the palace walls, brought down by an English grenade, collapsed on top of it.

  The English soldiers came into Foumban following this apocalyptic display of their weapons, overturning calabashes and breaking chairs. They were blacks, some of them Indian. Their uniforms were different from those of the askaris. Five British officers led their columns. Njoya’s men spent hours trying to convince the population of Foumban to come out from hiding and greet the new arrivals. Everyone set about cleaning up their courtyards, dusting off their clothes, and calming their crying children. The squashed dog was found under the ruins only much later. It was just a side causality. I must say that the people of Foumban weren’t yet aware of the butchery that, in the trenches of France, Belgium, and parts of the Ottoman Empire, turned human beings into dust and invented genocide.

  The English arrested the hidden Germans and confiscated their weapons. To celebrate their victory, they drank cases of Herr Habisch’s beer, wine, and whiskey. They scrambled the eggs Njoya had offered them and demanded the best food the Bamum had to offer for their soldiers. Like everyone else, Nebu saw the Swiss merchant come out of Nji Mama’s attic, his hands on his head, a rifle pointed at his back. He looked like a madman, all covered with dust. He was joined by the missionary Göhring, his wife and son, and Fräulein Wuhrmann. They were pitiful. No battles took place in Foumban. Nevertheless, the chaos that arrived in Bamum land that day, scattering chickens, squashing a dog, and making children cry, will still be referred to in the history books as World War I.

  8

  A Colony, Postwar

  “My granddaughter, will you let me finish?”

  That’s how Sara took the floor. The young people from Nsimeyong can attest to it: suddenly there was no way for me to interrupt the flow of her words, to tell her what I had found about her father in the archives. In truth, I was also happy to drink from her memory’s endless river. It cost me nothing to be quiet for a moment. As for Sara, she emerged exhausted from the tunnel of her past. Still, she could have taken a short break and listened to me! After all, my research had brought me dramatically closer to her birth.

  Of all the things that Joseph Ngono regretted when he got back to Cameroon after the war of 1914–18—this is what I wanted to tell the doyenne—the worst by far was the loss of his books of poetry. She wanted him to be a poet, didn’t she? He had decided to “go back home,” as he put it, anticipating that his country would not have changed in the slightest since he’d left. The colony had been divided between the war’s victors, the English and the French, and his hometown, Yaoundé, was now under French occupation. For him, that wasn’t the most important thing, oh no! Most important was that he get back to his homeland. As far as he was concerned, the new flags wouldn’t change the scent of the ground after a rain. The country’s earth was still red, just as rich as ever. Its persistent color let Ngono look back on his life in Berlin with distance and detachment. For him, the colonizers would come and go; Cameroon itself was unchanging.

  The Ewondo lecturer hadn’t imagined that the many years he’d spent abroad, in Germany to boot, would render him suspect in the eyes of the French. He realized all too late that he had opened up his mind to take in the breadth of the world only to come back to a country held captive by colonial mentalities; that he had left the streets of Berlin, fleeing from the threat of Adolf and other scoundrels of his ilk, only to come back to a camp. How could he have imagined that he would leave the warmth of the Landlord’s house only to be interrogated once again by the police? Ah, when he arrived, Joseph Ngono was struck head-on by the prosaic colonial life he’d long forgotten. “Life in a colony is hell,” he’d often say afterward, reflecting on what happened to him upon his return.

  Ngono was no longer a native. That was the crux of the problem, especially for the colonial administrators who still saw him as one. How many times did he have to squelch his desire to shout back in their faces, to insult them, or, better, just to curse them outright: “Ilang! Asshole!”

  Or to fight as he had in Berlin?

  Against Adolf?

  How many times had he wanted to shatter the mustache of a French colonial officer? Ah, from time to time Ngono made do with grumbling his foul insult: “Ilang nuazut! Your asshole stinks!”

  Or even, “Belobo lobo! Invaders!”

  What really surprised me was that he came back to Cameroon without his wife. I found no document suggesting that she had been blocked from entering the protectorate. It wouldn’t have surprised me if I had—anything is possible in the colonies. The ex-lecturer married another woman, Sala, soon after his arrival in Cameroon. This woman first bore him a daughter, Sara, then a son
, Carl. Ngono was distracted when the Catholic priest registered his daughter in the church records and didn’t notice that he’d inscribed “Sara” instead of “Sala.” When it was time to name his son, Ngono thought of his happy past, especially of his best friend, Charles Atangana. He decided to write the name with a C, like the English, rather than with a German K.

  The two friends met up again later, in August 1923, and told each other about their very different experiences. They recalled happily how they’d traveled to Germany together on a boat registered to the Woerman company. “We were so young!” They remembered everything they’d done, especially their experiences with white women.

  “I’ve changed,” said Charles Atangana, smiling.

  “Really?” Ngono replied, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Tell me.” Joseph still saw him as a ladies’ man. He hit the packet against the back of his hand and pulled out two cigarettes, offering one to his friend. Yet it was Ngono who had things to tell, for the chief saw right then that he was missing two fingers. As always, without rushing, Ngono described the details of his fight in Berlin, rekindling an intricate memory of Adolf and his bloody mustache.

  “Me too, I have sad stories to tell,” Charles Atangana confessed.

  He told about losing his first wife, Marie Biloa, in a car accident just a week after he’d returned from Spain. “The very first car accident in Yaoundé, can you imagine?” He admitted that the accident had really changed him.

  “I became an entirely different man,” he insisted. “Monogamous.”