It might have seemed like happiness. It was during that time that my mother got pregnant twice. The Africans have a custom of saying that humans are not born on the day they come out of their mother’s womb, but in the place and at the moment of their conception. I know nothing about my birth (which I suppose is true of all of us). But if I go inside of myself, if I turn my eyes inward, I am aware of that force, the bubbling of energy, the soup of molecules ready to come together to form a body. And, even before the instant of conception, everything that preceded it, that is in the memory of Africa. Not an ideal, diffuse memory: the image of the high plateaus, the villages, the faces of old men, the wide-eyed children wasting away with dysentery, the contact with all of those bodies, the smell of human skin, the muffled moans. Despite all of that, because of all of that, those images are images of happiness, of the fulfillment that brought me into the world.
That memory is linked to the places, to the lay of the highlands, to the mountain sky, to the lightness of the morning air. To the love they felt for their house, that hut of dried mud and leaves, the courtyard in which the women and children came to sit every day, on the bare ground, waiting for my father to begin consulting, give a diagnosis, a vaccination. To the friendship that brought them closer to the inhabitants.
I remember my father’s assistant in Banso as if I’d known him myself, old Ahidjo, who grew to be his advisor and his friend. He took care of everything, the supplies, the itinerary through the remote regions, the relations with the village chiefs, the porters’ salaries, the condition of the travelers’ cabins. He accompanied him on the journeys in the beginning, but his advanced age and his state of health made it impossible for him to continue doing so. He wasn’t paid for the work he did. No doubt he gained in prestige, in esteem: he was the medical officer’s troubleshooter. It was thanks to him that my father was able to establish himself in the country, be accepted by everyone (including the witchdoctors with whom he was in direct competition), and practice medicine. During the twenty-some years he spent in West Africa, my father made only two lasting friends: Ahidjo and “Doctor” Jeffries, a district officer in Bamenda who had a passion for archeology and anthropology. Shortly before my father’s departure, Jeffries did in fact finish his Ph.D. and was hired by the University of Johannesburg. He sent news from time to time, in the form of articles and brochures having to do with his discoveries, and also, once a year for Boxing Day, a package of guava fruit pastes from South Africa.
As for Ahidjo, he wrote to my father in France on a regular basis for years. In 1960 at the time of independence, Ahidjo asked my father his opinion on the question of incorporating the western kingdoms into Nigeria. My father answered that, considering the history of the region, he thought it was preferable that they be integrated into francophone Cameroon, which had the advantage of being a peaceful country. Time has proven him right.
Then the letters ceased and my father heard from the nuns in Bamenda that his old friend had died. Similarly, one year the package of guava pastes from South Africa didn’t arrive for the first day of the year and we learned that Doctor Jeffries had passed away.
That was how my father’s last ties with his adopted country were severed. All that was left was the meager pension that the Nigerian government had pledged to pay its former civil servants when independence was declared. But not long afterward, the pension stopped too, as if his past life had entirely vanished.
So it was the war that had broken my father’s African dream. In 1938 my mother left Nigeria to return to France and give birth with her parents at her side. The brief leave of absence that my father took for the birth of his first child made it possible for him to join my mother in Brittany, where he remained until the summer of 1939. He took the boat back to Africa just before the war was declared. He took up his new post at Ogoja, in the province of Cross River. When war broke out, he knew it would put Europe to fire and sword again, as it had in 1914. Perhaps he hoped, as did many people in Europe, that the advance of the German army could be checked at the border, and that Brittany, lying the furthest west possible, would be spared.
When news of the invasion of France reached him in June of 1940, it was too late to act. In Brittany, my mother saw the German troops marching by under her windows in Pont-l’Abbé, while the radio was announcing that the enemy had been stopped at the Marne. The orders of the Kommandantur were irrevocable: anyone who was not a permanent resident of Brittany was to leave. Though she had barely recovered from childbirth, my mother had no choice but to go, first to Paris, then on to the free zone. No news could circulate. In Nigeria, my father knew only what was transmitted by the BBC. For him, isolated in the bush, Africa had become a trap. Thousands of miles away, somewhere on the roads crowded with people in flight, my mother was driving my grandmother’s old De Dion, taking her mother and father and her two children, a one-year-old and an infant of three months, along with her. That was probably when my father made that crazy attempt to cross the desert to Algeria so he could get on a boat going to the south of France to save his wife and children and bring them back to Africa with him. Would my mother have agreed to follow him? She would have had to abandon her parents in the middle of the upheaval, when they were in no condition to withstand the ordeal, face the dangers along the return journey, risk being captured by the Germans or the Italians and possibly deported.
My father probably had no real plan. He threw himself into the venture without even thinking. He left for Kano, in the north of Nigeria, and bought his passage aboard a caravan of trucks that were crossing the Sahara. The war hadn’t reached the desert yet. The merchants continued to transport salt, wool, wood, raw materials. The sea routes had become dangerous and the Sahara made it possible to keep goods circulating. For a medical officer of the British army traveling alone, the plan was audacious, insane. My father made his way northward, camped in the Hoggar near Tamanghasset (Fort-Laperrine at the time). He hadn’t had time to prepare for the journey, bring medicine, provisions. He shared in the daily fare of the Tuaregs who accompanied the caravan, he drank the water from the oases, as they did, alkaline water that purged those not accustomed to it. He took pictures of the desert all along the way, in Zinder, in In Guezzam, in the Hoggar Mountains. He photographed the Tamacheq inscriptions on stones, the nomadic camps, girls with their faces painted black, children. He spent several days at the In Guezzam fort, on the border of the French possessions in the Sahara. A few buildings made of pisé, over which the French flag flew, and at the side of the road, a stopped truck, perhaps the one he was traveling in. He reached Arak, on the other side of the desert. He might have reached Fort Mac-Mahon, near El Goléa. In times of war, all strangers are spies. In the end he was stopped and turned back.
After that setback, Africa no longer had the same taste of freedom for him. Bamenda, Banso, was the happy period, up in the highland sanctuary surrounded by giants on all sides, Mount Bambouta at 2,700 meters, Kodju at 2,000, Oku at 3,000. He’d thought he would never leave there. He’d dreamt of a perfect life, in which his children would grow up in that natural setting, would become, as he had, inhabitants of that land.
Ogoja, to which he had been condemned by the war, was an outpost of the British colony, a large village in a stifling basin on the Aiya River, encircled by the forest, cut off from Cameroon by an inaccessible mountain range. The hospital he was in charge of had existed for a long time, it was a large cement building with a sheet-metal roof housing an operating room, dormitories for the patients, and a team of nurses and midwives. Though it was still a bit primitive (it was an hour’s drive from the coast after all), it was organized. The D.O. was not far away, Cross River — the province’s large administrative center — was in Abakliki, which was accessible by a motorable road.