Free Mount Pleasant by Patrice Nganang

beyond the borders of the protectorate. He had toured all around the colony with the Germans. By contrast, Njoya’s only trip, in 1908, had taken him no farther than Buea. His exile to Yaoundé was the biggest move he had ever made, and merely his second excursion outside Bamum land.
    So what had drawn these two men together? Let’s see. Their love of fine, expensive clothes? The fact that they were both, without a doubt, the best-dressed men in the protectorate? Njoya’s collection of sculpted canes was on a par with his friend’s cigars and brightly colored outfits, I can vouch for that. Except that vanity doesn’t draw men together; on the contrary, it divides them. Maybe what made Njoya and Charles Atangana friends was the feeling that “they had been through it all.” They had seen the faces of all the colonizers.
    Or maybe it was their playful habit, which they never lost, of speaking to each other in the first language that came to their lips. A strange game, one that amused those who heard them. The chief would say something in Ewondo and his friend would reply in Shüpamum, then continue in German and be answered in French. Ah, how did they understand each other? Even today, how do Cameroonians, with their two hundred languages, understand each other? The fact remains that their friendship began in Mantoum in 1920 with a burst of laughter. Charles Atangana had paid a visit to Njoya in the residence where the sultan was spending the first months of his exile, and their conversation turned, seemingly of its own accord, to the colonizers who had spent time in their respective cities, and who had been on opposite sides of the war.
    â€œSo,” Charles Atangana began, “which are the best? The French, the Germans, or the English?”
    â€œThat’s not fair!” the sultan protested. “You can’t ask me such a thing.”
    â€œBelieve me,” the chief continued in a conspiratorial tone, “never compare a Frenchman to a German.”
    â€œOr a German to an Englishman.”
    â€œAn Englishman to a Frenchman.”
    â€œA Frenchman to anyone at all.”
    The chief thought for a moment about what Njoya had said.
    â€œYou are right,” he said with a great guffaw. “Whites are such tribalists!”
    Then Njoya burst out laughing. It was so true!
    Cameroon, such as we know it today, wasn’t yet born. For Sultan Njoya, the word had for so long referred to a city, Cameroon City, the present-day Douala, that it couldn’t mean anything else. As for Charles Atangana, this country—if one could speak of it as a country—would only be important once his hometown, Yaoundé, where he had convinced the Germans to set up a camp, had become the city of his dreams: the Cameroonian metropolis.
    That, at least, was his reputation: he wanted Yaoundé to become a second Rome. According to some, his plan was insane for one simple reason: the land itself was too poor. Only groundnuts grew there—although in abundance, it’s true. People snickered and said that the only thing the chief could trade on to realize his wild dreams was the future. A visionary without the funds to make his dreams come true, Charles Atangana knew he had to make compromises and, above all, to make as many friends as possible. He invited everyone to Yaoundé; Njoya was only the last of a long list. The Germans were the first to let themselves be convinced, mostly because of the friendship between the chief and their hero Dominik. The French came along later because he had sworn he would transform the forests of Southern Cameroon into endless cocoa plantations. In terms of megalomania, it was a plan so wild it even amused the French high commissioner, Marchand. But Marchand was too astute a politician not to recognize this chief, with his steady gaze and his quirky habits, as a kindred spirit. “This guy is a genius,” he told his colleagues. “No