It was there, in that setting, that I lived the moments of my wild, free, almost dangerous life. A freedom of movement, of thought, and of emotions that I have never known since. Memories can probably be misleading. I must have only dreamt about that life of absolute freedom rather than having really lived it. Between the dreariness of the South of France during the war, and the bleak end of my childhood in Nice in the 1950s, rejected by my classmates because of my oddness, obsessed with my father’s excessive authority, doomed to years in the Boy Scouts, to the extreme vulgarity of high school, then during my adolescence, to the menace of having to go to war to maintain the privileges of the last existing colonial society.
So the days in Ogoja had become my treasure, the luminous past that I could not lose. I recalled the blaze of light on the red earth, the sun that cracked the roads, the barefoot race through the savannah all the way out to the termite fortresses, the thunderstorm rising in the evening, the nights filled with sounds, with cries, our female cat making love with the tigrillos on the sheet metal roof, the torpor that set in after a fever, the cold coming in under the mosquito netting at dawn. All of that heat, that burning, that tingling.
TERMITES, ANTS, ETC
IN FRONT OF the house in Ogoja, once you’d gone past the barrier around the garden (a wall of brush rather than a straight, neatly trimmed hedge), the great grassy plain that stretched all the way out to the Aiya River began. A child’s memory exaggerates distances and heights. I have the impression that the plain was as vast as a sea. I would stand on the edge of the cement slab that served as a walkway around the cabin for hours, my gaze lost in that immensity, following the waves of wind over the grasses, fixing my eyes on the little dusty whirlwinds that danced here and there over the dry earth, scrutinizing the splotches of shade at the foot of the irokos. I really was on the deck of a ship. Our cabin was the boat, not only the cinder block walls and the sheet-metal roof, but everything that had to do with the British Empire — not unlike the George Shotton, a vessel I had heard about, an armored steamship equipped like a gunboat, topped with a roof of leaves where the British had set up the consular offices, that sailed up the Niger and the Bénoué Rivers back in the days of Lord Lugard.
I was only a child, quite indifferent to the power of the empire, but my father followed its rules as if it alone gave meaning to life. He believed in discipline in the minutest acts of everyday life: rise early, make one’s bed immediately, wash with cold water in the tin basin and save the water for soaking socks and underwear. My mother’s lessons every morning, spelling, English, arithmetic, prayer time every evening, and curfew at nine o’clock. Nothing in common with the French style of upbringing, the games of “drop the handkerchief” and freeze tag, the joyful meals where everyone talks at the same time, and in the evening the chante-fables that my grandmother used to recite, daydreaming in bed, listening to the weather vane squeaking on the roof and to the adventures of a traveling magpie flying over the Norman countryside in the book entitled The Joy of Reading. In leaving for Africa, we had changed worlds. The freedom during the days compensated for the discipline in the mornings and evenings. The grassy plain in front of the house was immense, both dangerous and alluring like the sea.
I don’t recall the day my brother and I first ventured out into the savannah. Maybe we were needled into it by the children in the village, an eclectic group including very small, completely naked toddlers with swollen bellies and near-adolescents of twelve or thirteen, dressed in khaki shorts and a shirt just as we were, and who had taught us to take off our shoes and wool socks to run barefoot through the grass. The same ones I see surrounding us in the rare photographs of that time, very dark-skinned, gangling, undoubtedly jeering roughnecks, but who had accepted us in spite of our differences.
In all probability, it was strictly forbidden. Since my father was gone all day, not to return until nightfall, we must have realized that applying the rules could only be relative. My mother was mild-mannered. She was undoubtedly busy with other things, reading, or writing inside the house to escape the afternoon heat. She had tried to become as African as she could. I suppose she must have thought there wasn’t a safer place in the world for two boys of our age.
Was it hot? I can’t recall in the least. I remember the cold in winter, in Nice, or in Roquebillière, I can still feel the freezing wind blowing through the narrow streets, cold as ice, as snow, in spite of our gaiters and sheepskin vests. But I don’t remember being hot in Ogoja. When she saw us going out, my mother made us put on our Cawnpore helmets — in reality they were just straw hats that she had bought us before our departure in a shop in the old part of Nice. Among other rules imposed by my father was wearing wool socks and shiny leather shoes. As soon as he left for work, we took them off to run around barefoot. In the beginning, I wounded my feet running on the cement floor — I don’t know why, I was always stubbing the big toe of my right foot. My mother would put a bandage on my foot, and I would hide it in my sock, and it would begin all over again.
Then one day, just the two of us went running over the straw-colored plain toward the river. The Aiya wasn’t very wide in that particular place, but it rushed past with a mighty current, ripping clumps of red mud from the banks. The plain on either side of the river seemed endless. Here and there, in the middle of the savannah, stood tall trees with very straight trunks, which I later learned were used to supply mahogany floors to industrialized countries. There were also cotton plants and acacias that cast dappled shadows. We ran, almost without stopping, through the tall grasses that whipped our faces around the eyes, guided by the stems of the tall trees, until we lost our breath. Even today, when I see images of Africa — the vast parks of Serengeti or Kenya — I feel a thrill in my heart, it’s as if I recognize that plain we ran over every day, in the afternoon heat, aimlessly, like wild animals.
In the middle of the plain, far enough away so that we could no longer see our cabin, there were castles. Along a barren, dry patch of ground, dark red ruins of walls, the tops of which were blackened by fire, like the ramparts of an ancient citadel. Here and there, jutting up along the walls, were towers whose pinnacles seemed to have been pecked away by birds, hacked at, burned by lightning. The great walls encompassed an area as vast as a city. The walls, the towers, were taller than we were. We were only children, but as I remember them, those walls must have been taller than an adult man, and some of the towers must have been over six and a half feet tall.
We knew it was the city of termites.
How did we know? Maybe through my father, or one of the boys from the village. But no one came out there with us. We learned how to demolish those walls. We must have started by throwing a few rocks, to test it out, to listen to the cavernous sound they made in hitting the termite mounds. Then we started hitting the walls, the tall towers, with sticks, to watch the powdery earth crumble, lay bare the galleries, the blind creatures that lived in them. The next day, the workers had plugged up the cracks, tried to rebuild their towers. We struck again, until our hands were aching, as if we were combating an invisible enemy. We didn’t talk, we just kept pounding, letting out cries of rage, and new sections of walls went crumbling down. It was a game. Was it a game? We felt imbued with power. Today I don’t think of it as a spoiled child’s sadistic pastime — the gratuitous cruelty little boys sometimes enjoy meting out to defenseless life forms, tearing the legs off a beetle, crushing a toad in the door jam — but as if we were under some sort of spell that the open stretch of savannah, the proximity of the forest, the fury of the sky, and the thunderstorms had cast upon us. Or perhaps it was our way of throwing off our father’s draconian authority, returning blow for blow with our sticks.