His house was Forestry House, a real two-story wooden house, with a roof of leaves that my father would take the utmost care in rebuilding. Below, down in the valley, not far from the prisons, was the Haussa town with pisé ramparts and high gates, exactly as it was during the glorious era of the Adamawa. A little off to one side, the other African town, the market, the palace of the King of Bamenda, and the guest house for the district officer and other officers of Her Majesty’s (they came only once, to decorate the King). A picture taken by my father, undoubtedly somewhat satirical, shows these officials of the British government, standing stiffly in their starched shorts and shirts, wearing helmets, calves sheathed in their woolen stockings, watching the parade of the King’s warriors, in loincloths, heads decorated with fur and feathers, brandishing their assegais.
My father brought my mother to Bamenda after their marriage and Forestry House was their first home. They filled it with their furniture, the only furniture they ever bought, which they took with them everywhere: tables, armchairs carved out of trunks of iroko, decorated with the traditional sculpture of the high plateaus of western Cameroon, leopards, monkeys, antelopes. My father took a picture of their living room in Forestry House, decorated in a very pronounced “colonial” style: above the fireplace mantle (it gets cold in Bamenda in winter) hangs a large shield made of hippopotamus skin, along with two crossed spears. They are probably objects left behind by the preceding occupant of the house, for it doesn’t look like the kind of thing my father would go out in search of. The carved furniture, on the other hand, came back to France with him. I spent a large part of my childhood and my adolescence surrounded by that furniture, sitting on the stools to read dictionaries. I played with the ebony statues, the bronze hand bells, I used the cowrie shells as jacks. To me, those things, the sculpted wood and the masks hanging on the walls weren’t in the least exotic. They were my African side, they were a prolongation of my life, and in a certain way, an explanation of it. And before my life, they spoke of the time when my father and mother had lived over there, in that other world where they had been happy. How can I explain it? I felt surprised, and even indignant, when I found out, long afterward, that objects of that sort could be bought and exhibited by people that had never known anything about all of that, for whom they meant nothing, and even worse, for whom those masks, those statues and those thrones weren’t living things, but dead skin that is often called “art”.
During the first years of their marriage, my mother and father lived their life as lovers there, in Forestry House and on the roads of the Cameroon highlands, as far out as Banso. Traveling along with them were their employees: Njong the chocra, Chindefondi the interpreter, Philippus the head porter. Philippus was my mother’s friend. He was a short man with inborn Herculean strength, capable of pushing aside a tree trunk to clear the road or of carrying loads no one could have even lifted. My mother said that several times he’d helped her cross flooding rivers, holding her up over his head above the water.
Also traveling with them were the inseparable companions that my father had adopted upon his arrival in Bamenda: James and Pegasus, the capricious and gentle horses with white stars on their foreheads. And his dog, named Polisson, a sort of gangly pointer that would trot out ahead on the paths, and lay down at his feet wherever he stopped, even when my father was to pose for an official photograph in the company of kings.
BANSO*
IN MARCH OF 1932, my mother and father left the Forestry House residence in Bamenda and set up house in the mountains, in Banso, where a hospital was to be built. Banso was at the end of the laterite road that was negotiable by car in all seasons. It was at the frontier of what was known as “wild” country, the last outpost where British authority was recognized. My father was to be the only doctor, and the only European, which did not displease him.
The territory he was in charge of was immense. It stretched from the border with Cameroon under French mandate in the southeast, all the way to the limits of the Adamawa emirate to the north and included the majority of chiefdoms and small kingdoms that escaped the direct authority of England after the departure of the Germans: Kantu, Abong, Nkom, Bum, Foumban, Bali. On the map he drew himself, my father noted the distances, not in kilometers, but in hours or days of walking time. The details noted down on the map reveal the true dimensions of that country, the reason he loved it: the river fords, the deep or tumultuous rivers, the mountainsides to be climbed, the bends in the paths, the descents into valleys that cannot be tackled on horseback, the impassable cliffs. On the maps he drew, the names make up a litany, they speak of walking in the hot sun, through the grassy plains or scaling laboriously up mountains amidst the clouds: Kengawmeri, Mbiami, Tanya, Ntim, Wapiri, Ntem, Wanté, Mbam, Mfo, Yang, Ngonkar, Ngom, Nbirka, Ngu, a thirty-two-hour walk, meaning five days at a rate of ten kilometers a day over difficult terrain. In addition to the stopovers in hamlets, the bivouacs, the treatments to be given, the vaccinations, the discussions (the notorious palavers) with local authorities, the complaints that needed to be listened to, and the travel log to keep up, the budget to watch, the medicines to be ordered from Lagos, the instructions to leave with the medical officers and the nurses in the dispensaries.
For more than fifteen years, this would be his country. Probably no one has ever reached a better understanding of it than he, no one has ever traveled, probed, endured it to the extent he did. Encountered every inhabitant, brought many of them into the world, accompanied others on their journey toward death. And especially, loved it, because — though he didn’t speak of it, though he never related a single thing about it — the mark and the trace left by those hills and forests, those pastures and the people he met there, remained deep within him all the way to the end of his life.
At the time he was traveling through the northwestern province, maps were nonexistent. The only printed map in his possession was the German army’s general staff map in the scale of one centimeter to three kilometers plotted by Moisel in 1913. With the exception of the major rivers, the Donga Kari — an affluent of the Bénoué — in the north and the Cross River in the south, and the two ancient fortified cities of Banyo and Kentu, the map is inaccurate. Abong, the northernmost village in my father’s medical territory, located at more than a ten-day walk, is noted on the German army’s map with a question mark. The districts of Kaka, of Mbembé were so far from the coastal zone it was as if they belonged to a different country. Most of the people who lived there had never seen Europeans, the most elderly had horrid memories of the occupation of the German army, executions, child abductions. This much was certain — they hadn’t the slightest idea of what the colonial powers of England or France represented and had no inkling of the war that was being prepared on the other side of the world. They weren’t remote or wild regions (as my father would, however, have qualified Nigeria, and, in particular, the forest surrounding Ogoja). On the contrary, they lay in a prosperous land, where fruit trees, yams, and millet were cultivated, where animals were bred. The kingdoms were central to a puissant territory influenced by Islam coming from the northern empires of Kano, the emirates of Bornu, Agadez, and Adamawa, imported by Fulani itinerant peddlers and Haussa warriors. To the east was Koro and Borroro country, to the south the ancient culture of the Bamouns de Foumban founded on trading. They were master metal workers and even used a system of writing invented in 1900 by King Njoya. All things considered, European colonization had affected the region very little. Douala, Lagos, Victoria were light years from there. The mountainous peoples of Banso still lived as they always had, at a slow pace, in harmony with the sublime nature that surrounded them, cultivating the land and grazing their herds of longhorn cows.