Mount Pleasant (41 page)

The Man of the French needed to leave, yes. So then Captain Ripert accused Njoya, said that he, yes, he, Njoya, was behind all this confusion, that he was pulling the strings. Captain Ripert declared, yes, that he would hold Njoya responsible for anything that happened in Foumban that day, as if that hadn't been the sultan's responsibility since his birth! As if, “for common sense to prevail,” Njoya hadn't himself cleaned up the trash that had piled up in the streets of Bamum land since the first white had set foot there. The situation was so ridiculous that the sultan would have burst out laughing if he hadn't known how much his laughter would have added to Ripert's humiliation. What Njoya knew was that the cost was going to be high this time, especially if measured in terms of Ripert's nerves: they were a purse it would be best not to stretch any further. That's why he decided to word things differently and speak to the captain in a friendly way.

“I didn't ask them to come here,” he said, his conversation with Muluam and Ngbatu still fresh in his mind. “In fact, I asked them to put up with Mose.”

Captain Ripert didn't believe him. How could he? Mose's translation didn't help any.

“Liar!” shouted the French officer.

Mose didn't translate the insult; it would have just riled up the Bamum people all the more and to no good end. Never before had they heard their sovereign called a liar. But of course, very few people here, none really, had read the reports of the French officers, who often used such language in reference to their sultan.

“How can I ask them to leave,” Njoya continued, “when I didn't ask them to come?”

He might have added that he was in the same position as Captain Ripert, but he didn't have the chance.

“Tell them to leave,” Ripert threatened, “or I'll send you into exile!”

Yes, that's what the colonial officer said, and this time Mose Yeyap translated: “exile.”

There was no law in the Indigenous Code that advised shouting threats of exile in the face of a sultan. But wasn't Captain Ripert himself the law in person? Moreover, he wouldn't have hesitated to sign such a decree, right there, in front of his office, in front of everyone. He wouldn't have hesitated! Martin, his boss in Dschang, would have covered for him, “so that France not lose face.” Njoya knew very well that in an occupied territory, the smallest are really the big men, and that the decision of a subaltern colonial officer means just as much as that of the high commissioner. For years he had avoided conflict with the Europeans, and now suddenly he found himself caught in the middle. He called the two leaders of the protest movement, lectured them publicly, and asked them why in the name of Nchare Yen did they want to sow disorder in Foumban?

“Chaos is already in the house, Alareni,” Muluam replied. In his anger, the boy had forgotten the ritual gestures of politeness he ought to have made before the sultan.

“You no longer respect my orders?” Njoya demanded.

Neither Muluam nor Ngbatu replied.

“Do you want someone to die?”

Ngbatu was quicker than his friend. “Alareni,” he said, “we just want Mose Yeyap to go!”

He turned and faced the crowd of apprentices behind him. “Isn't that so?”

The thousands gathered replied with one voice, “We don't want him anymore!”

Muluam stressed, “Alareni, we all want Monlipèr.”

He emphasized “we all.” The crowd chanted, “Monlipèr! Monlipèr!”

In vain. Captain Ripert still wouldn't accept Ibrahim, whose name Njoya had put forward as a replacement, for the reasons we already know. France, etc. Yet he knew that the French colonial administration couldn't make an ad hoc decision while under siege. It took him several hours to convince himself, and it was really against his own will that Ripert finally emerged from his office to read the decree recognizing a new authority in the Artists' Alley. People whispered, but didn't applaud. For what Ripert wanted in exchange was a gesture of goodwill, to “show the French administration, etc.” He demanded that Muluam and Ngbatu be thrown into prison for “attempted murder,” “destruction of property” (Mose's house), “inciting rebellion,” “disruption of the public order,” and several other dreadful offenses. Njoya didn't contradict him, no. Even in the palace, his court would have condemned the two fellows, accusing them of disobeying the sultan's orders. Taking advantage of this start of a dialogue, the Bamum spread out their list of complaints: lower taxes, lifting the limitations placed on the authority of husbands over their wives, suppression of forced labor, etc. The French officer interrupted their fervor. He demanded that all the men be disarmed before speaking to him. That was met with a lively protest, and the list of their complaints grew even longer; but the captain reminded the proud Bamum riflemen that carrying weapons had already been banned by the Germans and the English, and so was illegal under the French.

“Illegal?” they shouted in surprise. “Are the French really Germans?”

“What do you mean, illegal?” one man shouted. “Since when?”

“The sultan never banned our rifles!”

“Who do you think you are?”

“Will the French ensure the sultan's safety?”

Et cetera.

At the end of this rather long day Captain Ripert had met the crowd's most pressing demands and gotten its two most inflamed advocates off the streets. No more than that. What people didn't know is that he had committed to memory the faces of all those he'd seen inciting riot, for he mentioned their names in the report he subsequently wrote and sent to Dschang in order that it be forwarded to High Commissioner Marchand in Yaoundé. Mose Yeyap gave him the names of these subversives, and the translator added that they were, for the most part, apprentices of the deposed master Monlipèr, which made Ripert's next decision all the easier. In truth, he had already made up his mind when they announced the death of a man on the worksite of the new palace.

“Will this chaos never end?”

Ripert jumped on his horse, rushing with the alarmed crowd to the Palace of All Dreams.

And that was just the start of it.

 

14

The Equation of an Assassination

Here is what had happened: the crowd that had gathered in front of Captain Ripert's office was dispersing when an out-of-breath slave threw himself at Njoya's feet. The man's face was dripping with fear, and his hands were waving madly.

“Wombo-o,”
shouted the slave, “he's dead!”

“What?”

“He is dead!”

“Who?”

“Wombo-o!”

When the sultan, his entourage, Ripert, and his
tirailleurs
arrived at the palace, they found Nebu's body smashed on the ground, surrounded by pieces of the statue he'd been working on. A very strange death, yes, a very strange death! The sculptor was entirely naked, and his penis still standing. By all appearances, he had fallen from the window of the Palace of All Dreams with his statue. The palace workmen surrounded him, stunned. They were pushed back by the voices of the sultan and Captain Ripert, who both wanted to see for themselves before believing what had happened. So, for the fourth time Njoya met Nebu, but this time Bertha's son was dead.

“What happened to him?” the sultan asked.

And Captain Ripert asked,“Who killed him?”

With a policeman's quick eye the Frenchman measured the dimensions of the wall from the window to the ground. His question demanded an answer, but as it emerged from his lips, it was cut off by the shout of a mother exploding in the heart of the crowd. It was Bertha. She threw herself on the body of the son she had loved so much but hadn't been able to save. She beat her breast, revealing to everyone her body splattered with Nebu's blood, her mouth open to the sky to release the pain in her belly caused by the amputation of the most important part of her life.

“My son!” she cried.

All the women around her repeated her cry.

“Our son!”

“My son!”

“Our son!”

“Who killed our son?”

“Wombo-o!”

Bertha's body was clothed in pain. Her hands were lifted up to the sky, and her endless cry tore the universe with a tremolo that left no eyes dry. Njoya couldn't contain himself either at the sight of this genius sculptor whom he had elevated to the status of
Nji
just a few months earlier. The sultan cried. Monlipèr, Nji Mama, Ibrahim, all the city's masters, and several others were also devastated by this great loss. The crowd gathered around the suffering mother and cried with her.

In fact, the whole sultanate was devastated by the artist's death. All of Cameroon—what am I saying?—all of Africa would have cried for such a loss! All those who had been alerted to what had happened in the Artists' Alley, who had come together to vent their rage with their collective demands, now had an actual death before them and one specific question on their lips, a short one: “Who killed Nebu?”

The French colonial administration—Ripert himself—had never looked sympathetically on Njoya's plans to build his Palace of All Dreams. It had always wanted to put an end to work on the site; pushing the sultan into bankruptcy was one way to do that.

The death that took place at the palace gave the captain the pretext his bosses needed, just as the protest movement that had shaken up the Artists' Alley had inspired him to write a vitriolic report that tied it all together. He demanded that everyone clear away from the site of the drama. He was heard. The tearful mob carried the artist's body into the distant neighborhoods. A hundred hands rushed to console the mother who had seen her son's body lying broken on the ground.

Back in his office, Captain Ripert quickly wrote a thirteen-page report to his superior in Dschang, a report that ended with a practical solution and a scandalous accusation that he hadn't had the guts to formulate out loud in front of Nebu's body. The conclusion: “We must do something.”

By “we” Ripert meant the “colonial administration,” which in Foumban meant Ripert himself, of course.

As for his accusation, it was just as clear: “Njoya is behind all of this disorder.”

That was the sort of conclusion and accusation that Commander Martin in Dschang didn't need to read twice. He had been waiting for them. High Commissioner Marchand, on the other hand, might have sent a dispatch from Yaoundé asking “Why?” Martin would then have sent him a sketch of the palace under construction drawn by Nji Mama, the sketch Ripert had attached to his text to bolster his accusations. (The captain had confiscated it as proof that Njoya's construction didn't respect the minimum standards set for the protection of workers.)

However, the sketch of the palace, covered with notes written in Akauku letters, would have neutralized Ripert's accusation had it arrived on the high commissioner's desk, even if it was meant as important evidence in support of the captain's claim; Marchand would have sent it on to the Ethnographic Museum in Paris for “more analysis,” and from there, the plan would have been sent on to the learned colonial administrator in Senegal, Delafosse, in order that he “determine if it were the product of an authentic indigenous intelligence.”

Such is the administrative route the report accusing Njoya would have taken. The Palace of All Dreams would have been mentioned in a scientific article on Bamum writing and Njoya's creations, on which Delafosse was then working. It's useless to say that such an article wouldn't have changed Ripert's decision, for on that day his anger caused by the death at the palace was limitless and his will to bring French justice to bear could not bend before science.

Had a Bamum master artist told him what was evident to everyone's mind—that Nebu's death was the sacrifice required for the construction of the palace to progress unimpeded, yes, that the sculptor had to die so that the worksite would from then on move ahead smoothly—Captain Ripert would have shouted, “Superstitions!”

His Cartesian logic governed his thoughts, like the mechanism of the double-barreled rifle by his side, and his decision to “be done with the sultan” was so firm that it had the abstract clarity of a coordinate plane:

With the variables:

x
2
=
Nebu's death

and

y
2
=
Njoya's palace

The result could only be:

4
=
Njoya must be banished from Foumban.

Had the artisans drawn attention to the artist's nakedness, Ripert would have explained that some slaves still went about the streets dressed only in a loincloth, despite the orders of his predecessor and of the Germans before them. The “strangely erect penis” of the deceased sculptor wouldn't have made him change his mind. On the contrary, had anyone evoked the statue of the woman in movement that the sculptor had just completed, suggesting the possibility of an artistic metaphysics, Ripert would have burst out laughing. If anyone had even said that the statue was so perfect that once completed, it was only logical that it come to life, “stand up and walk,” the captain would have been amused by “all this foolishness.”