The African Read online

  No matter. My father had decided to go away, he would go away. The Colonial Office assigned him to be a doctor on the rivers of Guiana. As soon as he arrived, he chartered a pirogue with a roof of palm leaves, propelled by a long-axle Ford motor. Aboard his pirogue, in the company of his team, nurses, pilot, guide and interpreter, he sailed up the rivers: the Mazaruni, the Essequeibo, the Kupurung, the Demerara.

  He took pictures. With his Leica Bellows camera, he collected black-and-white snapshots that depicted, better than any words, the remoteness of the post, the enthusiasm he felt at discovering the new world. Tropical nature was not new to him. In Mauritius, in the ravines under the bridge in Moka, the Terre-Rouge River was no different from what he found upstream on the rivers in Guiana. But that country was immense, it didn’t belong to human beings quite yet. His pictures show loneliness, abnegation, the feeling of having reached the most distant shore in the world. From the wharf at Berbice he photographed the dark sheet of water over which a pirogue is gliding past a village of sheet metal scattered with scraggly trees. His house – a sort of chalet of planks on stilts, on the edge of an empty road, flanked by an absurd lone palm tree. Or else the city of Georgetown, silent and slumbering in the heat, white houses with shutters closed against the sun, encircled by those same palm trees, haunting emblems of the tropics.

  The pictures my father liked to take were those that showed the interior of the continent, the incredible power of the rapids his pirogue had to bypass, being hauled up on logs alongside the tiered rocks where the water cascades down between the dark walls of the forest on either bank.

  Kaburi Falls, on the Mazaruni, the Kamakusa hospital, the wooden houses along the river, the shops of diamond hunters. A sudden calm on an arm of the Mazaruni, a sparkling mirror of water that sweeps you away into a dream. In the photo, the stem of the pirogue can be seen floating down the river. I look at it and can feel the wind, smell the water, despite the rumbling of the motor, I can hear the unbroken whirr of insects in the forest, can feel the anxiety springing from the coming of night. At the mouth of Rio Demerara, the hoists are loading Demerara sugar onto rusty cargo ships. And on a beach, where the wash comes rippling up to die, two Indian children gaze out at me, a small boy of around six and his sister hardly any older than he is, both with bellies distended from parasites, their black hair in a “bowl cut” just over their eyebrows like mine at their age. From his stay in Guiana, my father brought back only the memory of those two Indian children standing at the edge of the river, watching him, grimacing a little from the sun. And the images of a still wild world that he glimpsed along the rivers. A mysterious and fragile world ruled by sickness, fear, the violence of gold prospectors and treasure hunters, one in which the despairing chant of the vanishing Amerindian world could be heard. If they are still alive, what has become of that boy and girl? They must be very elderly, near the end of their lives.

  Later, a long time afterward, I too traveled to the land of the Indians, along the rivers. I met similar children. The world had probably changed a lot, the rivers and forests weren’t as pure as they were in my father’s youth. Yet I thought I understood the sense of adventure he’d felt getting off the boat in the port of Georgetown. I too bought a pirogue, I navigated standing upright in the bow, my toes splayed to get a firmer grip on the edge of the boat, swinging the long perch in my hands, watching the cormorants taking flight before me, listening to the wind whistling in my ears and the echoing of the outboard motor sinking into the dense forest behind me. In examining the picture taken by my father in the front of the pirogue, I recognized the prow by its slightly squared snout, the coiled mooring rope laying crossways in the hull to serve as a bench from time to time, the canalete or Indian paddle with a triangular blade. And before me, at the far end of that wide “lane” of river, the two great black walls of the forest closing back in.

  When I returned from the Indian territories, my father was already ill, locked into that obstinate silence of his. I remember the gleam in his eyes when I told him I’d spoken of him to the Indians, and that they had invited him to come back to the rivers, that in exchange for his knowledge and medicine, they would offer him a house and food for as long as he wanted. He’d smiled faintly, I think he said, “Ten years ago, I would have gone.” It was too late, you can’t go back in time, even in your dreams.

  His life in Guiana had prepared my father for Africa. After all that time spent on the rivers, he couldn’t go back to Europe – much less to Mauritius, the tiny country where he’d felt imprisoned amongst so many vain, egotistical people. A position had just been created in West Africa, in the strip of land that had been taken away from Germany and put under British mandate at the end of the First World War and that was made up of eastern Nigeria and western Cameroon. My father volunteered. Early in 1928 he found himself aboard a boat skirting the African coast heading for Victoria on the Bay of Biafra.

  It is the same journey I took twenty years later with my mother and brother to join my father in Nigeria after the war. But he wasn’t a child being swept along in the current of events. He was thirty-two at the time, a man hardened by two years of medical experience in the tropics of South America, a man familiar with death and disease, having lived with them – unprotected – every day, in emergency situations. His brother Eugène, who was a doctor in Africa before him, had most certainly informed him: the country he was headed for was not easy. Nigeria was of course “pacified,” occupied by the British army. But it was a region in which war was all-pervasive, the war of human beings against one another, the war against poverty, the war against abuse and corruption inherited from colonization, especially the war against germs. In Calabar, in Cameroon, the enemy was no longer Aro Chuku and his oracle, or the army of Fulanis and their long rifles from Arabia. The enemies were called kwashiorkor, vibrio bacteria, tapeworm, bilharzia, smallpox, amoebic dysentery. Confronted with these enemies, my father must have found his medical bag to be very lightweight. Scalpel, surgical clamps, trephine, stethoscope, tourniquets, and a few basic tools, including the brass syringe which he later used for giving me vaccinations. Antibiotics, cortisone didn’t exist yet. Sulfonamides were rare, his powders and unguents looked more like the potions of a witchdoctor. Vaccinations were available in very restricted quantities, for combating epidemics. The territory that needed to be covered in order to carry out the battle against disease was immense. In comparison with what awaited my father in Africa, the expeditions upriver in Guiana undoubtedly seemed like mere outings to him. He was to remain twenty-two years in West Africa, until his physical strength began to decline. He would experience everything there, from the enthusiasm of his beginnings to the discovery of the great rivers, the Niger, the Bénoué, all the way out as far as the Cameroon highlands. He would share love and adventure with his wife, traveling the mountain paths on horseback. Then later the loneliness and anxiety of war, till it wore on him, till it embittered his last moments, the feeling of having surpassed the limits of just one lifetime.

  I wasn’t able to understand all of that till much later, in going away – as he had – to travel in another land. I read it, not in the rare objects, the masks, statuettes, and several pieces of furniture he had brought back from the Ibo country and the Grassfields of Cameroon. Nor even in looking at the photographs he took the first few years after arriving in Africa. I found it out by rediscovering, by learning to better see the objects of everyday life that had always been with him, even during his retirement in France; those cups, plates of blue and white enameled metal made in Sweden, the aluminum flatware he’d eaten with all those years, the stacked lunch pails he used to eat out of while in the field staying in travelers’ cabins. And all the other objects, marked, dented from the jolts, bearing the traces of torrential rains and that peculiar faded color caused by the equatorial sun, objects he had refused to get rid of and that were, in his eyes, worth more than any traditional knick-knack or souvenir. His wooden trunks with metal banding, whose hinges and loc
ks he’d repainted several times and upon which I could still read the address of their final destination: General Hospital, Victoria, Cameroons. Aside from that luggage, worthy of a voyager in the days of Kipling or Jules Verne, there was the whole collection of tins of shoe polish and cakes of black soap, the oil lamps, the alcohol burners, and those large tins of Marie biscuits in which he stored his tea and his granulated sugar until the very end of his life. His tools, as well, the surgical instruments that he used in France as cooking utensils, carving the chicken with a scalpel and serving it with a clamp. And lastly, the furniture, not those classical monoxylous stools and thrones of primitive art. He preferred his old folding canvas and bamboo armchair to them, the one he’d carried from one travelers’ cabin to the next over all the mountain tracks, and the little table with a rattan top that he used as a stand for his radio, with which he listened – up until the end of his life – to the BBC news every evening at seven o’clock: Pom pom pom pom! British Broadcasting Corporation, here is the news!

  It was as if he had never left Africa. When he returned to France, he continued his work-a-day habits – up at 6 A.M., dressed (always in those khaki pants of his), shoes polished, hat on head, ready to go out shopping at the market (just as he used to go on the rounds at the hospital), home at 8 A.M. to cook the meal – as meticulously as he would carry out a surgical procedure. He had retained all of the fussy habits of an ex-military man. The man who had trained to be a doctor in remote countries – who had learned to be ambidextrous, able to operate on himself using a mirror or to stitch up his own hernia. The man with the calloused hands of a surgeon, who could saw through a bone or put a splint in place, who could make knots and splices – that man no longer used his energy and knowledge for anything but those minute unrewarding tasks that most people in retirement refuse to do: with equal application, he would wash the dishes, repair the broken floor tiles in his apartment, wash his clothing, darn his socks, build benches and shelves out of crate wood. Africa had left a mark on him that fit closely with the legacy of the spartan upbringing he’d received from his family in Mauritius. The Western-style clothing he donned every morning to go to market must have made him uncomfortable. As soon as he returned home, he would slip into a large blue shirt like the tunics the Haoussas of Cameroon wear and wouldn’t take it off until bedtime. That is my perception of him at the end of his life. No longer the adventurer or the inflexible military man. But rather an old man out of his element, exiled from his life and his passion for medicine, a survivor.

  * * *

  For my father, Africa had begun when he landed on the Gold Coast, in Accra. A typical picture of the colonies: European travelers, dressed in white and wearing Cawnpore helmets being disembarked in a basket and taken to shore in a pirogue navigated by black people. That Africa wasn’t terribly disorienting: it was the narrow band of land that followed the contours of the coast, from the tip of Senegal down to the Gulf of Guinea that everyone coming from the metropolises to do business and turn a quick profit was familiar with. A society that had, in less than half a century, structured itself into castes, reserved domains, taboos, privileges, abuses, and profits. Bankers, salesmen, civil or military administrators, judges, policemen, and gendarmes. All around them, in the large port cities, Lomé, Cotonou, Lagos, as in Georgetown in Guiana, a clean, luxurious zone had been created, with perfect lawns and golf courses, and palaces built of stucco or rare woods amid vast palm groves on the banks of an artificial lake, like the residence of the director of medical services in Lagos. A little farther out, the circle of the colonized with the complex framework described by Rudyard Kipling with regards to India and by Rider Haggard concerning East Africa. The servant echelon – that expandable buffer of intermediaries – clerks, lackeys, guard dogs, drudges (there’s no dearth of words!), dressed in semi-European style, wearing shoes and carrying black umbrellas. Lastly, on the outer edges, there was the immense ocean of Africans, who knew Westerners only through their orders or the almost unreal vision of a sleek black car roaring through their neighborhoods and villages in a cloud of dust, honking.

  That was the image my father hated. He who had broken away from Mauritius and its colonial past, who made fun of plantation owners and their grand airs, who had fled the conformism of British society where a man’s worth was measured by his calling card alone, he who had traveled the wild rivers of Guiana, who had bandaged, stitched-up, nursed the diamond hunters, the undernourished Indians, that man could only loathe the colonial world and its brazen injustice, its cocktail parties and neatly attired golfers, its servants, its fifteen-year-old ebony mistress-prostitutes brought in through the backdoor and its official wives puffing in the heat and taking their resentment out on their servants over a pair of gloves, some dusty furniture, or broken china.

  Had he spoken of it? Where does that sensation of deep-rooted repulsion I have felt for the colonial system since my childhood stem from? I must have picked up a word, a thought about the ridiculous behavior of administrators such as the district officer of Abakaliki whom my father sometimes took me to see and who lived amongst his pack of Pekingese dogs that were fed filet of beef and biscuits, and given exclusively mineral water to drink. Or else the tales of Great White Hunters traveling in convoys on lion and elephant hunts, sporting rifles with telescopic sights and exploding bullets who, when they encountered my father in those remote lands, took him for a safari organizer and questioned him regarding the presence of wild animals. My father would answer, “In the twenty years I’ve been living here, I’ve never seen one, unless you’re talking about snakes and vultures.” Or still yet, the district officer posted at Obudu, on the Cameroon border, who got a kick out of having me touch the skulls of the gorillas he’d killed and showing me the hills in back of his house claiming that in the evening you could hear the thumping noises the apes made beating upon their chests to provoke him. And above all, the haunting image that still remains with me, the column of black prisoners in chains, walking in time along the road that led to the Abakaliki swimming pool, flanked by policemen armed with rifles.

  Perhaps it was the way my mother saw this continent, with eyes that were so very pure, yet at the same time tarnished by the modern world. I can’t recall what she said to my brother and me, when she spoke of the country where she’d lived with my father, the place we would join him in one day. I only know that when my mother decided to marry my father and to go and live in Cameroon, her Parisian friends had said to her, “What, with the savages?” and she, after everything my father had told her, simply responded, “They’re no more savage than the people in Paris!”

  * * *

  After Lagos, Owerri, Abo, not far from the Niger River. My father was already far from the “civilized” zone. He contemplated equatorial African landscapes such as André Gide describes in his Travels in the Congo (more or less contemporary to my father’s arrival in Nigeria): the expanse of the river – vast as an arm of the sea – where pirogues and paddle-wheel boats navigated and its affluents – the Ahoada River with its “sampans” equipped with palm leaf roofs, propelled with poles, and nearer to the coast, the Calabar River and the indentation of the village of Obukun, hacked out of the dense forest with the aid of machetes. Those were the first sights that met my father’s eyes in the country where he was to pass the greater part of his professional life, the country that – out of necessity – he would be forced to adopt as his true country.

  I can imagine how exalted he felt upon arriving in Victoria after the twenty-day journey. In the collection of snapshots taken by my father in Africa, there is one that particularly moves me because it is the only one he chose to have blown up and framed. It conveys the way he felt at the time, the impression of being at the beginning, on the threshold of Africa, in almost virgin territory. It shows the mouth of the river, in the place where the fresh water mixes with the sea. Victoria Bay follows a curve that ends in a finger of land where the palm trees are bent over from the sea breeze. The waves break on
the black rocks and come rippling up to die on the beach. The sea spray, swept aloft on the wind, veils the trees of the forest, mingles with the mists rising from the river and the marshes. There is something mysterious and wild about it, despite the beach and the palm trees. In the foreground, very near the river bank, is the white cabin my father was lodged in when he arrived. It’s no coincidence that to designate those houses that Africans reserved for travelers, my father used the very Mauritian term “camp.” If that landscape lends itself to the term, if it also makes my heart race, it’s because it could be in Mauritius, at Tamarin Bay, for example, or else at Cap Malheureux where my father used to go on excursions when he was a child. Perhaps he’d thought, upon his arrival, that he would find part of his lost innocence, the memories that circumstances had torn from his heart? How could it not have crossed his mind? It was the same red earth, the same sky, the same incessant wind from the sea, and everywhere, on the roads, in the villages, the same faces, the same children’s laughter, the same carefree equanimity. The original land in a way, where time had gone backwards, had unraveled the threads of mistakes and betrayals.

  * * *

  That’s why I can feel his impatience, the pressing desire to go into the backcountry to begin his work as a doctor. From Victoria, the trails led him across Mount Cameroon toward the high plateaus where he was to take up his post in Bamenda. It was there that he was to work for the first years, in a half-tumbled-down hospital, a dispensary founded by Irish nuns, dried mud walls and a roof of palm leaves. There that he was to pass the happiest years of his life.