“France is nothing without Africa.”
“Is that so? Well,” I say, “just look at the Central Post Office! Since 1939, it hasn’t changed at all, isn’t that so? If anything, it’s even uglier today, am I right?”
How I love to debate with my compatriots!
“Is France going to rebuild it for us?”
“France owes its lifeblood to Cameroon,” they insist. “My dear friend, Paris was liberated by us!”
“Bèbèla!”
“Go tell that to the French.” That’s what I tell them.
“Do you believe,” they snap back, “that de Gaulle would have been taken seriously by Churchill for even one minute without the victory in Yaoundé?”
I love how they are so precise: “for even one minute”!
More Cameroonian nonsense! I want to shout. Just more Cameroonian nonsense!
Listen, they tell me: First, Churchill began to pay attention to de Gaulle’s theories only after Yaoundé. He also needed to convince Roosevelt. After 1940, especially after 1942, things moved quickly once the United States joined the war, furious because of the attack on its navy the year before in Pearl Harbor. De Gaulle had no choice but to offer up the African coast, African cities—like Algiers and Casablanca!—to the growing Allied forces. The landing at the beaches in Normandy was modeled on that of Algiers, itself based on the experience gleaned in the failed landing at Dakar, on September 23–25, 1940. Really, it all goes back to Leclerc’s landing on the shore at Douala, in a little pirogue, the night of August 26, 1940. The people of Yaoundé—just ask any intellectual taxi driver, he’ll say the same thing—they all know that plum season signals the ripeness of those fruits in a very particular way; those plums, which de Gaulle ate in Yaoundé’s courtyards, mark the start of a joyful harvest season, even if he threw the pit out the window of French history. “He will bring together France’s last putsch and Africa’s first,” Fritz predicted, and along with him the good Cameroonian thinks that the putsch in Ongola paved the way for the ones in Algiers and then Paris, where de Gaulle finally took power in August 1944. The people of Yaoundé sometimes regret that Paris lived through such calm times after 1944, while their hometown was besieged by the fear of possible coups, like those that actually took place in the other African capitals. Obviously, I’m not trying to say that people would complain about a coup d’état against Paul Biya, who, like his predecessors, lives to follow Paris’s orders. The intellectual taxi drivers will tell you straight out: “Mola, Yaoundé is not another neighborhood in Paris, huh! If there’s a coup d’état here, bèbèla, Biya will shit his pants!”
* * *
History is written by the victors. It’s really too bad that the books that show us pictures of the victors of the Second World War don’t take our taxi drivers into account. Ah! Does that mean that the tirailleurs didn’t, in fact, offer up to newly liberated Paris that black force that she wanted to take in her arms? Was it a waste of time that Free France whitened the French army, especially Leclerc’s forces? Or does it mean that the discussions between de Gaulle and Churchill didn’t transform France’s destiny, as they were supposed to do, or turn her back into the great power of de Gaulle’s dreams? On all of these questions, the Sahara remains strangely quiet. But that’s not really a problem, because while the desert gave everything to Leclerc, what did it learn that it didn’t already know? When Pouka met Fouret in 1947, he saw a man comfortably settled down. His words mentioned the war only rarely, and then just to express his surprise at how badly things had turned out. He spoke to Pouka as if he came from a far-off continent, a continent that knocked on his door, “as it had knocked on France’s,” bringing more questions than answers. He had become a Gaullist because, as he said, de Gaulle was luckier than Louis Napoléon had been “with his African generals.”
“Like Napoléon?” Pouka asked quizzically.
“Let’s not exaggerate,” Fouret chastised.
He paused, reflecting for a moment.
“It’s the dialectic,” he went on. “It’s the dialectical process of Africa coming to save France.”
An ironic smile lit up his face. Several times he used the phrase “Third World” to refer to Africa, a place he now knew quite well. The war had given him a newfound power, the power to travel extensively, in Africa primarily, “in our dueling field,” he added with a laugh. The memory of the desert campaign was still fresh in his mind. He was by that time teaching philosophy at the University of Bordeaux, where he’d become the butt of the leftist students’ jokes—by that I mean, most of the students’—since he’d added the writings of Marx and Hegel to his courses.
“Revolution,” he said to Pouka, “it’s up to the Third World to lead it.”
“Why?” the maestro asked.
“Europe is tired of change.”
Pouka noted the weary features of this man who had abandoned his dreams. So it was Professor Fouret who one evening introduced him to Jacques Delarue, who taught law at the Sorbonne, the famous professor the poet had first heard about back in the homeland, and who’d come to Bordeaux to give a lecture. In his hotel, Delarue immediately asked Pouka what had become of Um Nyobè. Pouka couldn’t tell him much, only that his friend was involved in union activities, that he still liked talking politics and playing soccer—he was captain of a team, in fact. He thought he saw a glimmer of doubt in Fouret’s eyes, but also the conviction that Cameroon’s future was still in play. What Pouka didn’t tell him was that he had actually gone to Paris because of Delarue, because he wanted to continue the legal studies he’d begun in Bordeaux. Instead of giving Pouka advice on the study of law, however, Delarue had encouraged him to enroll at the School of Oriental Languages in Paris to study anthropology. He gave him the addresses of several people he said he knew, including one man from Senegal by the name of Léopold, who, he added, had been a tirailleur and also wrote poems. Pouka confessed that he had a manuscript in his bag, The Tumultuous Reveries, that he hoped to have published.
“That will make Léopold happy,” Fouret said with a nod. “He’s working now on an anthology of poems by black writers, I think.”
That caught Pouka’s attention.
“I’m more of a man of action, myself,” Fouret added.
He revealed that his stay in Cameroon hadn’t made his life easy since he had come back to France.
“Ah! Gaullism! I should have realized.”
And that brought the conversation back to Cameroon, to the desert campaign, and the year 1942.
“Everything was decided in 1942.”
“In 1940,” Pouka insisted. “With the events in Ongola.”
How could Fouret have known? One thing is certain, however: the maestro was not one of the poets chosen for Senghor’s anthology.
25
Between Us Women
History kept marching on. After Fritz’s departure for Douala, Ngo Bikaï asked Nguet to come live with her. Let’s not dwell on Fritz’s decision, because it was painful, oh so very painful, for each of the parties concerned. The children. Ngo Bikaï. Fritz. Ask anyone who has gone through a divorce and you’ll hear all about it. Choices are easier to make when they’re theoretical, Fritz realized. He couldn’t blame Ngo Bikaï for anything, because if there was a victim in this, it was her. And what about him? When you can no longer blame the living, you blame the dead. Rummaging through his father’s belongings, he found something that brought him some peace. Discovering that an askari is the equivalent of a tirailleur, and a tirailleur an askari by another name, was a revelation that freed his conscience, freed his hands. He could walk away from everything his father had bequeathed to him, no regrets; and so he set off on the road to Douala, his pockets empty, leaving behind a pile of bags full of his own belongings in his room.
“Keep it,” he said to his wife when the two met one last time in the bedroom, their love’s bedroom. He pointed at the two piles he’d made. “That’s for the kids.”
Obviously, he was lying.
/> Ngo Bikaï sought to heal the wound of their separation by moving Nguet into the room just a few days after Fritz had liberated the space. A father can never be replaced, of course, but something needed to be done so that the children would stop asking over and over, “When is Papa coming home?” Luckily, Nguet had her own way of talking to them. She became Ngo Bikaï’s right-hand woman, not out of a sense of obligation, but rather by default, because, as you may recall, that had been her sister Martha’s job before. But Martha was in Yaoundé.
There was something else, too. Nguet was pregnant. By whom? More than mourning Bilong, it was that bit of news, the impending birth of a child, that brought the two women back together. It didn’t matter who the father was! Ngo Bikaï sympathized, she understood. The soldiers of Free France had left behind them many round bellies.
At first Nguet had hesitated.
“But you’ll be better off at my house,” Ngo Bikaï pleaded.
“But I have a room of my own!”
“If you move in with me, you’ll have the run of a whole house!”
“I’m going to give birth soon.”
“Precisely,” and that’s the argument that finally won the day. “I’ll help you deliver the baby.”
Nguet, who had been living on her own, explained to Ngo Bikaï that although her name sounded like a Bassa one, she wasn’t really from Edéa. Ngo Bikaï let her know that there was no question of her returning to her native Foumban so late in her pregnancy. With Ngo Bikaï, she wouldn’t have to rely on neighbors to help when the baby’s time came. She’d have a sister right there with her: a sister-in-law. That was an easy argument for her to understand. And that’s how it happened.
One night, Nguet opened the door to the room where Ngo Bikaï was sleeping with her children.
“My sister,” she whispered.
“What is it?” Ngo Bikaï asked as she came out of the room, holding a lamp and rubbing her eyes.
“I think,” said Nguet, “I’ve become a child again.”
She sounded like she was talking to her own mother.
“Why?”
“I’ve wet my bed.”
That’s how it all began. An inauspicious night for the birth, because it was raining. Ngo Bikaï could have run through the night, calling her women together, but could she leave a woman in labor alone with the children? No, she could never do that.
“Let’s go to the living room.”
And there, together, they waited for the first contractions.
“Get undressed,” Ngo Bikaï said, once the contractions had started, “and put this on.”
In that living room that had been the scene of such a long story, she helped Nguet put on the kaba ngondo she herself often wore to the market.
“Walk around the table.”
Where had she learned the art of midwifery? Having gone through three pregnancies, she knew she needed to wrap her arms around Nguet and hold her up, because Nguet was tired.
“You have to keep walking,” she insisted.
The two women made their way around the table, which on the day they celebrated a now-failed marriage had held one of the biggest captains ever; under the watchful eyes of photographs depicting the ghostly remains of a family, they walked all through the night that swallowed up their words as the rain fell, harder and harder, in big drops on the roof and ground. They retraced the path of those who had shared in the joyful meal. Step by step, one contraction after another, Nguet reinscribed in that living room the love it had lost, the love of a brother, Bilong, the love of a husband whose photos still hung on the walls, the love of Ngo Bikaï who had learned to see her as a woman like any other, the love of a child who commanded her every move.
“Walk,” said Ngo Bikaï.
“I can’t take it anymore.”
“You must keep walking,” the Mother of the Market insisted, “until the contractions are much closer together.”
Ngo Bikaï recalled the mathematics of a pregnant body. She kept track of Nguet’s contractions systematically, as if they were in her own body. Then, when they reached the right number, she held the exhausted woman gently around the hips and guided her toward Fritz’s room, helping Nguet to lie down on the bed where she had so often sought and found love, love that had now departed.
“Spread your legs wide,” she said.
And Nguet did as she was told, bracing her feet against both sides of the bed.
Ngo Bikaï massaged her belly, using an oil she’d prepared just for this. Gently, but firmly. With great patience she spread open her sister’s legs, the lips of her vagina, her whole body. The details of her own pregnancies ran through her mind. But a first pregnancy is not like a second one, or a third. This was Nguet’s first.
“The first birth always takes a long time.”
“Does it hurt?”
“That depends.”
Ngo Bikaï knew that there was no use lying.
“Tell me a story,” Nguet asked.
So Ngo Bikaï told her own story.
“Another.”
Ngo Bikaï told the story of her love with Fritz, how they’d met, her own first pregnancy, the birth of her first child, the start of her business, in short, her whole life. At the same time, she was massaging Nguet’s vagina. She spoke gently as she rubbed. Tears flooded her eyes. Using more of the oil, she rubbed first with two fingers, then with four, then six, finally all ten fingers. Soon Nguet no longer heard the voice that had been talking her through the birth. All of a sudden the child in her belly began to move, timidly at first, and then with determination. It was as if, alerted by the story he heard, he first strained his ear to listen more closely, then moved his body to listen even better, then poked out his head to see who was talking.
“I see the head,” Ngo Bikaï said. “Push!”
And Nguet pushed.
“You’re doing great,” said Ngo Bikaï, holding Nguet’s feet wide apart, “you are brave, you are courageous. Now, count one, two, three, and push.”
And Nguet pushed. A flood burst out from her vagina, soaking the bed. The head appeared. Nguet cried. Ngo Bikaï started counting again.
“One more time! Push!”
The strength of her voice carried Nguet along. And Nguet pushed, carried away by the child who wanted to know the happy ending of the story of which he’d heard only a few painful chapters, chapters that weren’t about him. Nguet pushed and excrement poured out of her rectum. Nguet pushed once more and the child leaped from her belly, falling into Ngo Bikaï’s hands. Lifting the baby by his feet, she gave him a little swat on the behind. The baby gave his first cry. Ngo Bikaï cut the umbilical cord.
“Here is your child,” she announced to the exhausted mother. “It’s a boy.”
Nguet was crying and laughing. In her love, she found the strength to hold to her breast the little one who had just been torn from her womb, from her body, from her heart. She didn’t even feel the placenta coming out of her belly. Ngo Bikaï, who had spent the whole night between her sister’s legs, finally stood up and covered Nguet with a towel. She rushed to bring water to clean up the blood and fluid that had spilled over everything, that still flowed from the happy mother. Suddenly she realized that her three children were in the doorway, where they’d been watching the whole scene in silence. She jumped but didn’t miss a beat.
“Bring me some water,” she asked the oldest, then said to the others, “Come say hello to your new cousin.”
The new mother was whispering a song into the babe’s ear, a rosary comprised of thanks and praise names. She sang and cried. She spoke to her child of the men who had left. Of far-off countries. She called her newborn son Bilong, and also Hebga. Bilong Hebga. The children repeated the names, amazed by the nursing babe.
“Bilong,” said the eldest.
“Bilong Hebga,” Ngo Bikaï corrected with a smile, happy at the thought that on this child’s birth certificate her little brother’s name would be inscribed, instead of “father unknown.”
“Doesn’t he have a first name?”
“Bilong, that’s his first name, his father’s name,” Nguet replied.
“And Hebga?”
The two women suddenly exchanged a knowing glance.
“That’s an extra name, a given name.”
“Given to whom?”
“That’s a whole other story,” said the new mother.
A really long story.
The story of all the women on the home front.
26
That’s How Friendships Are, Too
Um Nyobè and Pouka learned only later that Ngo Bikaï and Fritz had separated. It doesn’t matter which of them took it worse. The maestro simply asked why even get married if you’re just going to divorce the next day? Let’s leave it up to Um Nyobè to put him in his place.
His plans foiled again by the rain—because at the start of the season, the rain in Yaoundé just doesn’t stop falling—Pouka was only able to meet up with his friend after work, when the weather died down. The two writers agreed that, for a man, life without a woman is a hard bed to lie in.
“Don’t you have anything to eat in this house?” Um Nyobè asked.
Food wasn’t the only problem on his mind. He knew Pouka never cooked anything anyway. Except for a table and chairs, and two armchairs, his house was empty. Um Nyobè peered out at the courtyard that had become a lake, where the falling rain left big circular drops like so many water lilies.
When the Plums Are Ripe Page 31