Great-Uncle Mbon told us that every hut was burned down, and that the three of them had spent the day following the battalion’s trail, trying to salvage what could be salvaged after it departed. They wanted everyone to recognize they’d never see their village again the way it once was, and they’d never again own anything at all.
“Yes, we do! Now we own combativeness and a vastly increased determination,” Aunt Roz said. “They won’t enter the Elephant Forest via Massébè. The blood spilt here must stop them. So, everyone stand up!”
And everyone remained upright throughout the years that the repression lasted. The healthy men and women joined the resistance. The rest of the population was deported to a kind of concentration camp they called the Relocation Camp of Bondjock. Grand Madja and Aunt Roz went there at Grand Pa Helly’s insistence. But Aunt Roz was the link with the resistance fighters, collecting half of the dried cod, the chocolate, sugar, and milk they gave us and depositing them in the shrubbery. She always managed to convince some young military guardsmen to let her look for traditional medicines for her aged father or fruit for her children. Her accomplices then passed the provisions to the fighters through the camp’s fence—to the enormous disapproval of her mother, who dreaded another retaliation, another massacre, if her daughter were caught red-handed as a supporter of the resistance. But nothing could stop Aunt Roz. She always answered that it was her duty to try to put right the ills her brother had created.
She was the main resistance organizer in the region. Her husband Ratez had settled in the district’s main town, where he had found a job as an assistant to the local commander, and so she had free rein. She had made the food supply and rationing service completely subservient to her by becoming its director’s mistress. She could therefore collect all the leftovers from the officers’ mess and have the women make them into meals again before she deposited them outside the camp for the resistance fighters to pick up. Indeed, for three years the battalion of Bondjock unwittingly provided the resistance with sugar, milk, smoked fish, beef, and vitally needed medications. Aunt Roz figured it was the least she could do. She also organized small teams to sabotage the machinery intended for opening the road to the Elephant Forest. The children would pour a bit of sauce in the motor oil, a bit of salt in the carburetors, in tiny quantities—just enough to slow down the work, but keep anyone from figuring out the reason.
The road never went beyond Massébè.
And elsewhere, nobody knows the name of the village that today has a hundred inhabitants at best. Better that it remain anonymous than it enter the history books under the name “gate of the death for every future.”
There was nothing but alarming news about my father: He had become a consultant to the Whites, a “collaborator,” as this new class of people was known from that time on. Or we were told that he had returned to Douala, where he had seduced and instantly married a midwife who worked at the maternity clinic of Eseka, Bitchokè’s stronghold.
“Couldn’t he ask his White friends to post his midwife-wife somewhere other than in this cursed place, where a certain Bitchokè, mad with hatred and contempt, decapitates his brothers?” Grand Pa Helly wanted to know. What irresistible destiny was driving his son Njokè to run so permanently with danger? Was it recklessness? Ignorance?
Grand Madja wanted to die of shame, and implored the ancestors and the spirits to open the earth beneath her feet and swallow her up. Alas! Not a month went by that we didn’t hear talk of Bitchokè: He had caught some patriot in the resistance with his own hands and delivered him to the White soldiers. He had set fire to the house of someone suspected of being a resistance fighter or one of their accomplices. He had abducted the wife of another fighter and had her raped by all his men to humiliate the husband. As a reward the Whites had given him hunting rifles with bullets meant for elephants. Then he had promised to kill Mpôdôl himself with an elephant bullet “to squash his dirty traitor’s skin and send it flying to the four corners of the world, so that the earth will forget he ever passed through this life.”
Bitchokè couldn’t tolerate hearing that another Black man was on the trail of Mpôdôl: It was his private hunt, as he reminded anyone who would listen. When he caught a resistance fighter and delivered him, Bitchokè was careful to behead him and have his head exhibited on the square for two days so that everyone would be sure to take note of his own power. Once and for all, he wanted to destroy the myth of invincibility that surrounded the famed patriotic resistance fighters, which so exasperated him.
“What ill fortune has generated this ‘nameless era,’ this non-era, saddling me with White soldiers and commanders, thereby overshadowing my power as a Lôs and relegating me to the despicable role of a ‘collaborator’ or, worse, of a mere underling?” Thus he would lament, in places where he had done his damage, according to the accounts spread by innumerable witnesses. “It’s the fault of that lousy Mpôdôl and his whole gang of gutless Mbombocks who could find nothing better to do than hide out like rats in the bush! Why didn’t they take up arms and organize a true resistance? Why didn’t they call upon the deities Ngué, Um Nkora Ntong, and all the other Lôs powers to liberate them?” he kept on moaning.
In fact, they said that Bitchokè utterly despised White men, but since he found them to be more shrewd and much more powerfully armed, he’d told himself that as long as he had to ally himself with someone, it might as well be them.
“I’m infuriated by every pretentious Black, I feel nothing but contempt for those so-called patriots, incapable of getting along with each other, who’ve allowed the colonizers to come in by taking advantage of their divisiveness! These Black pseudo-intellectuals and politicians know nothing about their own traditions anymore, and forget to call upon Lôs like myself to rid the country of these invaders. I’m especially angry with Mpôdôl, who, if he were worthy of the name, would obviously have called upon me, the greatest of all the Lôs! I swear I would have purged the Bassa land of all these cantankerous pigs, even if it meant eating them raw,” he never failed to add.
“One doesn’t necessarily catch mange the same day one eats a leopard’s skin,” as one of our old proverbs says. That is why on the day my father met Bitchokè for the first time, he never could have imagined the slew of misfortunes he had just unleashed.
Indeed, sometimes it is as if a higher power subjugates even our innate free will. Every act becomes an involuntary function, just like digestion or perspiration, and that’s fatal. To be sure, that fate is generated by prior acts, but when it starts moving you can’t escape it anymore, for each act must find its recompense. And only my father knows what actions he committed to set this peculiar destiny in motion.
Grand Pa Helly had to go in search of the news himself, and when he returned we were given the most recent, very colorful information. “The name of Njokè’s midwife is Naja as well,” he told us.
My mother took great offense at this, wondering why he couldn’t at least have found a midwife with a different name. She could understand that her incorrigible husband wanted a midwife, just as she could understand that he’d taken a White woman as a wife, since she herself was not. It was a craving like wanting sweets and was always very short-lived. The last time, the deserted White husband had simply sent his runaway wife back home, proving that it wasn’t just Black women who had to suffer the laws made by men for men. Although it was sad it was nevertheless a consolation.
What really bothered my mother was that her husband wanted to disregard her to the point of changing wives without changing names. This willingness to merge the two women shocked my mother to the highest degree. Ranting and raving into the wind, she called upon various witnesses—her father-in-law, her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law, and anyone else who was willing—to listen.
“Am I not right? On top of it all she’s a ‘sista’ Jehovah’s Witness like