Mount Pleasant by Patrice Nganang Read Free Book Online Page B

Ah! that’s it! It was Uncle Owona’s eyes—Sara could never forget them—the wild flames in those treacherous eyes that, even when she was ninety, she still described as horrifying.
    â€œHe gave me to the chief to forget.”
    â€œForget what?”
    The voice of the doyenne was again that of a young girl. “His crime.”
    No, she’d never gotten over it.
    â€œThere are things that even a whole life can’t erase,” she added in a muffled voice.
    â€œDid your mother know?”
    â€œShe knew my uncle went crazy when he was drunk.”
    She paused thoughtfully before continuing.
    â€œMy mother knew Uncle Owona did things he would regret for the rest of his life and that he kept drinking more and more to forget.”
    â€œLike every drunk,” I added tentatively.
    Was agreeing to incarnate Nebu the young girl’s own way of escaping Uncle Owona’s grasp? Of getting rid of him once and for all? Even after all these years, her uncle’s face still burst violently through her words as she told me her story.

 
    11
    What a Man!
    â€œWhat a man!”
    Yes, what a man! That’s how many German and English texts speak of Njoya—with repeated exclamations. Though French texts usually do tend to minimize his genius. Some call him a “Negro king.” Of course, Nebu couldn’t know what the colonial chroniclers had written, much less grasp the implications of what they said. How could he have? Thankfully, before my trip to Cameroon I had visited the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and then the German Staatsarchiv in Berlin. The Cameroonian National Archives came to my rescue in moments of doubt, spreading before me the totality of the words, the mountains of correspondence that the monarch exchanged with the colonial authorities of his day.
    From this unending supply of confidential reports and books filled with admiration and hatred, I was able to reconstruct an image of Njoya as he invented the writing system that had fueled his dreams, as he toiled away in flickering lamplight for twenty years to perfect it. I saw him, Njoya, dressed in his caftan, awake at five in the morning, already eager to get to work. I saw him standing in front of his table in the half-light of his workshop, imagining model pictograms, then moving on to phonograms, and then to phonemes. Making calculations and sketching drawings of his printing press with Monlipèr, the master blacksmith he had brought with him into exile so that the traditional Bamum heraldic banners might keep flying high. I saw him crumple up his designs and start again. I saw him poring over his plans for his new palace, the “Palace of All Dreams,” which he wanted to finish building as soon as his exile ended and he was allowed to return to Foumban.
    I saw Njoya examining the sketches, despite the painful distance of his banishment, and finding them lacking. Assessing disdainfully these manuscripts that Western archives now guard so jealously, wanting to tear them up, and staying his angry hand because of a noise behind him. “You must maintain control of time,” he said to the man who had just entered, focusing his anger on him. “You are always late, Mama .”
    And Nji Mama would bend his head in shame. He was the sultan’s closest collaborator. The occasions when Nji Mama angered the sultan were rare, for after all, it was he who had built Mount Pleasant. He had done it in just one month, though he didn’t brag about it too much. In his haste he had reused sketches drawn up for the old palace in Foumban that he had constructed in 1917. Njoya’s arrival in Yaoundé had caused some turmoil. The vast entourage that accompanied the monarch needed to be housed somewhere. That Nji Mama had had to copy his own sketches was humiliating for a man who took such pride in his art. And yet, who was unaware of his talent?
    Here are the presumed plans for Mount