Mount Pleasant (13 page)

“So giving you to the sultan was an act of revenge?”

Sara looked at me as if I were a child, no older than the young people from Nsimeyong who were drinking up her tale—that is to say, as if I were an idiot, as if I understood nothing about men. She quietly took a pinch of snuff and asked, ever so quietly, “What do you think?”

I knew she was teasing me, and yet I was reassured by her words. I was even more at ease when, after I told her about finding her father's name in the American archives, she gave a start and stared at me with that same hungry expression I had seen when I told her my name was Bertha.

“My father?” she asked. “Really?”

“You'll have to tell me.”

And that was true, for the revelation of her paternity suggested the twisted outlines of a friendship that clearly had ended with her brutal separation from her mother. The next day, Sara began to call me her daughter, or her granddaughter.

“You are my granddaughter,” she said, “don't you know?”

I was truly honored to be able to reveal to this fountain something of her own sources, to tell her about the circumstances leading up to her birth: events that had taken place on a continent, Europe, and in a country, Germany, and in a city, Berlin, where Sara never could have set foot. And so she became the eager audience for the story of her own gestation. The beginning is an end, isn't it? For the moment, however, I had just one brief mention of an enigmatic name in the documents I had found, along with a few notes jotted down in my files. Ah, Sara was far enough removed from the story of Joseph Ngono that she could wait, like a child eager to hear an amazing epic tale. But what about me?

 

2

Time Regained When You Least Expect It

What a trove of information to be found in the observations of colonists! What an immense contribution colonialism made to African historiography. No more sifting through idle chatter: real books, the written word, firsthand accounts, actual facts. I needed to restrain myself in the name of science, or else I would have shouted with joy, ecstatic at the sight of those piles of official accounts, biased ethnographic studies, missionaries' circulars, and the administrative reports in which the lives of the natives were buried. The vast colonial archives laid out Joseph Ngono's life before me in minute detail. And what's more, I could draw on photographs and even films, not to mention the Internet. What I had previously found in the Library of Congress and in the German Staatsarchiv also came to my rescue. The colony is fixed in our memory in black and white; all I needed to do was to wipe off my glasses and give free rein to my Technicolor imagination to see it all play out before me. With a little effort, I came up with enough details to please Sara, who was waiting for me, ears open wide.

The young people of Nsimeyong would tell me that these comments are not politically correct “for any
good
Cameroonian.” But if I wanted to stitch together Sara's confusing ancestry, if I wanted to tell her her father's name, I needed to draw on all my sources, all of them. It was thanks to colonial-era films that I was able to see Joseph Ngono walking through the streets of Yaoundé in 1911, from Nkomkana—the neighborhood where his family had a compound—to Ongola, the city center. I saw him as a child, holding his little sandals in the rain to “save them”; I saw him with his schoolbag on his head to keep off the sun; I saw him carrying his slate under his arm and hurrying to make it to the mission school on time. Because I saw him go about his business so clearly and carefully, I could tell Sara that her father was a true flower of the colony. I found Ngono again several years later, working as a clerk, politely answering the questions of a German officer, just as he'd been taught. At times he laughed, and occasionally he got angry.

But what I couldn't tell from the archives was what Ngono did when he wasn't with the whites. Although he clearly spent most of his time with his compatriots, he seemed to have lived a good part of his life—the most important part for his daughter's story—in the shadow of the whites, in and around their settlements. The reasons behind his unpredictable behavior were beyond me. In a certain sense, his life was the mirror image of Charles Atangana's, even though Ngono's had unfolded in Germany's sordid underbelly, its stinking bars, and Atangana was received by emperors and kings, even greeted by the pope. Wouldn't that have been enough to make the most honest of men lose his footing?

A temperament can change radically over the course of a life. The more police reports, anthropological articles, and greeting cards from German citizens I read, the more obvious it became that Ngono's decision to quit his job at the Institute of Colonial Studies of the University of Berlin was the real start of his wanderings. Charles Atangana, on the other hand, zealously fulfilled his mission at a similar institute in Hamburg, where he was posted: he copied folktales from his homeland, provided the vocabulary necessary to produce an Ewondo-German dictionary, recorded his voice for phonetics exercises, and gave endless Ewondo conversation classes. And unlike his compatriot, he was rewarded for his efforts. As for Ngono, after several months of work, he knocked on the door of the institute's director and, after being invited in and without even taking a seat—as etiquette required—abruptly declared, “I quit!”

Of course, this scene isn't recorded in any document; still, it is just as true as any of the reports of the vice squad, who were soon instructed to follow him across Berlin. For the first time, this man—who had, for too long, dreamed only of the sunny future laid out for him by colonists—felt how hard life could be. Ngono quit just before the start of the Great War, that's a fact. Up till then, his life had been a pale copy of his friend Karl's, for that's how the chief was known at the time. Roped in by promises of an endless supply of candy, they had both started at the missionary school and converted to Christianity together. Thanks to the rudiments of their European education, they quickly embraced the future that colonialism held out for men of their precocious intelligence.

In reality, the possibilities open to them were quite limited. Just two years after the end of his studies, Ngono realized that he had already gone as far up the colonial ladder as a native could go. I am sure that somewhere in the archives there is a report where a German officer, let's call him Lieutenant Rectanus, describes his visit to Kribi, Douala, or Yaoundé and wonders who had swept the streets: the person responsible for this is clearly destined to do great things for the colony! Or maybe a description of another officer, Killmann, let's say, eating his red sausage off a plate so clean he wants to know what local hands have washed it. “The future of this country is in these hands,” he shouts, greedily swallowing his sausage. “What attention to detail!”

Of course, my years of remove from the situation give me the advantage of perspective. I know now that the future evoked by this colonist never came to be; these colonial officers—so amazed by the hands of their subalterns who washed their plates, swept their streets, took care of their every need—they could do anything they wanted in the tropics, and yet they still couldn't predict an African's future. Whatever the outcome of the conflict ahead—a conflict moving ever closer, although they couldn't see it coming—Joseph Ngono seemed destined for success, just like Charles Atangana. It couldn't go any other way. Weren't the two friends the cream of the colony's crop?

“Attention,” the administrative regulations declared, “colonialism provides professional mobility for the natives.” Yes, according to the system's logic, you could leave a job as a houseboy to become a clerk or even a translator. But for the translator to become a lecturer of Ewondo—and in the fatherland, to top it off—that was a step that no colonized subject would have dared to dream of in 1913. This dream assumed that this colonized subject would teach classes of future colonial administrators, all sitting politely in rows and listening to a black professor. It would have turned the whole colonial order upside down.

Because a black professor in Germany would, of course, grade the exams of his white students, requiring the less assiduous among them to amend their work, it goes without saying that his position would be untenable. The mediocre students of the professor in question (who, following the tenets of colonialism, certainly think themselves smarter than the professor) would sometimes have to repeat a course, and perhaps even abandon their colonial dreams. These same students would give themselves permission to stop by the professor's office to ask that he let them retake exams or that he
adjust
their grades—by which I mean falsify their report cards to save their careers.

Sometimes the Ewondo lecturer would watch his students—especially those most certain about their mission to civilize the colonies—and he would start to laugh, a ferocious laugh, deep in his chest, that he would have a hard time stifling. Why? Ngono had just discovered European poetry, and these human specimens working so hard to scale the steps of conformity made him uncomfortable, for in the verses of their compatriots he had discovered the hymn of futility.

In the Staatsarchiv I actually found—no joke—a note written in the margins of the minutes of a meeting by the famous Professor Baumann, doctor of philosophy (then the director of the Colonial Institute and Ngono's boss), that mentioned a book the illustrious doctor had found on his lecturer's desk: Rilke. This theoretician of Bantu languages, including the one spoken by Ngono, burst out with a laugh that echoed down the halls and through the classrooms of the whole university; he was amused by the scandal of someone like Ngono reading Rilke, a logical reaction if measured against the colonial mentality that so blinded him.

Dr. Baumann wrote a paragraph about this affair in his annual report of the institute's activities, although he neglected to mention which book of Rilke's Ngono was reading. This lapse really says something about the esteemed professor's poetic tastes, or about the commotion his discovery provoked in the institute (too much laughter for a German research institute!). It also taught me why, just a few months after Ngono arrived in Berlin, the Ewondo lecturer suddenly began to feel uncomfortable in his role as colonial educator and cut off from his colleagues. It's a fact: he had started to separate himself from his shadow—or rather, to think independently of it.

Sara willingly accepted this image of her father, adding that she knew him to be a dreamer.

“But you weren't even born yet,” I remarked.

What did it matter? In the end, such details weren't important to her. That Ngono was clearly the father she preferred, the one she would have invented herself if necessary.

“He was a poet,” she repeated.

I was amazed by her lack of pretension as I described her father to her, and nothing entertained me more than that look of hers, which reduced me to silence in a flash. “You're joking, right?” she seemed to ask.

“He's crazy, isn't he?” she sometimes said about her father, interrupting my story. “He's really crazy, isn't he?”

At other times she said, “Tell me the truth.”

 

3

A Sultan's Smile Can Change the Face of the World

But I wanted to hear the rest of Sara's story. The one she was telling was as tumultuous as her father's, no doubt about it. Several days after the events that shook up Nsimeyong and condemned Njoya to lie in bed in an unending coma, Nebu found the sultan's apartments abuzz with activity. Ngutane came running out of the bedroom, her hair a mess, tears in her eyes. Her voice echoed through Mount Pleasant's corridors and made everything in the main courtyard fall still. Njoya had opened his eyes! It wasn't his daughter's faithful reading sessions alone that had given him the will to live once more. Ngutane had brought his grandchildren to his bedside, asking each of them to sing happy songs and recite joyful verses.

That's what had roused Njoya.

At the end of the last poem, something strange had happened: all of a sudden the sultan smiled. He felt heartbeats speeding up in his chest. The smile was still on his lips when Nebu came into his bedroom. Ngutane was outside crying, whether in disbelief or happiness. At first she had taken her father's grimace for the start of a mad dash to the doors of eternal absence. Oh, had she stayed by his bedside, Ngutane would have seen the extraordinary signs of a man's victory over fate. But perhaps she wanted to hide the shock of her unexpected joy from Njoya's keen eye.

It had taken him so long to wake up that the idea of a miracle was hard to swallow. Still, Father Vogt didn't miss the chance to appear at the bedside of the newly awakened sultan; he even found a way for his future flock—meaning all of Mount Pleasant—to know that the hand of his God had made it so.

“He smiled?” he asked the overexcited artisans.

“Yes, he smiled,” a chorus replied. “He smiled!”

“God,” Father Vogt said simply, “God is great.”

Father Vogt kept asking the same question and always got the same answer: “Yes.”

Only a few voices—exceptions in the crowd—ignored his enthusiasm.

“In faith,” the father insisted, “we are all God's children.”

“Amin,”
said the Muslims.

“Amen,” said the others.

When the prelate made the sign of the cross, no one followed suit. Even the energetic professional pagan hunter inside him could understand that the bedroom of someone brought back from the dead is not the place for a conversion. But he wasn't a man to show restraint when a miracle just needed a little bit of help. Instead of looking for Bible verses that would back him up convincingly, he reprised his role as doctor. And what Father Vogt the medic did then will forever be engraved in Mount Pleasant's memory. He took apart his bicycle and asked that someone bring him a chair. Even Nji Mama was startled.