Mount Pleasant (28 page)

Naturally, he began with the gardens of the new palace. Then he moved on to the baobab, in the center of Foumban. The city's inhabitants took his appearance in their homes as an opportunity to air their complaints, to tell him their stories. And they had a lot to complain about—oh, yes, so many things to tell him! Accusations against the family chiefs, the Nji, against the whole noble class, the Mbansi. Hundreds of complaints about freemen, about men altogether, about forced labor, about the work done by noblewomen, not to mention their objections to new taxes.

“You should work,” Njoya told the noblewomen, “if you want to pay your taxes.”

“If it were only the taxes, Alareni,” said a man, stammering respectfully but clearly distraught. “If it were only the taxes.”

Njoya waited for him to finish; his neighbor cut in.

“Now we have to pay our slaves.”

“Like any other workers.”

“If you can't pay them,” the sultan said, “well, they just won't work for you any longer.”

“Mfon Bamum,” an anxious man asked the Bamum chief, “do women now have the right to leave their husband?”

“They've always had that right,” Njoya replied. “They've always had it. It's up to you to learn how to keep your wives satisfied.”

And the sultan laughed.

Everyone felt relaxed around him.

“It's up to
you
to be your wives' lovers,” he continued.

He stressed “you,” staring right at the men. He had left his palace to draw a map of his country, and the land's voices were grabbing hold of his feet like mud after a rain. Everything was spiraling out of his control; the thousands of complaints that filled his ears signaled the slow but certain erosion of his land and asked him to fight against the storm brewing on the horizon. The more information he and his assistants collected, the more his ears were filled with complaints about land that had been lost. The ground's pain was a solemn call to action, one he didn't really want to hear, because he didn't want to challenge the French administration.

Nji Mama, whom Njoya had entrusted with the task of using all the collected information to sketch a map of Foumban, couldn't close his ears to the words rising up from the earth. His artistic soul, of course, was captivated by the chart on which he had noted, one after the other, the bits of information his assistants gave him; yet the city streets he traced on a large sheet of paper could not be kept silent forever.

“The map is speaking,” he said. “The country is speaking.”

Nji Mama imagined Njoya enthralled by this definitive picture of his country's capital. Oh, the master architect did everything in his power to satisfy the sultan's artistic urges. But he couldn't stem the flow of painful murmurs coming from the Bamum. No one beside the sultan could know that this map was the last desperate attempt to grab hold of a handful of earth under a torrential rain. The song rising from the ground revealed a dangerous void growing in its depths. The architect's pulse raced when he marked the location of the French headquarters in the middle of the map, writing beneath it in Roman letters, “Lieutenant Prestat.” He stopped, read the name over repeatedly, and sighed heavily. He felt that this name did not belong on his map, not on Njoya's map. He erased it carefully and stood there contemplating his work's liberation, lost in his own thoughts.

 

15

A Woman Is a City, Unself-conscious

Nebu had been standing in front of the door to his master's workshop for some time. He wanted to tell Nji Mama that he had finally discovered the formula he'd been looking for and solved the equation that had obsessed him for so long. He wanted to tell him he'd found the solution to the mystery of how women move by adding up all the triangles that formed a woman, a woman with Ngungure's face. Then he saw the sadness in the old man's eyes and decided to come back later. That's when his stupid sneezing started up again.

“Come in,” Nji Mama said, noticing his apprentice standing at the door to his workshop. “Come in, my son.”

It would have been far better if only Nebu had been able to come up with a quick excuse. Instead, he just sneezed again.

“Do you have a cold?” his master asked, patting his shoulder.

Nji Mama's face was creased with worry on account of this sculptor. Nebu blamed the uncertain weather, the shift from the dry season to rain, the scent of the city's red earth, and what else? Still, he agreed to his master's suggestion that he drink some citronella tea.

“Ask your mother to make you some,” Nji Mama insisted. “Herb tea soothes the throat quickly.”

Nebu tried to change the subject, not realizing that his master was happy for the distraction.

“A beautiful map,” the young man said after wiping his nose on a cloth Nji Mama handed him.

No word more astute than “beautiful” had come to mind.

“It's almost done,” Nji Mama announced.

Together they pored over the roads, the location of the houses, the angles of the intersections. Nji Mama added other place-names. Two symbols marking the location of the palace and the baobab in the center of town gave a sense of perspective to the map, filling it with an unexpected breath of life. The Artists' Alley was nicely drawn. Nebu also recognized the spice market. His hand moved along mechanically, searching for his mother's house.

“Here's where I live.”

“I know you live there.”

His master's response was curt. Nji Mama had an ironic smile on his lips when he said “there,” and he hadn't added anything to mark the spot where Nebu's finger lay. The young boy didn't have the courage to ask why. It would have been a stupid question. Why would his mother's house—that of a woman and, what's more, a slave—been important enough to deserve a spot on the historic map of Foumban? Was his mother's life worth the trouble? No one included such trivial details when they wrote history. Nebu knew it, and it made him sad.

“It's a very beautiful map,” he repeated.

Nji Mama paused thoughtfully, his hand slowly caressing his goatee. Nebu didn't dare interrupt his silence.

“You know,” the master began, “I saw you out walking the other day.”

Caught off guard by the comment, Nebu replied without thinking.

“How did you know it was me?”

The words slipped out of his lips.

“Young man,” Nji Mama calmly replied, smiling ironically, “I was once your age, too.”

“Forgive me—Nji,” Bertha's son stammered, his head sunk into his shoulders. “I'm really sorry.”

His ears rang again with the spice market's laughter. He remembered his disguise and lived through his humiliation once more. He didn't even know if he was apologizing for questioning the master's knowledge or for having walked clear across Foumban dressed as a woman. Just one question had him rattled: Does he really know everything? That question frightened him all the more because Nji Mama seemed to be able to see right through his soul. He had never lied to his masters. And now he couldn't keep quiet either.

“Yes,” he said. “I was following a girl.”

Nji Mama tilted his head to listen. Nebu told him about Ngungure and what he had noticed. The master was visibly impressed by the passion that lit up the young man's face and smiled at his timidity. He reassured his apprentice that his quest was legitimate, interrupting him only when the young man told him he had done it “for art, just for art's sake.”

“You're exploring new terrain,” Nji Mama conceded. “Entirely new.”

Perplexed, Nebu suspected that what he had done with his muse, Njoya had done with the city itself. In fact, Nebu saw no difference between the fevered solution he'd found to the equations of a woman's body as she crossed the city—his logarithm for a body in motion—and the mapping of the longitude and latitude of Foumban's quarters. His master could understand this better than anyone else, he thought.

“I have all her measurements,” he said. “Everything.”

Nji Mama smiled.

“I have the triangles of her being right here in my head,” Nebu said, touching his temple, clearly quite pleased with himself.

“It's crazy to follow a girl all the way across the city,” Nji Mama observed. “Really crazy…”

He didn't add “and to dress up as a woman.” But it was as if he had. Nebu wanted to explain that art's truth is found in the artist's nudity. That what he had done was no more ludicrous than getting lost in the city streets as you tried to note everything down so you could map it all out. That he could see the slave woman in his mind with just as many details as there were on the map spread out before his master's eyes. That he knew the latitude and the longitude of that woman's veins as well as the number of her heartbeats. That he had calculated the proportions of her bones and the weight of each part of her flesh. Finally, he wanted to tell his master that of course he wasn't trying to compare Njoya's map to his own vision and dreams of a woman. But he kept quiet. He wanted Nji Mama to understand that his vision of Ngungure was just as transparent as a survey. He didn't raise his voice, because he had no right to, and especially because he knew his ideas were outrageous.

The map before him was unique: nothing like it had ever been done before. It was Foumban! This map was the realization of one of the sovereign's dreams, Njoya's vision of the land of his ancestors. Nebu knew it, but his mind was filled with Ngungure alone.

“I can still see her now, just like…” he ventured.

Yes, Nebu wanted to say, just like this map. Nji Mama was listening, waiting for him to finish his sentence. The sculptor stopped, just shy of the fine line that separates genius and insolence; instead, he concluded, “like truth.”

The master didn't interrupt him.

“Because truth is concrete, isn't it?” Bertha's son continued after wiping his nose once more.

Nji Mama didn't answer, for it wasn't really a question. Nebu knew his master understood even if he didn't interrupt. That's how Nji Mama was: a man of few words, but always a fatherly judge. Nebu didn't understand why there was such sadness in his eyes.

“You are still very young,” the chief architect acknowledged, patting his shoulder once again. “Art is in your blood.”

They looked at each other, and then Nebu lowered his eyes. The map of the city was spread out between them, and on it Nebu could have traced all the pathways he had followed behind the slave woman. The young man didn't know that his master had also left out the spot where the next group of Bamum would be put into shackles. The streets were like a network of twisting veins, and the map of the city was shaped like a beating heart. Nebu left his master in the silence of the exchange that followed their conversation. He slowly began to back up, turning around only once he'd gotten a good distance away. Suddenly the chief architect's voice echoed down the corridor.

“Don't forget the citronella tea,” Nji Mama said. “Ask your mother for some.”

Nebu saw him waving in the doorway.

“Yes, master,” he cried, waving back. “I won't forget. Understood.”

Map of Foumban drawn by Nji Mama in 1920. The location of the French headquarters isn't given.

 

16

The French Officer's Mistake

It was the missionary Göhring who put an end to the Bamum practice of slaves walking naked in public. That was in 1911. He wanted to protect the son his wife had given birth to in Foumban, a boy named Njoya Göhring, in honor of his friendship with the sultan. Nansa Njoya—“Njoya the White,” as people called the child—was starting to notice things and ask questions. The father did what any father would do if he had the power to alter reality to suit himself. Not many people remember that. What most do remember is an order issued by Lieutenant Prestat in 1920 that prohibited any clothing that didn't cover people from the knees “up to (and including) the breasts.” People told me, moreover, that Lieutenant Prestat made that decision because he couldn't concentrate, was distracted by the sight of all those female breasts dancing in the streets, shopping in the market, sometimes lining up in front of his office, or even, on many occasions, coming right into his bed. Yes, I was told that the sight of so many naked women crowded his mind with images of fornication so clear that his written reports were filled with gibberish.

If his headquarters had been located outside the city, as the German and English headquarters had been, he would have cast a less nervous eye on life in Foumban. Ah, how to avoid the question? Maybe he would have had an entirely different idea of black women and slavery in general. Just one detail can change the course of history! According to some people, it was Madame Dugast who, despite her kindness, was behind the lieutenant's strictures; she agreed with him on most points, except for the closing of Njoya's schools and the requirement that all children attend the French school. In any event, women were on the front lines of the battle that soon broke out in Foumban.