The government house he lived in was right next to the hospital. It wasn’t a lovely wooden building like Forestry House in Bamenda, nor a rudimentary pisé and palm leaf hut like his home in Banso. It was a modern, rather ugly house, made out of cement blocks with a corrugated metal roof that turned it into an oven every afternoon — and that my father quickly covered with leaves to insulate it from the heat.
What was his life like during those long years of war, alone in that large, empty house, having no news of his children or the woman he loved?
He threw himself into his work as a doctor. The carefree, easy way of life in Cameroon didn’t exist in Ogoja. Though he still consulted in the bush, it was not on horseback along the paths that wound through the mountains. He used his car (the Ford V8 that he bought from his predecessor, more of a truck than an automobile, the one that made such a strong impression on me when he came to pick us up as we were getting off the boat in Port Harcourt). He went to neighboring villages, linked by laterite tracks, Ijama, Nyonnya, Bawop, Amachi, Baterik, Bakalung, out as far as Obudu in the foothills of the Cameroon Mountains. The contact he had with his patients was no longer the same. There were too many of them. At the hospital in Ogoja, he didn’t have time to talk, to listen to the complaints of the families. The women and children weren’t allowed into the courtyard of the hospital, lighting cooking fires there was against the rules. The patients were in dormitories, lying on real metal beds with starched, very white sheets, they probably suffered as much from anxiety as they did from their illnesses. When he walked into the room, my father could read fear in their eyes. The doctor was not the man who brought them the virtues of Western medicine and who could share his knowledge with the village elders. He was a stranger whose reputation had spread throughout the land, one who cut off arms and legs when gangrene had set in, and whose only cure was contained in the instrument that was both terrifying and ludicrous, a copper syringe equipped with a six-centimeter needle.
Then my father discovered — after all those years of having felt close to the Africans, like a relative, a friend — that the doctor was just another instrument of colonial power, no different from the policeman, the judge, or the soldier. How could it have been otherwise? Exercising medicine also meant having power over people, and medical supervision also meant political supervision. The British army knew that all too welclass="underline" at the turn of the century, after years of fierce resistance, it had conquered the magic of the last Ibo warriors with the might of its arms and modern technology in the sanctuary of Aro Chuku, at less than a day’s march from Ogoja. It is not easy to change entire populations when the change is made under duress. My father probably learned that lesson from being plunged into loneliness and isolation by the war. That knowledge must have deepened his feeling of failure, of pessimism. I remember his telling me once, at the end of his life, that if he could do it all over again, he wouldn’t be a doctor, but a veterinarian, because only animals are able to accept their suffering.
There was also the violence. In Banso, in Bamenda, in the Cameroon Mountains, my father was under the charm of the African people’s gentleness and sense of humor.* In Ogoja, everything was different. The country was troubled by tribal warfare, retributions, scores being settled between villages. The roads, the trails were not safe, one could not go out unarmed. The Ibos of Calabar resisted European penetration most vehemently of all. They were said to be Christians (it was even one of the arguments that France used for supporting their struggle against their Yoruba neighbors, who were Muslims). In truth, animism and fetishism were common at the time. Witchcraft was also practiced in Cameroon, but for my father it was more straightforward, more positive. In eastern Nigeria witchcraft was secretive, it was practiced through the use of poisons, hidden amulets, signs intended to bring misfortune. My father heard for the very first time, from the mouths of the European residents and later spread around by the locals in their service, stories of possession, of magic, of ritual crimes. The legend of Aro Chuku and its human sacrifice stone still deeply affected people. The stories that went around created a climate of suspicion, of tension. In such and such a village, they say, not far from Obudu, the inhabitants have a custom of stretching a rope across the road when a lone traveler ventures out on a bicycle. As soon as he falls, the poor man is immediately clubbed over the head, dragged behind a wall and his body cut up to be eaten. In yet another village, the district officer confiscated what was purportedly pork from the butcher shop, but, as rumor has it, was in fact human flesh. In Obudu, where the gorillas from the mountains are poached, their amputated hands can be found on sale in the market as souvenirs, but they say that if you look more closely, you can see there are also children’s hands for sale.
My father repeated those alarming stories to us, he probably only half-believed them. He never saw any evidence of cannibalism himself. But one thing is certain: he often had to travel in order to autopsy murder victims. It was that kind of violence that haunted him. I heard my father say that the bodies he had to examine were sometimes in such a state of decomposition that he needed to tie the scalpel to the end of a piece of wood before cutting into the skin to avoid the explosion of gases.
To him there was something offensive about disease, once the charm of Africa had worn off. The profession he had exercised with enthusiasm gradually grew to be toilsome, in the heat, the humidity of the river, the solitude in that remote corner of the world. The close contact with suffering wore on him: all those bodies burning with fever, the bloated bellies of cancer patients, those legs eaten away with ulcers, deformed by elephantiasis, those faces gnawed away by leprosy or syphilis, those women torn apart in childbirth, those children grown old from deficiencies, their gray skin like parchment, their rust-colored hair, their eyes enlarged at their approaching death. A long time afterward, he talked to me about the terrible things he had to face, as if the same sequence of events would begin all over again every day: an old woman driven mad with uremia who must be tied to her bed, a man from whom he removes a tapeworm so long he has to wrap it around a stick, a young woman he is going to amputate due to gangrene, another one who is brought to him dying of smallpox, her face swollen and covered with pustules. Close physical contact with that land, the feeling one gets only from encountering humanity in all of its painful reality, the odor of skin, of sweat, of blood, the pain, the hope, the small gleam of light that sometimes illuminates a patient’s gaze when the fever goes down, or that infinite second during which a doctor can see life burning out in a dying man’s eye — all of that, everything that had inspired, had stimulated him in the beginning, when he sailed up the rivers in Guiana, when he walked the mountain paths in the Cameroon highlands, was put into question in Ogoja, because of the appalling grind of days filled with unexpressed pessimism, because he realized the impossibility of succeeding at his task.
His voice still husky with emotion, he told me about the young Ibo who was brought to the hospital in Ogoja, hands and feet bound, mouth gagged with a sort of wooden muzzle. He’s been bitten by a dog and rabies has set in. He is lucid, he knows he is going to die. At times in the cell where he’s been isolated, he is seized with attacks, his body arches up on the bed in spite of the ties, his limbs are possessed of such strength that the leather thongs seem to be near breaking. At the same time, he moans and screams in pain, foams at the mouth. Then he falls back into a sort of lethargy, numbed with morphine. A few hours later, my father inserts the needle that will carry the poison into his vein. Before dying the boy looks at my father, he loses consciousness and his chest collapses in one last sigh. What kind of man are you when you’ve lived through that?