Today, in hindsight, I understand that my father was transmitting the most difficult part of an upbringing to us — that which no school will ever provide. Africa hadn’t transformed him. It had brought out rigor in him. Later, when my father came to spend his retirement in the South of France, he brought that African heritage back with him. Authority and discipline, to the point of brutality.
But also exactness and respect, like one of the rules of the ancient societies of Cameroon and Nigeria, where children must not cry, must not complain. A penchant for a religion with no frills, no superstitions, that I suppose he developed using Islam as a model. That is how I have come to understand what seemed absurd back then, his obsession with hygiene, the way he washed his hands. The aversion he showed for pork, extracting the encysted tapeworm eggs from the meat with the tip of his knife, in order to convince us. His way of eating, of cooking his rice African-style, adding hot water little by little. His love of boiled vegetables, which he seasoned with hot pepper sauce. His preference for dried fruits, dates, figs, and even bananas that he would set out to dry in the sun on his windowsill. The care he took to go to the market very early every morning, in the company of North African laborers whom he also encountered at the police station every time he renewed his residence permit.
All of that might sound anecdotal. But those African habits, which had become second nature to him, surely brought home a lesson that could not leave a child or — later on — an adolescent indifferent.
Twenty-two years in Africa had inspired in him a deep hatred of all forms of colonialism. In 1954, we took a trip to Morocco (where one of the “uncles” was manager of an agricultural domain). I recall an incident that marked me much more than any of the traditional folklore. We had taken a regular bus from Casablanca to Marrakesh. At one point the driver (a Frenchman) grew angry, insulted an old peasant who probably could not pay the fare and threw him out on the side of the road. My father was indignant. His tirade extended out to include the entire French occupation of the country that prevented local people from holding the most menial of jobs, even that of a bus driver, and mistreated the poor. Around that same time, day after day, he would listen to the news on the radio about the Kikuyus’ struggle for independence in Kenya and that of the Zulus against racial segregation in South Africa.
It had nothing to do with abstract ideas or political leanings. It was the voice of Africa that spoke within him, that awakened his earlier sentiments. He’d undoubtedly thought about the future when he was traveling with my mother on horseback along the trails in Cameroon. It was before the war, before the solitude and the bitterness, when everything was possible, when the country was young and new, when anything could happen. Far from the corrupt, profiteering society on the coast, he had dreamt of the rebirth of Africa, liberated from its colonial shackles and the inevitability of pandemics. A sort of state of grace, like that of the vast grassy expanses through which the herds moved driven by their shepherds, or the villages around Banso, with the immemorial perfection of their walls of pisé and their leaf-covered roofs.
The advent of independence in Cameroon and in Nigeria, then — step by step — across the continent, must have impassioned him. Each insurrection must have been a source of joy for him. And the war which had just broken out in Algeria, a war his own children could have been drafted into, could only have been the worst of his nightmares. He’d never forgiven de Gaulle’s double-dealing.
He died the year AIDS was discovered. He had already perceived the tactical state of neglect in which the colonial powers left the continent they had exploited. Tyrants were put into place with the aid of France and England — Bokassa, Idi Amin Dada — to whom the Western governments provided arms and subsidies for years, before repudiating them. The doors of immigration having been flung open, cohorts of young men left Ghana, Benin, or Nigeria during the sixties to serve as a labor force and populate the ghettos of the urban outskirts, then those same doors clamped shut again when the economic crisis made the industrial nations wary and xenophobic. And above all Africa was abandoned to its old demons, malaria, dysentery, famine. Now AIDS, the new plague, threatens a third of its general population with death, and again the Western countries, who control the remedies, pretend to see nothing, know nothing.
Cameroon, it seemed, had escaped those maledictions. The highlands of the west, in separating from Nigeria, had made a sensible decision, which protected the region from the corruption of tribal warfare. But the arrival of modernity did not bring the expected benefits. What had disappeared, in my father’s eyes, was the charm of the villages, the slow, carefree life punctuated by the rhythm of agricultural tasks. The lure of money, venality, a certain degree of violence had replaced all of that. Even far from Banso, my father must have been aware of it. He must have felt the passing of time like an ebbing flow, leaving the tide-marks of memory behind.
In 1968, as my mother and father were observing the mountains of garbage left by the general strike piling up under their windows in Nice, and as I, in Mexico, was listening to the whirr of army helicopters carrying away the bodies of students killed in Tlatelolco, Nigeria was entering the last phase of a terrible massacre, one of the great genocides of the century, known by the name of Biafra. To gain control of the oil wells at the mouth of the Calabar River, Ibos and Yorubas were exterminating one another, as the Western world looked on with indifference. Worse yet, the large oil companies, mainly the Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum group, took sides in the war, putting pressure on their own governments to safeguard the wells and pipelines. The countries they represented confronted one another by proxy, France on the side of the Biafran insurgents, the Soviet Union, England, and the United States on the side of the federal government made up of a Yoruba majority. The civil war became a world issue, a war of civilizations. There was talk of Christians against Muslims, or of nationalists against capitalists. Developed countries discovered an unforeseen market for their manufactured products: to both sides they sold light and heavy weaponry, antipersonnel mines, combat tanks, planes, and even German, French, Chadian mercenaries who made up the Fourth Biafran Brigade serving the rebels in Ojukwu. But at the end of the summer of 1968, surrounded, decimated by the federal troops under the command of general Benjamin Adekunle, nicknamed the “Black Scorpion” for his cruelty, the Biafran army capitulated. Only a handful of combatants continued to resist, most of them children wielding machetes and sticks carved in the shape of rifles against Migs and Soviet bombers. At the fall of Aba (not far from the ancient sanctuary of the magician warriors of Aro Chuku), Biafra entered a long period of agony. In collusion with England and the United States, General Adekunle clamped down a blockade over the Biafran territory, preventing the arrival of all aid, all supplies. Before the advancing federal army in the grips of a mad desire for revenge, the population fled toward what was left of Biafra, flooding through the savannahs and the forest, trying to survive on their reserves. Men, women, children were caught in a deathtrap. From September onward, there were no more military operations, but millions of people were cut off from the rest of the world, without food, without medicine. When international organizations were finally able to penetrate the zone of the insurgency, they discovered the extent of the horror. Along the roads, on the banks of the rivers, at the entrances to villages, hundreds of thousands of children were dying of hunger or dehydration. It was a cemetery as vast as a country. Everywhere, in the grassy plains similar to the one where I once ran to wage war on the termites, children without parents wandered aimlessly, bodies transformed into skeletons. For a long time after that, I was haunted by Chinua Achebe’s poem, “Christmas in Biafra,” that begins with these words: