Excerpt of Disciples of Fortune
Nineteen fifty-seven ended dismally for the UPC in French Cameroun. The civic-nationalist political party began the New Year as by far the most popular political organization in the territory, yet it had no legal rights to manifest its political agenda in French Camerounian politics. When in April 1956, Pierre Joseph Auguste Messmer, a hero of the legendary General Charles De Gaulle’s Free French Forces during the Second World War, replaced Roland Pré whose July 13, 1955 decree banned the UPC, many French Camerounians and Kamerunist nationalists in general were hopeful that the new High Commissioner or governor would ease tensions in the French Trust Territory. But that was not the case. Pierre Mesmer immediately went about accelerating the military clamp down on the UPC while grooming local political forces submissive to France’s game plan for French Cameroun, all the while, never heeding the voices of the people of the land.
Hans had a great deal of reservation while following the political developments that saw the granting of limited autonomy to French Cameroun, whereby France placed some political powers in the hands of its protégés in the Trust Territory. He was particularly intrigued by the machinations that led André-Marie Mbida to become the first indigenous Prime Minister of French Cameroun. Still, he remained the voice of caution among the Njike men in their relationship with the UPC. However, after spending three years trying to convince the French Trusteeship administration to uplift the ban, the party leadership realized belatedly that despite its seventy percent command of the support of the population and an even higher percentage of intellectuals, the French authorities were still bent on preventing the UPC from influencing the territory’s political evolution and direction. Hans too did not like that at all.
The Njike men were not indifferent to the changing political fortunes in the territories of the former German Kamerun. The UPC’s call for the reunification of British Cameroons and French Cameroun before an eventual independence had won overwhelming support in both territories, even though it now looked like the party may have to watch the political development of the territories from the sidelines. They too began to wonder whether the Kamerunian dream of reunification and independence could be realized without its propagators, since the puppets that France was using in French Cameroun’s political arena hardly even knew the concepts or the components of the dream.
However, when in January 1958, the two-month old right-wing government of French Prime Minister Félix Gaillard D'Aimé promoted Pierre Messmer from the position of High Commissioner of French Cameroun to the post of High Commissioner of French Equatorial Africa, and then replaced him with Jean Ramadier, the son of Paul Ramadier, the left-wing former Prime Minister of France, Hans saw an opportunity to exploit. He made inquiries on Jean Ramadier’s tenures as the High-Commissioner of Niger from 1956-1956 and of Guinea from 1956 to January 1958, arriving at the conclusion that he was the right person to deal with in resolving the ban on the UPC. So he booked an audience with the new High-Commissioner of French Cameroun, got his promise to resolve the issue once and for all, and his hint that the process would start with the rolling of heads in the current French Camerounian administration. Even so, Hans did not see it coming when Jean Ramadier publicly declared that he supported the reunification of French Cameroun and British Cameroons, and then started the process of replacing André-Marie Mbida with his deputy Ahmadou Ahidjo. The Njike brothers and their UPC friends were beginning to rejoice over the developments when news reached them that February, reporting the transfer of Jean Ramadier to an undisclosed post barely a month after he started working in French Cameroun. His replacement with Xavier Antoine Torré of the Radical Party, who quickly transformed himself into Ahmadou Ahidjo’s puppet master, saddened Hans enormously.
Hans became forthright in his condemnation of French policy in French Cameroun, certain that it spelled disaster for the progressive spirit of the people. He was versed with dreams, had experienced the force of dreams while growing up in Germany. He knew a collective dream happened to be the most effective tool to unite, mobilize and move a people forward, even for a negative cause. Dreams were impossible to usurp. He remembered telling Philip that only the dreamers of a dream are capable of translating their dreams into worthy practical endeavors that are devoid of haunting errors. After all, they are the ones who carefully observed the link between their dreams and reality; they are the ones who worked consciously to blend them into one.
As businessmen, Hans and his brothers did not allow the political tragedies in French Cameroun to overwhelm and paralyze them. After all, they never trusted the French authorities in their intentions in the land. So, the Njike family pursued the economic path as if there was no war going on in the land, and supported efforts to bring about peace as if they had no stake in the land’s political configuration.
Construction of the hospital in Douala began in earnest that year, led by Elizabeth. Businesses in West Germany were moving along with the tide of the West German economic prosperity, while operations in both French Cameroun and British Cameroons were churning out enough profits to keep them in business. Philip, who had always nursed ambitions to extend his father’s education drive, founded a secondary school in Douala and laid the groundwork for the founding of others in Nkongsamba and Banganté. Having been married the year before, he was now blessed with three kids, one with his new wife Maria Meuntjeu. Mami Njike was contented.
In fact, when Josef Nana Njike’s descendants celebrated the 1958 New Year in Hans’s home in Douala, they never imagined that tragedy could befall the family in rapid successions. First was Averill, who in March of that year was found lifeless on the lawn in the compound in Douala in what turned out to be the strangest death the family had ever known. The results of the autopsy revealed septicemia as the cause of her death. No clue was found as to how the blood poisoning came about. Not until Averill’s little boy who was with her at home that day started having recurring nightmares did the family become suspicious. He would be heard shouting in his sleep that he saw the man who killed his mother. At five, Joseph Njabou was noted for his sharp tongue and nimble wits. That gave the extended Njike family reasons to doubt the claims by doctors that Averill committed suicide.
Hardly even a month after Averill’s death; stories started circulating around that Nana Njike’s descendants had sacrificed her to a secret Bamileké society called Famla. The detractors held that the victims of the society were made to encounter superficial deaths so that their bodies got reincarnated after burial so that they could toil in a mystical world for the prosperity of their donors.
Hans observed the extended Njike family’s growing isolation and the desertion of some of its associates with keen interest. Some people they had known as friends or acquaintances began to distance themselves from the family, and even some farmers who had benefited by dealing with the cooperation decided to withhold their supplies. Others switched to new buyers altogether. Anti-UPC newspapers rallied to the rumors around with outrageous stories about the Njike family. One headline even read: DID THE LATE MILLIONAIRE JOSEF NANA NJIKE COMPROMISE HIS FAMILY WITH THE FAMLA? The story underneath was in the affirmative.
The Njike family watched the changes with an amused and curious silence. They had worries of their own.
But hardly three months after Averill’s death, another tragedy befell the Njike family when Jean Ondoa, paralyzed from the accident in Douala, died from renal failure and cirrhosis. His death fueled the storyline held by the gossip columnists and the rumormongers that the Njike family sacrificed him to the Famla so that the hospital under construction would flourish.
Perhaps death decided to strike its most vicious blow to the Njike family in a bid to complete its triangular pattern that year. Philip went to Banganté to visit his mother and woke up one morning to find her in an eternal repose on her bed. The family mourned her death in a funeral that was remembered in Banganté years after. They buried her next to her husband in the family compound in Banganté.
Nana Njike’s children knew they had to overcome their losses. They resolved to carry on with the family and business in a more united and determined manner than before. This reinvigorated drive to forge ahead despite the losses surprised their enemies and friends alike.
They bought shares in the Norddeutsche Landesbank in Germany and grabbed housing estates in Numburg and Regensburg. At a time that housing was posing as a problem for the West German government, owing to the millions of ethnic Germans streaming across the eastern borders into West Germany, the Njike family found themselves adequately rewarded in their investments. But Hans and his family did not decline in their commitment to the old line of business in Cameroon. They acquired a food processing plant in Essen for the processing of cocoa, coffee, bananas and citrus fruits shipped from Cameroon and delivered by other suppliers.
That was how the Njike family business flourished even before the living French legend Charles De Gaulle returned to power in France in 1958, created the Fifth French Republic, pledged to restore French greatness in world affairs, and promised to make its colonies and territories know no other independence than the independence of France. He did so by crafting a special cooperation policy for France to implement in its colonies and territories, making it the framework of their relationship after granting independence to these colonies and overseas territories. But before moving to the implementation phase, the Fifth French Republic embarked on a mission to eliminate the head of the political and partisan movement that was the most threatening to French control in Sub-Saharan Africa. When on September 13, 1958, the French Army in French Cameroun slayed Ruben Um Nyobé near Boumnyebel, the village of his birth, they thought his killing would deal a deathblow to the UPC as a political party and to the resistance that it was leading against French control in the land. Even Hans thought so too. But many people were badly mistaken.
The UPC leader’s murder while on his way to seek a peaceful resolution of the conflict with his adversaries troubled Hans enormously. It happened at a time that the party was still contemplating an all-out armed struggle against French rule in the land as the only option left in pursuing the cause. This assassination of the renowned head of the land’s most prominent political organization became a memory that would haunt Cameroonian union-nationalism and radicalize the party in its belated effort to pick up arms and defend itself in its struggle for the reunification and independence of British Cameroons and French Cameroun.
As another revelation of its game plan, France granted French Cameroun its independence under the puppet government of Ahmadou Ahidjo on January 01, 1960, concluding the masquerade with another gross deception called “The Colonial Pact”— a lopsided socio-economic and political agreement with a military component that allowed France to retain its forces in the newly independent Republic of Cameroun, thereby maintaining its de facto influence in the new country and its overwhelming control of Cameroon's destiny.
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