The village children were never with us when we went out to destroy the termite mounds. That insatiable desire to demolish would certainly have astonished them. They, who lived in a world in which termites were a fact of life, played a role in legends. The termite god had created the rivers in the beginning of the world, and it was he who was guardian of the water for the inhabitants of the earth. Why destroy his home? The gratuitousness of that violence would have made no sense to them: with the exception of game-playing, any form of activity was for earning money, getting a treat, hunting for something saleable or edible. The older boys took care of the younger ones, they were never alone, never left to fend for themselves. Games, discussions, and light work alternated with no specific schedule: they gathered dead wood and dried manure patties for fuel while out for a walk, they spent hours drawing water at the wells while they chatted, they played trictrac on the dusty ground, or sat in front of the door to my father’s house gazing out into the distance, not waiting for anything. If they pilfered something, it had to be useful, a piece of cake, a box of matches, an old rusty plate. From time to time the “garden boy” got irritated and shooed them off, throwing stones, but a second later they were back again.
So we were wild, like young colonists, sure of our freedom, our impunity, with no responsibilities, no elders. When my father wasn’t home, when my mother was asleep, we would escape, the straw-colored prairie would snatch us up. We went running as fast as we could, barefoot, far from the house, through the tall grasses that blinded us, jumping over rocks, on the dry, sun-crackled earth, all the way out to the termite cities. Our hearts were pounding, rage came spilling out with our heaving breaths, we picked up rocks, sticks, and we struck, struck, made great sections of those cathedrals topple, for no reason, simply for the pleasure of seeing the clouds of dust rise, hearing the towers come crashing down, the stick echoing on the hard walls, laying open to the light the red veins of the galleries seething with pallid, nacreous life. But perhaps in writing about it, I’m making the furor that ran through our arms as we struck at the termite mounds too literary, too symbolic. We were simply two children who had lived through the seclusion of five years of war, been brought up in a female environment, with a mixture of fear and cunning, where the only raised voice was that of my grandmother cursing the “Boches.” Those days of running through the tall grasses in Ogoja were our first taste of freedom. The savannah, the thunderstorm that gathered every afternoon, the sun burning down on our heads, and that exaggerated, almost caricaturized presence of animality, that’s what filled our small chests and threw us up against the great termite wall, those dark castles bristling against the sky. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so driven since then. Such a strong urge to measure my strength, to dominate. It was a moment in our lives, just a moment, with no explanation, with no regrets, with no future, almost with no memory.
I thought it would have been different if we’d stayed in Ogoja, if we’d become just like the Africans. I would have learned to perceive, to sense things. Like the boys in the village, I would have learned to talk with living beings, discover the godliness in termites. I even think I would have forgotten about them after a while.
There was a feeling of haste, of urgency. We’d come from the far side of the earth (for Nice was truly another side of the world). From an apartment on the sixth floor of an upper-middle-class building ringed with a small garden where children were forbidden to play, we’d come to live in equatorial Africa on the banks of a muddy river in the middle of the forest. We didn’t know we would ever leave there. Perhaps, like all children, we thought we would die there. Back there, across the sea, the world was mired in silence. A grandmother and her stories, a grandfather with his lilting Mauritian accent, playmates, classmates, it had all just stopped cold, like toys one puts away in a trunk, like the fears one shuts up in the closet. The grassy plain had obliterated it all, in the hot afternoon wind. The grassy plain had the power of making our hearts pound, of bringing forth the rage, of leaving us drained every evening, ready to drop into our hammocks.
* * *
The ants were the antithesis of that rage. The opposite of the grassy plain, of destructive violence. Were there ants prior to Ogoja? I don’t remember them. Or most probably those “Argentinean ants” — black specks that would invade my grandmother’s kitchen every night, along tiny routes leading from the potted rosebushes balanced on the gutter to the piles of refuse she burned in her boiler.
The ants in Ogoja were monstrous insects of the exsectoide strain that built their nests thirty feet under our lawn where hundreds of thousands of individuals lived. Contrary to the gentle, defenseless termites, incapable — in their blindness — of causing even the slightest harm, except that of consuming worm-eaten wood in houses and dead trees, the ants were fierce, red, with eyes and mandibles, able to secrete poison and attack whomever they encountered. They were the true rulers of Ogoja.
The bitter memory of my first encounter with the ants a few days after my arrival remains etched in my mind. I’m in the garden, not far from the house. I haven’t noticed the crater marking the entrance to the anthill. All of a sudden, without realizing it, I’m surrounded by thousands of the creatures. Where are they coming from? I must have strayed into the bare area around the entrance to their galleries. It’s not so much the ants that I recall, but the fear I feel. I stand there frozen, unable to flee, unable to think, suddenly the ground is seething, forming a carpet of armored bodies, of legs and antennae moving around me and swirling closer in on me, I see the ants climbing up on my shoes, working their way into the knit of those infamous wool socks my father made us wear. At the same time I feel the sting of the first bites on my ankles, along my legs. The dreadful, terrifying feeling of being eaten alive. It lasted a few seconds, a few minutes, as long as a nightmare. I don’t remember, but I must have cried out, even screamed because the next minute my mother saves me, whisks me up in her arms and my brother, the neighbor boys are standing all around me in front of the terrace of the house, they are looking at me in silence, are they laughing? Are they saying, “Small boy him cry?” My mother takes off my socks, delicately turns them inside out, as one would peel off a dead skin, I see my legs — as if I’d been lashed with a thorny switch — covered with dark dots where drops of blood are forming, it’s the ant heads clinging to the skin, their bodies had been ripped away when my mother pulled off my socks. Their mandibles are deeply embedded, they have to be taken out with a needle dipped in alcohol.
An anecdote, simply an anecdote. Why is it that I was so marked by it, as if the bites of the soldier ants were still painful, as if it had all happened yesterday? It’s probably half legend, half dream. Before I was born, from what my mother tells me, she was traveling on horseback in Western Cameroon where my father was an itinerant doctor. At night they camped in “travelers cabins,” ordinary huts made of palm branches at the side of the road where they would hang their hammocks. One evening, the porters came to wake them up. They were carrying lit torches, they spoke in hushed voices, pressed my mother and father to get up. When my mother tells that story, she says the thing that alarmed her at first was the silence, everywhere all around in the forest, and the whispering of the porters. As soon as she was on her feet, she saw — by the light of the torches — a column of ants (those same red ants flanked by soldiers) coming out of the forest and starting into the cabin. A column, or more precisely, a thick uninterrupted river moving slowly forward, paying no heed to obstacles, moving straight ahead, each ant touching the one ahead of it, devouring, smashing everything along its way. My mother and father barely had time to gather up their belongings, their clothing, sacks of supplies and medicine. A second later, the dark river was flowing through the cabin.