The African Read online

  We didn’t go to school. We didn’t belong to any club, didn’t practice any organized sports, didn’t have any rules, or any friends in the sense that we use the word in France or in England. The memory I have of those days could be likened to time spent aboard a boat between two worlds. When I look at the only photograph I’ve kept of the house in Ogoja (a tiny snapshot, the standard 6 × 6 centimeter post-war format), it’s hard for me to believe that it’s the same place: a large open garden where palms and flamboyant trees grow haphazardly, traversed by a straight driveway where my father’s monumental Ford V8 is parked. An ordinary house with a corrugated iron roof and, in the background, the first tall trees of the forest. There is something cold, almost austere about that unique snapshot, something that evokes the empire, an odd mixture of a military camp, a well-kept English lawn, and the forces of nature, something that I didn’t encounter again until long afterward, in the Panama Canal Zone.

  It was there, in that setting, that I lived the moments of my wild, free, almost dangerous life. A freedom of movement, of thought, and of emotions that I have never known since. Memories can probably be misleading. I must have only dreamt about that life of absolute freedom rather than having really lived it. Between the dreariness of the South of France during the war, and the bleak end of my childhood in Nice in the 1950s, rejected by my classmates because of my oddness, obsessed with my father’s excessive authority, doomed to years in the Boy Scouts, to the extreme vulgarity of high school, then during my adolescence, to the menace of having to go to war to maintain the privileges of the last existing colonial society.

  So the days in Ogoja had become my treasure, the luminous past that I could not lose. I recalled the blaze of light on the red earth, the sun that cracked the roads, the barefoot race through the savannah all the way out to the termite fortresses, the thunderstorm rising in the evening, the nights filled with sounds, with cries, our female cat making love with the tigrillos on the sheet metal roof, the torpor that set in after a fever, the cold coming in under the mosquito netting at dawn. All of that heat, that burning, that tingling.

  TERMITES, ANTS, ETC.

  IN FRONT OF the house in Ogoja, once you’d gone past the barrier around the garden (a wall of brush rather than a straight, neatly trimmed hedge), the great grassy plain that stretched all the way out to the Aiya River began. A child’s memory exaggerates distances and heights. I have the impression that the plain was as vast as a sea. I would stand on the edge of the cement slab that served as a walkway around the cabin for hours, my gaze lost in that immensity, following the waves of wind over the grasses, fixing my eyes on the little dusty whirlwinds that danced here and there over the dry earth, scrutinizing the splotches of shade at the foot of the irokos. I really was on the deck of a ship. Our cabin was the boat, not only the cinder block walls and the sheet-metal roof, but everything that had to do with the British Empire – not unlike the George Shotton, a vessel I had heard about, an armored steamship equipped like a gunboat, topped with a roof of leaves where the British had set up the consular offices, that sailed up the Niger and the Bénoué Rivers back in the days of Lord Lugard.

  I was only a child, quite indifferent to the power of the empire, but my father followed its rules as if it alone gave meaning to life. He believed in discipline in the minutest acts of everyday life: rise early, make one’s bed immediately, wash with cold water in the tin basin and save the water for soaking socks and underwear. My mother’s lessons every morning, spelling, English, arithmetic, prayer time every evening, and curfew at nine o’clock. Nothing in common with the French style of upbringing, the games of “drop the handkerchief” and freeze tag, the joyful meals where everyone talks at the same time, and in the evening the chante-fables that my grandmother used to recite, daydreaming in bed, listening to the weather vane squeaking on the roof and to the adventures of a traveling magpie flying over the Norman countryside in the book entitled The Joy of Reading. In leaving for Africa, we had changed worlds. The freedom during the days compensated for the discipline in the mornings and evenings. The grassy plain in front of the house was immense, both dangerous and alluring like the sea.

  I don’t recall the day my brother and I first ventured out into the savannah. Maybe we were needled into it by the children in the village, an eclectic group including very small, completely naked toddlers with swollen bellies and near-adolescents of twelve or thirteen, dressed in khaki shorts and a shirt just as we were, and who had taught us to take off our shoes and wool socks to run barefoot through the grass. The same ones I see surrounding us in the rare photographs of that time, very dark-skinned, gangling, undoubtedly jeering roughnecks, but who had accepted us in spite of our differences.

  In all probability, it was strictly forbidden. Since my father was gone all day, not to return until nightfall, we must have realized that applying the rules could only be relative. My mother was mild-mannered. She was undoubtedly busy with other things, reading, or writing inside the house to escape the afternoon heat. She had tried to become as African as she could. I suppose she must have thought there wasn’t a safer place in the world for two boys of our age.

  Was it hot? I can’t recall in the least. I remember the cold in winter, in Nice, or in Roquebillière, I can still feel the freezing wind blowing through the narrow streets, cold as ice, as snow, in spite of our gaiters and sheepskin vests. But I don’t remember being hot in Ogoja. When she saw us going out, my mother made us put on our Cawnpore helmets – in reality they were just straw hats that she had bought us before our departure in a shop in the old part of Nice. Among other rules imposed by my father was wearing wool socks and shiny leather shoes. As soon as he left for work, we took them off to run around barefoot. In the beginning, I wounded my feet running on the cement floor – I don’t know why, I was always stubbing the big toe of my right foot. My mother would put a bandage on my foot, and I would hide it in my sock, and it would begin all over again.

  Then one day, just the two of us went running over the straw-colored plain toward the river. The Aiya wasn’t very wide in that particular place, but it rushed past with a mighty current, ripping clumps of red mud from the banks. The plain on either side of the river seemed endless. Here and there, in the middle of the savannah, stood tall trees with very straight trunks, which I later learned were used to supply mahogany floors to industrialized countries. There were also cotton plants and acacias that cast dappled shadows. We ran, almost without stopping, through the tall grasses that whipped our faces around the eyes, guided by the stems of the tall trees, until we lost our breath. Even today, when I see images of Africa – the vast parks of Serengeti or Kenya – I feel a thrill in my heart, it’s as if I recognize that plain we ran over every day, in the afternoon heat, aimlessly, like wild animals.

  In the middle of the plain, far enough away so that we could no longer see our cabin, there were castles. Along a barren, dry patch of ground, dark red ruins of walls, the tops of which were blackened by fire, like the ramparts of an ancient citadel. Here and there, jutting up along the walls, were towers whose pinnacles seemed to have been pecked away by birds, hacked at, burned by lightning. The great walls encompassed an area as vast as a city. The walls, the towers, were taller than we were. We were only children, but as I remember them, those walls must have been taller than an adult man, and some of the towers must have been over six and a half feet tall.

  We knew it was the city of termites.

  How did we know? Maybe through my father, or one of the boys from the village. But no one came out there with us. We learned how to demolish those walls. We must have started by throwing a few rocks, to test it out, to listen to the cavernous sound they made in hitting the termite mounds. Then we started hitting the walls, the tall towers, with sticks, to watch the powdery earth crumble, lay bare the galleries, the blind creatures that lived in them. The next day, the workers had plugged up the cracks, tried to rebuild their towers. We struck again, until our hands were aching, as if we were co
mbating an invisible enemy. We didn’t talk, we just kept pounding, letting out cries of rage, and new sections of walls went crumbling down. It was a game. Was it a game? We felt imbued with power. Today I don’t think of it as a spoiled child’s sadistic pastime – the gratuitous cruelty little boys sometimes enjoy meting out to defenseless life forms, tearing the legs off a beetle, crushing a toad in the door jam – but as if we were under some sort of spell that the open stretch of savannah, the proximity of the forest, the fury of the sky, and the thunderstorms had cast upon us. Or perhaps it was our way of throwing off our father’s draconian authority, returning blow for blow with our sticks.

  The village children were never with us when we went out to destroy the termite mounds. That insatiable desire to demolish would certainly have astonished them. They, who lived in a world in which termites were a fact of life, played a role in legends. The termite god had created the rivers in the beginning of the world, and it was he who was guardian of the water for the inhabitants of the earth. Why destroy his home? The gratuitousness of that violence would have made no sense to them: with the exception of game-playing, any form of activity was for earning money, getting a treat, hunting for something saleable or edible. The older boys took care of the younger ones, they were never alone, never left to fend for themselves. Games, discussions, and light work alternated with no specific schedule: they gathered dead wood and dried manure patties for fuel while out for a walk, they spent hours drawing water at the wells while they chatted, they played trictrac on the dusty ground, or sat in front of the door to my father’s house gazing out into the distance, not waiting for anything. If they pilfered something, it had to be useful, a piece of cake, a box of matches, an old rusty plate. From time to time the “garden boy” got irritated and shooed them off, throwing stones, but a second later they were back again.

  So we were wild, like young colonists, sure of our freedom, our impunity, with no responsibilities, no elders. When my father wasn’t home, when my mother was asleep, we would escape, the straw-colored prairie would snatch us up. We went running as fast as we could, barefoot, far from the house, through the tall grasses that blinded us, jumping over rocks, on the dry, sun-crackled earth, all the way out to the termite cities. Our hearts were pounding, rage came spilling out with our heaving breaths, we picked up rocks, sticks, and we struck, struck, made great sections of those cathedrals topple, for no reason, simply for the pleasure of seeing the clouds of dust rise, hearing the towers come crashing down, the stick echoing on the hard walls, laying open to the light the red veins of the galleries seething with pallid, nacreous life. But perhaps in writing about it, I’m making the furor that ran through our arms as we struck at the termite mounds too literary, too symbolic. We were simply two children who had lived through the seclusion of five years of war, been brought up in a female environment, with a mixture of fear and cunning, where the only raised voice was that of my grandmother cursing the “Boches.” Those days of running through the tall grasses in Ogoja were our first taste of freedom. The savannah, the thunderstorm that gathered every afternoon, the sun burning down on our heads, and that exaggerated, almost caricaturized presence of animality, that’s what filled our small chests and threw us up against the great termite wall, those dark castles bristling against the sky. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so driven since then. Such a strong urge to measure my strength, to dominate. It was a moment in our lives, just a moment, with no explanation, with no regrets, with no future, almost with no memory.

  I thought it would have been different if we’d stayed in Ogoja, if we’d become just like the Africans. I would have learned to perceive, to sense things. Like the boys in the village, I would have learned to talk with living beings, discover the godliness in termites. I even think I would have forgotten about them after a while.

  There was a feeling of haste, of urgency. We’d come from the far side of the earth (for Nice was truly another side of the world). From an apartment on the sixth floor of an upper-middle-class building ringed with a small garden where children were forbidden to play, we’d come to live in equatorial Africa on the banks of a muddy river in the middle of the forest. We didn’t know we would ever leave there. Perhaps, like all children, we thought we would die there. Back there, across the sea, the world was mired in silence. A grandmother and her stories, a grandfather with his lilting Mauritian accent, playmates, classmates, it had all just stopped cold, like toys one puts away in a trunk, like the fears one shuts up in the closet. The grassy plain had obliterated it all, in the hot afternoon wind. The grassy plain had the power of making our hearts pound, of bringing forth the rage, of leaving us drained every evening, ready to drop into our hammocks.

  * * *

  The ants were the antithesis of that rage. The opposite of the grassy plain, of destructive violence. Were there ants prior to Ogoja? I don’t remember them. Or most probably those “Argentinean ants” – black specks that would invade my grandmother’s kitchen every night, along tiny routes leading from the potted rosebushes balanced on the gutter to the piles of refuse she burned in her boiler.

  The ants in Ogoja were monstrous insects of the exsectoide strain that built their nests thirty feet under our lawn where hundreds of thousands of individuals lived. Contrary to the gentle, defenseless termites, incapable – in their blindness – of causing even the slightest harm, except that of consuming worm-eaten wood in houses and dead trees, the ants were fierce, red, with eyes and mandibles, able to secrete poison and attack whomever they encountered. They were the true rulers of Ogoja.

  The bitter memory of my first encounter with the ants a few days after my arrival remains etched in my mind. I’m in the garden, not far from the house. I haven’t noticed the crater marking the entrance to the anthill. All of a sudden, without realizing it, I’m surrounded by thousands of the creatures. Where are they coming from? I must have strayed into the bare area around the entrance to their galleries. It’s not so much the ants that I recall, but the fear I feel. I stand there frozen, unable to flee, unable to think, suddenly the ground is seething, forming a carpet of armored bodies, of legs and antennae moving around me and swirling closer in on me, I see the ants climbing up on my shoes, working their way into the knit of those infamous wool socks my father made us wear. At the same time I feel the sting of the first bites on my ankles, along my legs. The dreadful, terrifying feeling of being eaten alive. It lasted a few seconds, a few minutes, as long as a nightmare. I don’t remember, but I must have cried out, even screamed because the next minute my mother saves me, whisks me up in her arms and my brother, the neighbor boys are standing all around me in front of the terrace of the house, they are looking at me in silence, are they laughing? Are they saying, “Small boy him cry?” My mother takes off my socks, delicately turns them inside out, as one would peel off a dead skin, I see my legs – as if I’d been lashed with a thorny switch – covered with dark dots where drops of blood are forming, it’s the ant heads clinging to the skin, their bodies had been ripped away when my mother pulled off my socks. Their mandibles are deeply embedded, they have to be taken out with a needle dipped in alcohol.

  An anecdote, simply an anecdote. Why is it that I was so marked by it, as if the bites of the soldier ants were still painful, as if it had all happened yesterday? It’s probably half legend, half dream. Before I was born, from what my mother tells me, she was traveling on horseback in Western Cameroon where my father was an itinerant doctor. At night they camped in “travelers cabins,” ordinary huts made of palm branches at the side of the road where they would hang their hammocks. One evening, the porters came to wake them up. They were carrying lit torches, they spoke in hushed voices, pressed my mother and father to get up. When my mother tells that story, she says the thing that alarmed her at first was the silence, everywhere all around in the forest, and the whispering of the porters. As soon as she was on her feet, she saw – by the light of the torches – a column of ants (those same red ants flanked by soldiers) coming o
ut of the forest and starting into the cabin. A column, or more precisely, a thick uninterrupted river moving slowly forward, paying no heed to obstacles, moving straight ahead, each ant touching the one ahead of it, devouring, smashing everything along its way. My mother and father barely had time to gather up their belongings, their clothing, sacks of supplies and medicine. A second later, the dark river was flowing through the cabin.

  How many times have I heard my mother tell that story? So many times I ended up believing it happened to me, confusing the ravenous river with the swarm of ants that attacked me. The churning movement of ants all around me is still there and I’m frozen in a dream, I listen to the silence, an acute, strident silence, more terrifying than any sound in the world. The silence of ants.

  * * *

  In Ogoja, there were insects everywhere. Day insects, night insects. Those that are repulsive to adults don’t have the same effect on children. It’s no strain of the imagination for me to conjure up again that nightly resurgence of armies of cockroaches – cancrelats – as my grandfather used to call them – the theme of one of those Mauritian riddles or sirandanes as they are called: kankarla, nabit napas kilot, cockroach got coattails, but got no drawers. They came out of the cracks in the floor, the planks of wood on the ceiling, they skittered around over by the kitchen. My father hated them. Every night, he’d roam around the house, flashlight in one hand, bedroom slipper in the other, for an endless and vain hunt. He was convinced that cockroaches were the cause of many diseases, even cancer. I remember hearing him say: “Brush your toenails well, or the cockroaches will come chew on them in the night!”