The African

BANSO*

IN MARCH OF 1932, my mother and father left the Forestry House residence in Bamenda and set up house in the mountains, in Banso, where a hospital was to be built. Banso was at the end of the laterite road that was negotiable by car in all seasons. It was at the frontier of what was known as “wild” country, the last outpost where British authority was recognized. My father was to be the only doctor, and the only European, which did not displease him.

The territory he was in charge of was immense. It stretched from the border with Cameroon under French mandate in the southeast, all the way to the limits of the Adamawa emirate to the north and included the majority of chiefdoms and small kingdoms that escaped the direct authority of England after the departure of the Germans: Kantu, Abong, Nkom, Bum, Foumban, Bali. On the map he drew himself, my father noted the distances, not in kilometers, but in hours or days of walking time. The details noted down on the map reveal the true dimensions of that country, the reason he loved it: the river fords, the deep or tumultuous rivers, the mountainsides to be climbed, the bends in the paths, the descents into valleys that cannot be tackled on horseback, the impassable cliffs. On the maps he drew, the names make up a litany, they speak of walking in the hot sun, through the grassy plains or scaling laboriously up mountains amidst the clouds: Kengawmeri, Mbiami, Tanya, Ntim, Wapiri, Ntem, Wanté, Mbam, Mfo, Yang, Ngonkar, Ngom, Nbirka, Ngu, a thirty-two-hour walk, meaning five days at a rate of ten kilometers a day over difficult terrain. In addition to the stopovers in hamlets, the bivouacs, the treatments to be given, the vaccinations, the discussions (the notorious palavers) with local authorities, the complaints that needed to be listened to, and the travel log to keep up, the budget to watch, the medicines to be ordered from Lagos, the instructions to leave with the medical officers and the nurses in the dispensaries.

For more than fifteen years, this would be his country. Probably no one has ever reached a better understanding of it than he, no one has ever traveled, probed, endured it to the extent he did. Encountered every inhabitant, brought many of them into the world, accompanied others on their journey toward death. And especially, loved it, because — though he didn’t speak of it, though he never related a single thing about it — the mark and the trace left by those hills and forests, those pastures and the people he met there, remained deep within him all the way to the end of his life.

At the time he was traveling through the northwestern province, maps were nonexistent. The only printed map in his possession was the German army’s general staff map in the scale of one centimeter to three kilometers plotted by Moisel in 1913. With the exception of the major rivers, the Donga Kari — an affluent of the Bénoué — in the north and the Cross River in the south, and the two ancient fortified cities of Banyo and Kentu, the map is inaccurate. Abong, the northernmost village in my father’s medical territory, located at more than a ten-day walk, is noted on the German army’s map with a question mark. The districts of Kaka, of Mbembé were so far from the coastal zone it was as if they belonged to a different country. Most of the people who lived there had never seen Europeans, the most elderly had horrid memories of the occupation of the German army, executions, child abductions. This much was certain — they hadn’t the slightest idea of what the colonial powers of England or France represented and had no inkling of the war that was being prepared on the other side of the world. They weren’t remote or wild regions (as my father would, however, have qualified Nigeria, and, in particular, the forest surrounding Ogoja). On the contrary, they lay in a prosperous land, where fruit trees, yams, and millet were cultivated, where animals were bred. The kingdoms were central to a puissant territory influenced by Islam coming from the northern empires of Kano, the emirates of Bornu, Agadez, and Adamawa, imported by Fulani itinerant peddlers and Haussa warriors. To the east was Koro and Borroro country, to the south the ancient culture of the Bamouns de Foumban founded on trading. They were master metal workers and even used a system of writing invented in 1900 by King Njoya. All things considered, European colonization had affected the region very little. Douala, Lagos, Victoria were light years from there. The mountainous peoples of Banso still lived as they always had, at a slow pace, in harmony with the sublime nature that surrounded them, cultivating the land and grazing their herds of longhorn cows.

The snapshots my father took with his Leica show the admiration he felt for that country. For example, the Nsungli near Nkor: a side of Africa that has nothing to do with the coastal zone where a stifling atmosphere pervades, where the vegetation is suffocating, almost menacing. Where the presence of the occupying forces of the French and British armies is even more oppressive.

This was a country of distant horizons, with vaster skies, with lands stretching out as far as the eye could see. My mother and father felt a sense of freedom they had never experienced anywhere else. They would follow the trails all day long, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback and stop in the evenings to sleep under a tree out in the open, or in a rudimentary camp like in Kwolu, on the road to Kishong, a simple hut of dried mud and leaves where they hung up their hammocks. In Ntumbo, on the plateau, they passed a herd that my father photographed with my mother in the foreground. They are at such a high altitude that the sky seems to be resting on the moon-shaped horns of the cows and veils the mountain peaks all around them. Despite the poor quality of the development, my mother and father’s happiness is tangible. On the back of a picture taken somewhere in the Grassfields region, in Mbembé country, depicting the landscape where they have just spent the night, my father writes with uncustomary grandiloquence: “The immensity one beholds in the background is that of the endless plain.”

I can sense the emotion he felt crossing the high plateaus and the grassy plains, riding on the narrow paths that snaked up the mountainsides, discovering new panoramas every minute, the blue outlines of the peaks emerging from the clouds like mirages, bathed in the African light, the harsh blaze of noon, the softened glow of twilight when the red earth and the straw-colored grasses seem to be lit from within by a sacred fire.

They also learned to know the exhilaration of a strenuous life, the weariness that causes one’s legs to wobble after a day of riding when the time comes to dismount and guide the horse by its tether over to the bottom of the ravines. The burn of the sun, the thirst that cannot be quenched, or the chill of the rivers that had to be forded mid-current, with the water reaching the horses’ chests. My mother rode sidesaddle as she’d learned to do at riding school in Ermenonville. And such an uncomfortable position — the segregation of sexes that was still the rule in the prewar years was surely a bit ridiculous — paradoxically gives her an African appearance. Something nonchalant and graceful, yet at the same time something very ancient, evocative of biblical times, or perhaps of Tuareg caravans in which the women traveled across the desert in baskets hanging from the sides of the dromedaries.

Thus she accompanied my father, along with the suite of porters and the interpreter, on his medical rounds through the mountains in the west. They went from camp to camp in villages whose names my father would note down on his map: Nikom, Babungo, Nji Nikom, Luakom Ndye, Ngi, Obukun. At times the camps were more than precarious, in Kwaja in Kaka country, they stayed in a hut of branches with no window in the middle of a banana plantation. It was so humid in there that every morning they had to put the sheets and blankets out to dry on the roof. They would stay for one or two nights, sometimes for a week. The drinking water was sour and purplish from permanganate; they bathed in the stream, cooked over a fire of twigs at the entrance to the hut. Nights in the mountains south of the equator were cold, rustling, filled with the clamor of wild cats and the barking of mandrills. And yet it was neither the Africa of Tartarin, nor even that of John Huston. It was rather the Africa depicted in African Farm, a real Africa, densely populated, wracked with disease and tribal wars. But powerful and exhilarating as well, with its countless children, its dances, the good humor and cheerfulness of the shepherds met along the paths.

For my mother and father, their days in Banso were the days of youth, of adventure. The Africa they encountered in the course of their marches was not colonial Africa. In keeping with one of its principles, the British administration left the traditional political structure with its kings, its religious chiefs, its judges, its castes and its privileges in place.

When they arrived in a village, they were welcomed by the king’s emissaries, invited to the palavers, and photographed with the court. In one of those portraits, my mother and father pose around King Memfoï, of Banso. According to tradition, the king is naked to the waist, sitting on his throne, with his fly whisk in hand. On either side of him stand my mother and father wearing worn clothing, dusty from the journey, my mother in her long skirt and walking shoes, my father in a shirt with rolled-up sleeves and his khaki pants that are too baggy and too short, held up by a belt that looks like a piece of twine. They are smiling, they are happy, fancy-free on that adventure. Behind the king, a wall of the palace can be seen, a simple dwelling of dried mud bricks with shiny bits of straw.

At times, in the course of their journey through the mountains, nights were brutal, burning, sexual. My mother speaks of the celebrations that suddenly burst forth in the villages, like in Babungo, in Nkom country, a four-day march from Banso. In the center of the village, the masked theater is prepared. The tom-tom players are seated under a banyan tree, they beat the drums and the call of the music echoes into the distance. The women begin to dance, they are completely naked, except for a string of beads around their waists. They move along one behind the other, bent forward, their feet stamping the ground in rhythm to the drums. The men remain standing. Some wear grass skirts, others bear the masks of the gods. The master of the jujus leads the ceremony.

It begins at sunset, around six o’clock, and lasts till dawn of the next day. My mother and father lie on their cots of canvas webbing under the mosquito net, listening to the tom-toms beating in an unbroken rhythm, with hardly a flutter, like the beating of a heart. They are in love. Africa, at once wild and very human, is their honeymoon night. The sun had burned their bodies throughout the day, they are filled with an all-powerful electrical force. In my imagination, they make love that night, to the rhythm of the drums vibrating in the ground, holding on to one another tightly in the darkness, their skin covered with sweat, inside the hut of mud and branches no larger than a chicken coop. Then they fall asleep at dawn in the cold breath of morning that stirs the curtain of the mosquito net, enlaced, no longer hearing the fading rhythm of the last tom-toms.

* Kumbo today