An Excerpt from Flash of the Sun
Chapter Thirty-Two
Clement
Coulther paced restlessly in his room, not knowing what more to write in his
attempt to convey the complex developments in the Republic of Cameroun.
“What am I doing in this godforsaken land?” he cursed at nobody in
particular, “It is a trap; everything here is a trap,” he added under his
breath and collapsed in his seat.
Still, the pain could not go away; the harsh reality could not stop
imposing itself on his consciousness—challenging him to look, analyze, and
judge. Whenever he tried to confront the challenges, a strange paralyzing
feeling of helplessness would overwhelm him. It left him resigned to the fact
that he was inextricably committed to Cameroon.
“It could have been avoided; it can still be overcome,” he mumbled and
took a slug from the bottle of vodka.
Yet there was no respite for his troubled soul. He had flown to French
Cameroun after the death of Ruben Um Nyobé and reported briefly on the war
against the UPC in Bassaland, Douala, and
the surrounding areas until his bosses assigned him to cover the elections in
France and report the developments there. There was actually much to write
about as the Gaullists were focusing on consolidating power through the new
constitution and the launch of the economic program called Dirigisme. But then,
he got tired at the close of 1959, asked to be reassigned and finally had his
way to return to French Cameroon. And what a timely return it was. Not only did
1960 herald the first launch of France’s plan for post-colonial Africa through
the socio-economic and military accord called the Le Pacte Coloniale (The Colonial Pact) that Paris imposed on its
colonies, starting with French Cameroon, but it also signaled a new direction
in the fight against the UPC. He had returned to French Cameroun at the closing
stages of the military campaign in the Bassa homeland, which saw a convulsive
upsurge of violence that abated later that year following the capitulation of
the Bassa elites after the Bassa faction in the UPC led by Théodore Mayi-Matip signed
a peace agreement with the French military and the administration of Ahmadou
Ahidjo in February 1959, after which he aligned with the French-backed
government, serving as Vice-President of the National Assembly of the Republic of
Cameroon following its independence on January 01, 1960.
There was little to write about during the months immediately after the
conciliation of the Bassa faction of the UPC under Mayi Matip, since that meant
the Franco-Camerounian Army succeeded in securing the vital railway and motor
routes connecting the economic capital of Douala and the political capital of
Yaoundé. Even so, ennui never kicked during that lull because there were other
adventures to keep him busy. The respite gave him the time needed to explore
Cameroon, understand the nature of the people, and discover African women. This
was Cameroonian women, to be precise, who, though still attached to their
African values, were equally embracing modernity and those occidental values he
was so familiar and comfortable with.
He got involved with many women during his coverage of the war in French
Cameron all right, but Delphine was the one who towered above all the others.
He found something strange in her allure that he could not explain and even
thought was mysterious. And he had to admit that she imposed herself on his
life in a subtle or almost innocent way. And it all began when he baited her
with his English books.
Clement had never imagined that he could find an enthusiastic reader in
an African until he met Delphine in her uncle’s stall one April afternoon,
reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It was his first time seeing her in the
stall, which was where he often bought his cigarettes and simple groceries.
Delphine had dropped the book she was reading the moment he showed up,
smiled timidly in that natural manner that immediately made him feel the
adrenaline coursing through his veins, and then asked in an almost angelic
voice how she could be of help to him. Her behavior reminded him of American
Southern hospitality, a unique development of English or Anglo-Saxon culture in
the western hemisphere, yet she came across as being very humble and dignified,
which was very different from the Gallic and traditional approach of other
shopkeepers around. Of course, he needed groceries, and he tried to be charming
in presenting his list.
But not until after making his purchase that day did he ask her to allow
him to take a look at the book she was reading. The title piqued his curiosity
right away, to the point where he spent close to an hour discussing the book
with her—touching on the central characters in the story and discussing the
nature of the plot. Delphine had talked fondly of Snowball, expressed her
perplexity about the vision Old Major held, pitied Boxer’s fate, laughed over
Benjamin’s role and castigated Napoleon.
He was highly impressed. In front of him was an eighteen-year-old in a
godforsaken part of the world having a perfect grasp of the satirical allegory of
Soviet totalitarianism under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, when he could
hardly find anyone back home to discuss the book with. He had left her with a
promise to bring her some English books the next day, which he did. Only, he
inquired about her life story after that and was captivated by it.
Emmanuel
Njitap Nya, as Delphine’s father was called, was a farmer and shopkeeper with a
vision. He arrived in British Southern Cameroons as a seventeen-year-old with a
determination to stake a new life in an environment that was not haunted by the
ripple effect of the instability that gripped the Bamilekéland during the first
two decades of French control in French Cameroun.
His first destination was Kumba, the primary commercial and
transportation hub of British Southern Cameroons, where he tried to make his
new home living with his mother’s paternal uncle, who had made the town home
since the early years of German colonization of Kamerun, but then left the
agricultural town after a wearying two months there after he became convinced
that the town held no future for any aspiring and enlightened soul. The town of
Victoria located sixty miles south of Kumba was his next destination, and he
fell in love with the coastal settlement the moment he arrived there. And as
fate would have it, he immediately found work as a cook with John Holt, a
German trader of renown in the territory. Emmanuel Nya had a good grasp of
French cuisine, something he had mastered while working as a dishwasher and
cook’s helper in a hotel in Douala. His kitchen skills paid off in Victoria
because he satisfied John Holt’s stomach to the point where the gourmand even
felt inclined to show him the tricks of doing business in that part of his
world.
It turned out that Emmanuel Nya had a far more remarkable eye for
business than his master had fancied because he became a businessman in his own
right before he turned twenty-two. He started a shop, bought land, and became
involved in the cultivation of bananas, cocoa,
and coffee. When he married the nineteen-year-old Theresia Nzekellang off the
hands of her paternal uncle, he was only twenty-four years old at the time. But
the sky appeared to be his limit. Delphine was born a year after the marriage,
and her entry into the world was followed by the births of her two brothers and
a sister, whom she loved so much that she was ready to die for them. This new,
young, and loving family lived comfortably, worked hard, and shared memorable
moments together; and the parents treasured their children as if they would not
be able to have any life of their own without their offspring.
Delphine and her siblings were sent to the best Catholic school in the
town, where they were taught the values that made them disciplined and
hardworking minds. The school authorities engaged the parents of their pupils
so well that the Nya children grew up understanding that books and a solid
education would open the doors to horizons far beyond their wildest dreams.
Delphine was apt to cry whenever she talked about her brothers. Vincent,
who was two years her junior, was an ingenious and fiery lad with quick wit, sharp tongue, and a zest for life that was unique around. He was a
powerful influence on Dieudonné, his brother who was eighteen months his junior,
and he took pride in taking him out on adventures. Delphine, on her part, was a
hardworking, gentle, insightful, and meditative soul who did her best to pass
those values over to her younger sister called Elizabeth.
Delphine had a reflective smile of pride spread across her face when she
recounted how the day after she passed her elementary school exams, her father
garbed himself in his Vintage Men's 3 Button sport coat with narrow lapels and
then drove to the residence of the Catholic bishop, where he convinced the man
to set aside a place for her at the sole girl’s boarding school in British
Southern Cameroons.
It was said at the time that the Queen of Rosary Secondary School at
Okoyong, in Mamfe, was one of the finest in British Africa. So, the fact that
Emmanuel Nya wanted his daughter to be educated and nurtured there so that she could become one of the few
enlightened ladies of the land, confirmed his dedication to his kids. Delphine
said that her father even had plans to send her to England after her Government
Common Entrance Ordinary Level (GCE O-Level) exams so that she could further
her education there.
But then tragedy struck before the plan was even hatched. The two Nya
brothers returned home from the renowned St. Joseph Secondary School, Sasse, in
Buea, that summer holidays with a spirit
to live their lives to the fullest, to the point of disregarding whatever
constraining rules that were out there, except their obligations to their
family. One of their adventures on the second day of August took them to the
sandy shores of Victoria’s Down Beach.
The waters were calm that day, eyewitnesses said, but Dieudonné and a
host of other swimmers were unaware of the undercurrent
that was building beneath the surface and moving in a different direction than
the visible waves until it was too late. Vincent heard his brother’s shouting
for help, saw him disappearing under the waves and in his attempt to save
Dieudonné, the treacherous undercurrent swept him under and drowned him too.
Victoria counted eleven deaths that day, but nowhere was the cry of anguish as loud
and severe as in the home of Emmanuel Nya.
“What were they doing in a body of water that never turns red?” Emmanuel
Nya grieved aloud, “Didn’t I repeat it countless times that Bamileké people are
not swimmers, that we should never trust anybody of water whose color cannot be
altered by the elements?”
Delphine contended that his father was so distraught that he decided to
put the memory of Victoria behind him with a decision to sell his businesses
and move to Bamenda in the hinterland. The move was supposed to be made that
Christmas holiday when another disaster struck. The Nya father was driving home
one night when a truck swerved onto his side of the road in a momentary
doze-off by the driver. He died from the head-on collision just as he was being
rushed to the hospital.
“My mother and I were helpless and at a loss,” Delphine had told Clement
Coulther, “My father’s brothers, sisters, uncles,
and cousins descended on my mother from French Cameroon as if she was of no
consequence, as if the grief of her loss had been momentary. They claimed that
the deaths in our family came about from maledictions from our ancestors
because my father neglected ancestral sacrifices and failed to pacify the taste
and hunger of his forebears when he
should have known that their blessings made him prosper.”
Delphine's mother refused to participate in their traditional rites,
turned down the offer to become the inherited wife of his younger
brother-in-law, and y not complying with her in-laws’ demands, she forfeited
her claims to his late husband’s fortunes. Also, the Nya women had never been
told by anyone that the late Emmanuel Nya had spun a son from wedlock without
even knowing about it, just before he left Douala, and that the son had been
living with his paternal grandfather for several years now.
Delphine, on her part, was told that she would have to be in the custody
of her paternal grandfather in Douala
since Bamileké traditions gave a grandfather the right of disposition over the
firstborn daughters of his sons. She did not resist the decision because his
uncle assured her that Douala had an All-Girls
boarding secondary school where she could complete her education in English. It
turned out that there was none in the city. So, she had to spend an entire
academic year sitting at home and selling at her uncle’s stall.
That is, until Clement came into
her life. He won her confidence, brought her books to satisfy her voracious
appetite for reading and promised to help her register as an external candidate
for the GCE Ordinary Level exams. And he kept his promise. But then, he ceased
bringing her books, and when she pleaded for them, he asked her to come over to
his place and get them herself. She visited his home once, twice, thrice, and
on the fourth visit, she was comfortable enough to help him wash the dishes.
She cleaned the house on her next visit and did his laundry the day after.
Then she ceased coming. One day, two days, and a week passed before his
desperation spilled over. He missed her, needed someone to have an intelligent
and relaxed conversation in English with, and he couldn’t understand why he
suddenly developed a bad taste for the local women he had been amusing himself
with. Desperate to see her again, he went to the shop several times, but she
was nowhere to be found.
He was becoming frantic about it when he spotted her across the street
one afternoon. He remembered running up to her and asking her if he had wronged
her in any way. When she told him no, he was happy beyond the expression of
words. He voiced his desire to see her again and even told her that he had just
received supplies of several new titles, even before she could come up with a
response to his invitation. Delphine ended up not providing him with a reason
for her absence, but promised to pass by.
And she did pass by five days after their chance meeting, on a late
afternoon when he least expected her to show up. Clement was having a late
lunch when he heard a timid knock on the slightly opened door, followed by it
creaking wide open. His mouth was agape for a moment as he watched her walk in,
wearing an overflowing flare skirt as if she wanted to hide her beautiful legs.
She told him her uncle didn’t want her to visit him anymore, revealed that she lied she would be researching in the
library so as to get the time to keep her promise to pay him a visit, and that
she was not angry with him at all. Clement was relieved but not happy. He asked
her to join him for lunch, but she declined. The next thing he did was offer
her some wine in the decanter on the dining table. It was the first time he had
offered her a drink, and since he had never seen her drinking before, he was
not surprised when she voiced her apprehension.
“I don’t drink alcohol.”
“It is sweet,” he had told her.
“Sweet?”
“Yes,” he had replied, dropped his fork, and picked up two glasses, “Does
sweet Côteaux du Layon wine contain alcohol?” he had added and filled up the
two glasses.
“I don’t know,” she had replied, looking confused and embarrassed.
“Then give it a try,” he had told Delphine before handing her a glass.
Delphine enjoyed the drink and did not decline a refill. Then, she
started talking freely—laughing and giggling—hardly a quarter into the second
glass of wine. She stopped recoiling from his touches
after that, and at one point, Clement sincerely thought she welcomed the
seduction. That is, until she got up from
bed four hours later and tried to stifle her sobbing. But then, she was all
composed a quarter of an hour after, told him she was okay, and then bade him
goodnight with a subdued note in her voice as if she did not hold him
responsible for taking away her virginity.
She visited him the next day, looking less animated, but then went about doing chores in the house as if it
were an obligation. She even went to bed with him that day when he invited her
over, but she did so in a rather obliging than anticipatory manner. She
demanded nothing from him for the next two weeks, even though she carried on as
if managing his home, cooking his meals, and supplying him with bananas,
African plums, avocados, oranges and
paw-paws were her duties.
So, when he decided to inform her three weeks after that he was returning
home to Jersey City at the end of the month, he knew he would be touching on
raw emotions. She wept for a moment and then asked
him when he planned to return. When he failed to give her a promise, she
accepted her fate with a quiet determination that he found surprising.
“I want you to know that I love you,” she had told him in a resigned
tone. It was the first time she had expressed her emotions in those magical
words.
“Woman! What are you doing to yourself?” he had stuttered, “You can’t;
you shouldn’t fall in love with somebody who is in love with an idea.”
“You are a good man.”
“I am not. What do you know about me?”
“Don’t fool yourself, you are a good man,” she had told him in a
determined voice.
“Don’t hurt yourself; I am warning you,” he had said to her with a
desperate note in his voice.
“You are the one who is hurting himself. You are a Capricorn man; I am a Cancer
woman. We complement each other, don’t you know that?”
He had looked at her with awe, wondering where she got the information
from and how much she knew about the horoscope or the different zodiac signs.
“How much do you know?” he had stuttered finally.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you know about this horoscope thing?”
“I read about it from a Reverend Sister in the Queen of Rosary Secondary
School.”
“She believed the things they wrote?”
“I don’t know. But I did. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Do you believe our lives are influenced by the stars and other cosmic
forces?”
“I don’t.”
“Do you go to church?”
“Occasional.”
“So, you are a believer.”
“Uh-huh! I believe in free will, not in predestination.”
“I believe the forces of the universe influence our free will; I believe
they stir us towards certain paths in life which we can embrace or reject
depending on the type of character we developed, the influence of those around
us, and also depending on our ambitions in life.”
“That’s very interesting! Now, tell me how you found out I am a
Capricorn?”
“You told me your birthday is January 1st.”
“I did?”
“Yes! Last week.”
“You are right. Now I remember.”
“You are a typical Capricorn man.”
“And you are a typical Cancer woman.”
“You said you don’t believe anything about horoscopes.”
“I did. But I didn’t say I have never read about it.”
“What is your opinion of a typical Cancer woman?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes, I do!” she had said with excitement in her voice that he had never
heard before.
“Okay! Here we go. Cancer women are good souls, I would say. They are
marvelous souls with a sense of loyalty that is perhaps unrivalled by people of
the other zodiac signs. They are very decisive and obey their instincts more
easily than, say, Capricorns. Also, they are driven by their impulses while
being very rational at the same time. But Cancer women most often end up making
the men they love miserable. And when the men they love are down, at a time when
these men are completely helpless, that is when the cancer women in their lives
tend to love them even more. Oh, girl, it
is just like a person who loves a bird
for its beautiful and strong wings, and the way it uses those lovely wings to
fly around or fly away. But then, this person breaks those same wings in his or
her possessive love, in his or her desire to have the bird around all the time.
However, when the bird becomes miserable because it can’t fly anymore and
because the person who loved it so much decided to cage it up, the possessive
bird lover dedicates himself or herself to raising the bird’s spirits; the
possessive bird lover ends up loving the bird even more.”
“Are you likening me to the hypothetical possessive bird lover?”
He had sighed and taken a deep breath instead of giving her an answer.
How he regretted afterwards for failing to offer her a response, for failing to
allay her fears.
She did not ask for his American address before she left that night, and
she did not show up the next day or the days after until he boarded the plane
and returned home.
The memory of Delphine left him with unsettling feelings that he had
difficulty sharing. Who would understand that the only woman who loved him
without demanding anything in return happened to be an African? He had
thought about this every now and then after his second Cameroonian trip. He kept those conflicting thoughts to
himself until he received an envelope from the Defense attaché at the embassy
of the United States of America in Yaoundé, the capital of the newly
independent Republic of Cameroun—former French Cameroun.
“Mama, you have a black grandson,” he had announced to his mother by
telephone that afternoon, right after perusing the letter.
“What are you doing to yourself? Vera couldn’t have twisted your mind to
the point of driving you to adopt a Negro. I told you already; you can have any
woman you want, and you can have a child of your own. All you have to do is
settle down.”
The mere mention of the name Vera had brought a mild smile to Clement
Coulther’s face. She had stayed on with her husband
and then went on to deliver a baby boy later than he had expected. That
was why when she informed him afterwards that the baby was not his, but was
rather from her husband’s seed, he could not tell whether she had taken him for
a fool again or not.
“No, mama, I have a son who has my blood. And settling down is now
something I should start considering.”
He had talked with his mother a little longer than the less than ten
minutes their phone conversations usually took. Then for the second time that
afternoon, he had perused the letter Delphine wrote and dispatched to the US
embassy in Yaoundé, which the Defense Attaché Peter Atkins had forwarded to
him. But he had done so with tears rolling down his cheeks, an unconscious
reaction that strangely enough did not leave him embarrassed. That was the
moment it dawned on him that Delphine was the only woman he had deeply
connected to physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Yet he had
fought hard not to acknowledge that aspect of the woman he had the most natural
soul ties with; he had run away from the woman who could have saved his soul.
Delphine discovered she was pregnant a couple of weeks after he returned
home. Despite that, she prepared for the GCE O-level exams in a cool-headed
manner and surprisingly passed six of the subjects she sat for. She gave birth
shortly after and christened their son Dieudonné-Vincent Nya Coulther as if to
make a point that all the male figures she had loved in different ways would be
embodied in the young infant she unexpectedly brought into the world.
Clement had returned to the Republic of Cameroun on April 30, 1961, to
search for his son and Delphine, only to find that the much-written
post-independence violence that gripped the city of Douala and the rest of the
Duala homeland was now under control, even though the city of Douala itself was
still in a state of emergency. He went searching for Delphine right away and learned
that she had lost her grandfather and uncle in the war and that she had moved
to Banganté with some of her relatives.
He had taken the train to Nkongsamba the next morning, hoping to arrive
in Banganté the day after. It was during the train ride through the Mungo
region that he observed something serious going on in the region. The heavy
joint Franco-Camerounian military presence there pointed to the Mungo as the
targeted area for pacification. However, hardly an hour after he boarded the
minibus in Nkongsamba, and barely a couple of minutes after it crossed the bridge
over the river Nkam and started skidding on the unpaved road into the
Bamilekéland, a strong realization hit him.
Ernest Ouandie, the successor to Félix Moumié, had just slipped into
Cameroon from exile and was reported to be rebuilding the UPC guerrilla
movement from his base somewhere in Bangou, about thirty miles away from
Banganté. That meant the Bamilekéland would be the next battleground. A cold
shiver ran up his spine at the thought. He understood the nature of the
Bamileké people. They would never surrender to the French and their Cameroonian
lackeys, and only their complete defeat would end the war in their homeland.
He arrived in Banganté sixty-three hours after he left Douala and found
accommodation that chilling night in an inn close to the Motor Park. He began
his search the next day, but then one
week passed, two weeks passed, three weeks passed, and a month appeared on the
horizon with nothing to show for his efforts. He drove to dozens of Bamileké
kingdoms that people told him boasted of a mulatto; he bribed his way around,
cajoled families, pampered the local administration, and solicited the help of
the military and other branches of the security forces, all to no avail.
Delphine and her son were nowhere to be found.
As he ate breakfast that second Tuesday of May and waited for his friend
Kenneth Smith, the only American he had come to know in Banganté, he decided it
was about time to put an end to the search. He would embark on three more
searches, and if they turned out to be futile too, then he would return to
Douala and pursue other options. Ken, as he called him, showed up around noon
in his 1958 Ford F-100 pickup and appeared more enthusiastic than he was for
the drive to Tonga, where a single mother and her mulatto child were said to be
residing. But the evangelist carried on in a lackluster manner afterwards for
about an hour before they left the inn premises.
That delay turned everything around.
They were driving through the Motor Park before hitting the main road to the
Bamileké kingdom of Tonga when Clement shouted at Kenneth Smith to stop,
jolting his compatriot to the point where he slammed hard on the brakes like
someone trying to avoid hitting a child right in front of his vehicle. The
sudden action caused the car to jerk forward convulsively as it screeched to a sudden stop.
“That girl,” he had pointed at a young woman disembarking from a Ford
pickup truck some two hundred yards away
with what seemed like a one-year-old
mulatto boy in her arms.
The young woman turned out to be Delphine, and she was returning from a
visit to her maternal grandmother in Batoufam. He had not thought of Batoufam
at all. It was too small a Bamileké kingdom to feature on his radar. Clement had jumped out of the vehicle and covered the
distance to the mother and child in a
splash. He had hugged and kissed Delphine as if she were back from the dead,
lifted his son in the air and trickled tears of joy to the amazement, if not
disbelief, of the passers-by and even those further away would see the drama
unfolding. He was happy beyond the expression of words, as if he had finally
lifted a burden off his soul. Kenneth Smith drove them that afternoon to the
home of Delphine’s maternal aunt in Banganté. After a moment of small talk with
Joseph Nkabyo Njike that evening, he pledged to make her his wife the next day
in the presence of her relatives and his few friends.
He had wanted to take Delphine and his son out of Banganté right away to
the short-term security of the metropolitan centers of either Yaoundé or Douala, but then he found out that an obstacle stood in his way. A
gendarme officer had seized her identification papers at the last checkpoint they went through before driving into
Banganté, asking her to return with her baby’s father before she could get her
documents back.
He stood up to the challenge and left with her to get her ID back right
after she told her about it, but neither the gendarme officer nor her identity
card could be traced in the local gendarmerie and the other security offices in
Banganté and the Nde Division. Pressing her case in the provincial capital of
Bafoussam, as her traditionally married husband, still failed to convince the authorities to issue her new
identification papers. The authorities wouldn’t even allow him to marry
Delphine legally because she did not have a valid identity card. Stuck in
Banganté with Delphine and
Vincent-Dieudonné, he knew he would have to keep looking for solutions every
day because nothing in the world would induce him to leave without taking with
him the only two souls who finally gave his life some real meaning.
Clement kept an eye on the Franco-Cameroonian troops, which kept
increasing their presence in the Bamileké homeland. He knew exactly what was
coming but decided to be quiet about it. Then he received information that René
Roccard had moved his military headquarters to Bafoussam, which was only thirty-one
miles and that Max Briand would be
joining him from the Mungo region. He had met the two men on several occasions
before, the first time in Indochina while they were there battling Ho Chi
Minh’s forces. Max Briand, in particular,
carried with him a reputation for napalming settlements in the Mungo region. Those
two Frenchmen filled him with trepidation.
The news of the men’s impending mission set him into a frantic spirit of
writing again. He considered it his duty to inform the world about the
goings-on in Cameroun. However, that familiar idea of being a revealer of tragedy was now in conflict with his duty to
his new family. If only he could get Delphine and their son out of the area and
Cameroun in general.
Clement Couther bit the cock of his pen for a moment as he thought of a
title for his article that night. Then a smile spread across his face as he
scribbled the words as if savoring a sweet revelation:
A war against African Civic-Nationalists and Traditionalists
in Cameroon, or a War against Communists?
By Janvier Chouteu-Chando, author of Flash of the Sun amazon.com/Flash-Sun-Comp
