Another group of White men come back, holding Grand Madja, Great-Aunt Kèl Lam, and another dozen women, fastened to a rope. One of the Whites brutally strike my great-aunt, but she doesn’t flinch. The soldier pushes her even more violently so that she falls, pulling all the other women to the ground with her.
Aunt Roz holds her breath, her body rigid as a tree trunk. Her ears are as red and transparent as those of Grand Pa Helly during his rare moments of rage. Although my sister and I are just as rigid, ours came from complete lack of understanding.
A different group of White men arrive, followed by at least twenty of my uncles. How had five small White men been able to tie up twenty of my very solid uncles? Oh yes, they had rifles. . . . But when I saw about twenty of my cousins, children like me, bound up and whipped, I almost let out a scream. Holding me in a vicelike grip, Aunt Roz puts her hand over my mouth. Our eyes are bulging like a snail’s antennas.
A whole crowd of people, all tied together with rope, is now standing around the White man on the ground, who’d been temporarily forgotten. Now he is wrapped up in white bandages and placed on a makeshift stretcher. A few of my uncles are forced to carry him. They hoist the four handles of the stretcher up on their shoulders, and the procession moves toward our village. Aunt Roz waits until they are gone and then we turn back, using a shortcut to get to the house before they do.
Aunt Roz acts as if we were returning from the fields, mud-stained and carrying hoes and baskets with vegetables. We’d seen and heard nothing; we know nothing. We even wait to see them appear before we begin to unload. Right away about ten of the White men surround us and rip away our baskets and Aunt Roz’s machete. She begins to yell and confront her brother, asking him what is going on—in Bassa, as if she doesn’t understand French, thereby making it possible for all of us to follow my father’s explanations.
“Resistance fighters fired at Captain Râteau. They’re wrong if they think they can stop the battalion from entering the Elephant Forest and catching that outlaw who claims to be Mpôdôl! Furthermore, they must know there’ll be retaliation: If the captain dies, sixty men from Massébè will be shot. You’d better pray that he doesn’t die, for then only twelve will be shot.”
Shrieking comes from every side. Many other people arrive to hear the news, and are all arrested, bound, and pushed to the ground after being hit with rifle butts or machetes.
My father had stated that the men from Massébè would never shoot at White people—first, because they all respected White authority, and second, because they didn’t own any rifles or ammunition. He had been willing to swear to this, because he knew them so well. Now he urges every man to attest to this himself, loud and clear, so that he can intervene and convince the White men to search elsewhere. But no one utters a word.
The White man in white bandages is placed in my father’s bed. A team that returns from the neighboring village announces that the Ndog Béa have dug trenches barring the evacuation of the captain by that route. They’d have to cope here for the time being, and figure out what to do next. The Whites make a radio call and arrange for a helicopter to evacuate the injured man.
“While we wait,” my father tells the villagers, “we have to feed the whole battalion. Therefore I’m asking everyone to contribute poultry, pigs, sheep, so we can feed the fifty White mouths that are now here, as well as those who are with them.”
That is when Grand Pa Helly, whom no one saw approaching, very calmly says: “There’s enough here to feed all these mouths for nine days without depriving the people; they’ve been through enough already. Let’s hope the White men won’t stay any longer than that. Tell them to set our young people free so they can slaughter the animals, and the women, too, so they can prepare the food.”
The three slaughtered pigs are more than enough to feed the whole battalion. These gentlemen decide that everyone has to be tied up again before going to sleep. More than sixty men and several hundred women and children are bound together, one arm attached to the person in front and the other arm to the person behind. This way we form one very long line that soon changes into a spiral, and so we spend the night, like an enormous snail of prisoners. Some people, like Aunt Roz and her cousins, don’t sleep a wink.
In the morning two helicopters unload a veritable medical team, and enough equipment for an entire clinic. They listened to the captain’s chest and declare that my father has done a good job. Just imagine, a single cartridge meant to hunt a bird, a miserable bit of lead, had lodged in a shoulder, and my father had extracted it with ease. The captain’s life was never in danger, and that same evening he had eaten lustily of the pork cooked in tree bark, asking for more at breakfast time. No matter! They brought in an alternate captain ordered to carry out the promised retaliation and continue the mission to the Elephant Forest. They deem it wise to send my father back to the capital. He disappears into one of the helicopters.
The snail of prisoners slowly unwinds and the long line is taken to the bush. Five very flushed and confused young White men are assigned to kill twelve Black men whose wives had cooked the pork in tree bark that was to be their last meal. One of the young men, the puniest of the five, named Private Marteau comes to a halt in front of me. Our eyes lock for what seemed like an eternity to me. A voice thundered: “Come on, Private Marteau!”
He jumps, and puts his gun to the head of my Uncle Ngan Njock, whose arm is tied to my right arm. One side of his head explodes, the blood spurting out. My uncle slumps to the ground, as did Private Marteau, who started to vomit violently. I tried to stay upright, but the weight of my uncle forced me to bend over in two. I see several other uncles of mine fall not far from me, and the ones who collapse pulled the rest of us to the ground with them. Nobody screams or cries.
It seemed as if death had immobilized everyone. Soon the buzzing of fat green flies is heard and, little by little, like the throbbing of a motor, a whole swarm latch onto my Uncle Ngan’s head.
Even after the battalion had been gone for several hours, we remain still on the ground, some in their eternal sleep and others drugged by exhaustion, fear, or despair. Still others with their eyes open, obstinate in their determination to look death right in the face. As for me, I can’t keep my eyes off the swarm of flies laying tiny white maggots on my uncle’s head.
Even today, I still wonder why an entire village population, alive and welded in death, lay motionless for hours. Perhaps we thought there were a few White men left, watching us to see if one of us might budge, and ready to blow his head off. Or perhaps we preferred to die together, and not be one of those who would some day have to describe something this grotesque. Undoubtedly, that was the reason why the event wasn’t spoken of again for another five years, and even then only in half-whispers, under breath and in veiled terms, like a distant nightmare. It took five years of waiting for the deported inhabitants of Massébè to come back to their land and for a purification ceremony to take place.
On a tourist trip to France, we visited Oradour, a small village in the Limousin, whose population had been slaughtered by German soldiers during the Second World War. Although they had already lost the war, they still locked innocent women and children in a church, burned them alive, and in the name of their glorious fatherland shot unarmed men like pheasants. While visiting such places, where signs provided many details, the memory of the Massébè massacre brutally invaded my consciousness. I wondered if a soldier named Marteau had visited there the way I was visiting here, and had then remembered his own actions. Recalling the scene in his mind, did he tell himself he’d served his country, as these mad officers had done? But then, France was not at war with the land of the Bassa! There had never been any war, proved by the fact that there is no record of it anywhere. Private Marteau must have been wholly convinced he was achieving his mission of civilization and salvation.
In some way, for the man whose life is a perpetual path of initiation, he would be right. As my father used to say, catastrophe is a sign that life is evolving, and this is salvation. But for Massébè’s ordinary women and children, it was a sordid and unspeakable massacre, a catastrophe that even someone like Dimalè would not