The snapshots my father took with his Leica show the admiration he felt for that country. For example, the Nsungli near Nkor: a side of Africa that has nothing to do with the coastal zone where a stifling atmosphere pervades, where the vegetation is suffocating, almost menacing. Where the presence of the occupying forces of the French and British armies is even more oppressive.
This was a country of distant horizons, with vaster skies, with lands stretching out as far as the eye could see. My mother and father felt a sense of freedom they had never experienced anywhere else. They would follow the trails all day long, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback and stop in the evenings to sleep under a tree out in the open, or in a rudimentary camp like in Kwolu, on the road to Kishong, a simple hut of dried mud and leaves where they hung up their hammocks. In Ntumbo, on the plateau, they passed a herd that my father photographed with my mother in the foreground. They are at such a high altitude that the sky seems to be resting on the moon-shaped horns of the cows and veils the mountain peaks all around them. Despite the poor quality of the development, my mother and father’s happiness is tangible. On the back of a picture taken somewhere in the Grassfields region, in Mbembé country, depicting the landscape where they have just spent the night, my father writes with uncustomary grandiloquence: “The immensity one beholds in the background is that of the endless plain.”
I can sense the emotion he felt crossing the high plateaus and the grassy plains, riding on the narrow paths that snaked up the mountainsides, discovering new panoramas every minute, the blue outlines of the peaks emerging from the clouds like mirages, bathed in the African light, the harsh blaze of noon, the softened glow of twilight when the red earth and the straw-colored grasses seem to be lit from within by a sacred fire.
They also learned to know the exhilaration of a strenuous life, the weariness that causes one’s legs to wobble after a day of riding when the time comes to dismount and guide the horse by its tether over to the bottom of the ravines. The burn of the sun, the thirst that cannot be quenched, or the chill of the rivers that had to be forded mid-current, with the water reaching the horses’ chests. My mother rode sidesaddle as she’d learned to do at riding school in Ermenonville. And such an uncomfortable position — the segregation of sexes that was still the rule in the prewar years was surely a bit ridiculous — paradoxically gives her an African appearance. Something nonchalant and graceful, yet at the same time something very ancient, evocative of biblical times, or perhaps of Tuareg caravans in which the women traveled across the desert in baskets hanging from the sides of the dromedaries.
Thus she accompanied my father, along with the suite of porters and the interpreter, on his medical rounds through the mountains in the west. They went from camp to camp in villages whose names my father would note down on his map: Nikom, Babungo, Nji Nikom, Luakom Ndye, Ngi, Obukun. At times the camps were more than precarious, in Kwaja in Kaka country, they stayed in a hut of branches with no window in the middle of a banana plantation. It was so humid in there that every morning they had to put the sheets and blankets out to dry on the roof. They would stay for one or two nights, sometimes for a week. The drinking water was sour and purplish from permanganate; they bathed in the stream, cooked over a fire of twigs at the entrance to the hut. Nights in the mountains south of the equator were cold, rustling, filled with the clamor of wild cats and the barking of mandrills. And yet it was neither the Africa of Tartarin, nor even that of John Huston. It was rather the Africa depicted in African Farm, a real Africa, densely populated, wracked with disease and tribal wars. But powerful and exhilarating as well, with its countless children, its dances, the good humor and cheerfulness of the shepherds met along the paths.
For my mother and father, their days in Banso were the days of youth, of adventure. The Africa they encountered in the course of their marches was not colonial Africa. In keeping with one of its principles, the British administration left the traditional political structure with its kings, its religious chiefs, its judges, its castes and its privileges in place.
When they arrived in a village, they were welcomed by the king’s emissaries, invited to the palavers, and photographed with the court. In one of those portraits, my mother and father pose around King Memfoï, of Banso. According to tradition, the king is naked to the waist, sitting on his throne, with his fly whisk in hand. On either side of him stand my mother and father wearing worn clothing, dusty from the journey, my mother in her long skirt and walking shoes, my father in a shirt with rolled-up sleeves and his khaki pants that are too baggy and too short, held up by a belt that looks like a piece of twine. They are smiling, they are happy, fancy-free on that adventure. Behind the king, a wall of the palace can be seen, a simple dwelling of dried mud bricks with shiny bits of straw.
At times, in the course of their journey through the mountains, nights were brutal, burning, sexual. My mother speaks of the celebrations that suddenly burst forth in the villages, like in Babungo, in Nkom country, a four-day march from Banso. In the center of the village, the masked theater is prepared. The tom-tom players are seated under a banyan tree, they beat the drums and the call of the music echoes into the distance. The women begin to dance, they are completely naked, except for a string of beads around their waists. They move along one behind the other, bent forward, their feet stamping the ground in rhythm to the drums. The men remain standing. Some wear grass skirts, others bear the masks of the gods. The master of the jujus leads the ceremony.
It begins at sunset, around six o’clock, and lasts till dawn of the next day. My mother and father lie on their cots of canvas webbing under the mosquito net, listening to the tom-toms beating in an unbroken rhythm, with hardly a flutter, like the beating of a heart. They are in love. Africa, at once wild and very human, is their honeymoon night. The sun had burned their bodies throughout the day, they are filled with an all-powerful electrical force. In my imagination, they make love that night, to the rhythm of the drums vibrating in the ground, holding on to one another tightly in the darkness, their skin covered with sweat, inside the hut of mud and branches no larger than a chicken coop. Then they fall asleep at dawn in the cold breath of morning that stirs the curtain of the mosquito net, enlaced, no longer hearing the fading rhythm of the last tom-toms.
* Kumbo today
THE RAGE OF OGOJA
WHEN I TRY to understand what changed that man, the fracture that occurred in his life, I think of the war. There was before the war and after the war. Before, for my mother and father, were the high plateaus of West Cameroon, the gentle hills of Bamenda and Banso, Forestry House, the paths through the Grass-fields and the mountains of Mbam and of the Mbembé, Kaka, and Shanti territories. All of that, not like a paradise — it had nothing to do with the gentle languor of the coast in Victoria, the luxurious residences and the idleness of the colonists — but like a treasure of humanity, something powerful and generous like blood pulsing through young arteries.