* The reputation of the gentleness of the people in the Banso region could hardly be generalized to the rest of west Cameroon. In a study devoted to the Wiya people of the Province of Bamenda, Doctor Jeffries reports atrocities committed during the war that has always pitted them against the Fulanis of Kishong: when the latter capture a Wiya, they slice off his ears and cut off both arms at the elbows and, sewing the palms of his hands together, make a sort of collar that they put around the neck of the prisoner before sending him back to his village. The French and British occupying armies tried in vain to counter such exactions that are reappearing in certain countries in West Africa such as Liberia.
NEGLECT
SUCH WAS THE MAN I met in 1948, at the end of his African life. I didn’t recognize him, didn’t understand him. He was too different from everyone I knew, a stranger, and even more than that, almost an enemy. He had nothing in common with the men I had known in France in my grandmother’s circle of acquaintances, those “uncles,” my grandfather’s friends, gentlemen of another age, distinguished, decorated, patriotic, revanchist, talkative, bearing gifts, having families, relations, subscribers to The Travel Journal, readers of Léon Daudet and Barrès. Always impeccably dressed in their gray suits, their vests, wearing stiff collars and ties, sporting their felt hats and wielding their metal-tipped walking sticks. After dinner, they would settle into the leather armchairs — souvenirs of prosperous times — in the dining room, they would smoke and talk, and I would fall asleep with my nose in my empty plate listening to the murmur of their voices.
The man that appeared before me at the foot of the gangway on the wharf at Port Harbor was from another world: wearing a shapeless pair of pants that were too baggy and too short for him, a white shirt, his black leather shoes dusty from the dirt tracks. He was harsh, taciturn. When he spoke French it was with the sing-song accent of Mauritius, or else he spoke in pidgin, that mysterious dialect that jingled like bells. He was inflexible, authoritative, yet at the same time gentle and generous with the Africans that worked for him at the hospital and in his government house. He was full of idiosyncrasies and conventions that were foreign to me, about which I hadn’t the slightest inkling: children should never speak at the table without being authorized, they should not run, or play, or laze in bed. They could not eat between meals, and never eat sweet things. They should eat without laying their hands on the table, could not leave anything in their plates and should be careful never to chew with their mouths open. His obsession with hygiene led him to do amazing things, like washing his hands with alcohol and then lighting a match to them. He was forever verifying the charcoal in the water filter, drank nothing but tea, or even hot water (that the Chinese call white tea), made his own candles out of wax and bits of twine dipped in paraffin, washed the dishes himself with extracts of soapwort. With the exception of his radio connected to an antenna hanging across the garden, he had no contact with the rest of the world, read neither books nor newspapers. The only thing he read was a small black book that I found a long time afterward, and that I can’t open without being moved: The Imitation of Christ, a military-man’s book, as I presume soldiers in the past might have read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius on the battlefield. Of course, he never said anything to us about it.
As soon as we met him, my brother and I tested him by putting pepper in his teapot. That did not make him laugh, he chased us around the house and beat us soundly. Perhaps a different man, I mean one of those “uncles” that visited my grandmother’s apartment, would have merely laughed. We suddenly learned that a father could be fearsome, that he could be ruthless, go out and cut down switches in the woods to thrash our legs with. That he could establish a virile code of justice, ruling out all dialogue, all excuses. That the code was founded on example, refused all negotiations, all denunciations, the whole act of tears and promises we were used to bringing into play with my grandmother. That he would not tolerate the slightest manifestation of disrespect and would accept no propensity for tantrums: to me the matter was clear, the house in Ogoja was on one level, and there was no furniture or windows to throw it out of.
It was that same man who insisted on prayers being said every evening before bed, and Sundays being devoted to reading the mass book. The religion we discovered under his care did not allow for compromises. It was a rule of life, a code of conduct. I suppose it was upon our arrival in Ogoja that we learned Santa Claus didn’t exist, that ceremonies and religious holidays were reduced to prayers, and that there was no reason to offer presents that, in the context we were in, could only be superfluous.
Things would undoubtedly have been different if there hadn’t been that fracture caused by the war, if my father, instead of being faced with children who had become strangers to him, had learned to live in the same house with a baby, if he had been part of the slow process that leads from childhood to the age of reason. That African land in which he had known the happiness of sharing his adventurous life with a woman, in Banso, in Bamenda, was the very same land that had robbed him of a family life and the love of his children.
Today I am able to feel regret at having missed that opportunity. I try to imagine what it must have meant for a child of eight, having grown up in the confinement of the war, to go to the other side of the world to meet a stranger who was introduced to him as his father. And that it should occur there, in Ogoja, in a natural setting where everything was excessive, the sun, the thunderstorms, the rain, the vegetation, the insects, a land of both freedom and constraint. Where the women and men were completely different, not because of the color of their skin and hair, but in their way of speaking, of walking, of laughing, of eating. Where disease and old age were visible, where joy and children’s games were even more marked. Where childhood ends very early, almost without transition, where the boys work with their fathers, the little girls get married and bear children of their own at thirteen.
It would have taken growing up listening to a father telling about his life, singing songs, taking his sons out to the River Aiya to hunt lizards or catch crayfish, it would have taken slipping my hand into his so that he could point out rare butterflies, venomous flowers, the secrets of nature he must surely have known about, listening to him talk about his childhood in Mauritius, walking beside him when he went to visit his friends, his colleagues at the hospital, watching him repair the car, or change a broken shutter, helping him plant the bushes and the flowers he loved, the bougainvilleas, the strelitzias, the birds-of-paradise, everything that must have reminded him of the marvelous garden of Moka, the house where he was born.
Instead, we waged a perfidious, grueling war against him, sparked by punishments and beatings. The period when he came back from Africa was the hardest. In addition to the difficulties he had in adapting, there was the hostility he must have felt in his own home. His fits of anger were disproportionate, excessive, exhausting. For insignificant things, a broken bowl, an inappropriate word, or look, he would mete out blows with the cane, with his fists. I remember having felt something akin to hatred. All I could do was break his sticks, but he went out and cut down others in the hills. There was something archaic about that approach, it didn’t fit in with what my friends experienced. I must have come out hardened, as the Arab proverb goes: he who is beaten is weak at first, then he grows strong.