Mount Pleasant by Patrice Nganang Read Free Book Online Page A

was just one of the faces of the thronging crowd I discovered under the shell of Sara’s face!

 
    10
    Symphony of a Colonial City
    In the 1930s Yaoundé wasn’t a city, but a town with a population of barely 150,000, whites and blacks included. In those days, the high commissioner’s palace, the central post office, the police stations, the French bakery, the café La Baguette de Paris, the church in Mvolyé, and the palace of the paramount chief were the only signs of the capital city that Yaoundé has since become. These touches of European-style urbanity let everyone know they were in a colony. The many shops that spread out along the main road, including a pharmacy and even a pet store, gave the area—already known as Ongola—the feel of a place where things were looking up. Mount Pleasant, with its ornate bamboo walls and its raffia roof, adorned with geckos and two-headed snakes, stood out starkly, even among the disparate architectural styles. There were some compounds built in the Fulani style, especially in Briqueterie, the Muslim neighborhood, but they were becoming less common.
    The truth is that the group of native Ewondo families that today claim the history of Yaoundé as theirs and theirs alone was already outnumbered by the Fulani shepherds who had settled in the valley, on both sides of the Mfoundi River, and by the Bamiléké who had immigrated to Yaoundé from the western plateaus or from Nigeria. The Bamiléké weren’t yet talking about putting down roots. Their peregrinations across the Ewondo swamplands dated back to an invitation from Charles Atangana himself: he had needed workers for his cocoa plantation. I’ll get back to that later. If the town didn’t yet have the shops run by Indians found elsewhere in Central Africa, it’s because the French administrators had placed their bets on the Lebanese they’d brought to the region. There was a rumor that Yaoundé’s “Lebanese” were actually Indians—that is to say, decommissioned British colonial soldiers who had settled there at the end of the First World War. Some even claimed that they were actually Egyptians, but what does it really matter?
    Among the whites, several different nationalities were represented: the French, of course, but also Englishmen and Greeks (actually, the Greeks were Cypriots who owned trading companies), and even Germans, almost all of whom had “gone native” under the leadership of a collector of flowers, birds, and butterflies named Zenker. This eccentric, who hid away in the depths of the forest with his compatriots, had refused to return home and, no joke, insisted on being called “Cameroonian.” Most of the white colony was made up of Frenchmen who owned the best stores in the city, as well as the bordellos, which were off-limits to the black population.
    Despite its two-tiered cosmopolitanism, Yaoundé kept traces of its original seven villages; these had been transformed into neighborhoods, some might even say slums. Most of the natives’ houses had mud walls and roofs covered with palm fronds, despite an order from the French high commissioner banning the use of such materials in the city and insisting on cement-block houses with corrugated metal roofs. Was this order followed? Hmm. The authorities had no means of enforcing their decrees save the force of the law, as always. But, well, the law …
    Even then it was impossible to live anonymously in this city, especially if, like Nebu, you were the sultan’s shadow. The child’s red pagne made him stand out, as did his shaved head. To think that the boy was the only person in Foumban who could have stripped bare and become an entirely different person, yes, a girl who could come down the hill from Nsimeyong and disappear!
    So what kept him from going back to where he was born? Yes, what made Nebu stay among Njoya’s men? Bertha, or rather …