for the servants: the “boy,” the “small boy,” and especially, the cook, whom my mother was fond of, and with whom she concocted recipes, not traditional French food – but peanut soup, roasted potatoes or foufou, the yam paste that was our daily fare. Every once in a while, my mother would launch into experiments with him, guava jam or candied papaya, or even sherbet that she’d crank by hand. In that courtyard there were, most importantly, always lots of children who would come over to play and talk every morning and whom we didn’t take leave of until nightfall.
All this might give one the impression of a very organized, colonial, almost urbane life – or at least a rustic one, in the manner of the English or the Normans before the industrial revolution. Nevertheless, it was absolute freedom of the body and mind. In front of the house, in the opposite direction from the hospital where my father worked, began an endless, slightly rolling, open stretch reaching out as far as the eye could see. To the south, the slope led down to the misty valley of the Aiya, an affluent of the Cross River, and to the villages Ogoja, Ijama, Bawop. To the north and the east, I could see the great wild plain scattered with giant termite mounds – cut off from the streams and the swamps – and the beginning of the forest, the stands of giants – irokos, okoumés – and, stretched over it all, an immense sky, a raw blue dome in which the sun burned down, invaded by storm clouds every afternoon.
I recall the violence of it all. Not the secret, hypocritical, terrifying violence that all children born in the middle of a war are familiar with – having to hide when I went out, spying on Germans in grey greatcoats while they stole the tires from my grandmother’s De Dion-Bouton, listening again in a dream to stories of trafficking, of espionage, veiled words, messages that came from my father via Mr. Ogilvy, the American consular officer, and especially hunger, the lack of everything, the rumour about my grandmother’s cousins eating only vegetable peelings. That violence wasn’t actually physical. It was muted and hidden like an illness. It was eating away at my body, it gave me irrepressible fits of coughing, such painful migraines that I would hide under the long skirt of the side table, my fists pushed into my eye sockets.
Ogoja introduced me to another kind of violence, one that was open, real, that made my body tingle. It could be seen in every detail of life and nature all around. Thunderstorms, the likes of which I have never seen or dreamt of since, the inky sky streaked with lightning, the wind bending over the tall trees around our garden, ripping the palm leaves from the roof, slipping under the doors to whirl around the dining room and blow out the oil lamps. Some evenings, a red wind from the north that would set the walls aglow. Sheer electrical energy that I had to accept, grow accustomed to. To that end, my mother made up a game. Count the seconds separating us from the lightning’s point of impact when we heard the first thunderclap, listen to it approaching kilometre after kilometre and then fading away out towards the mountains. One afternoon, my father was operating at the hospital when the lightning burst in through the door and silently spread out over the floor, melting the metal legs of the operating table and burning the rubber soles of my father’s sandals, then the bolt gathered itself back together and went out the way it had come, like an ectoplasm, to return to the depths of the sky. Reality was in the legends.
Africa was powerful. For the child I was, violence was all-pervasive, unequivocal. It filled us with enthusiasm. It’s hard to talk about it today, after so many catastrophes, so much indifference. Few Europeans have experienced that feeling. The work my father carried out, first in Cameroon and later in Nigeria, created an exceptional situation. Most of the British with assignments in the colony accomplished administrative duties. They were military appointees, judges, district officers (or D.O.s, the British pronunciation of which made me think of a religious term, as if it were a variation on “Deo Gratias” from the mass my mother celebrated on our covered terrace every Sunday morning). My father was the only doctor within a sixty-kilometre radius. But citing that distance is meaningless: the first administrative city was Abakaliki, a four-hour drive, and to get there you had to cross the Aiya River on a raft, and then a dense forest. Another D.O. resided near the French Cameroon border, in Obudu, at the foot of the hills where gorillas still lived. In Ogoja, my father was manager of the dispensary (an old religious hospital the nuns had abandoned), and the only doctor north of the province of Cross River. He did everything there, as he later said, from delivering babies to performing autopsies. My brother and I were the only white children in the whole region. We hadn’t the slightest inkling about what might forge the somewhat stereotyped identity of children brought up in “the colonies.” When I read British “colonial” novels of those years, or the years just prior to our arrival in Nigeria – for example Joyce Cary, the author of Mister Johnson – they are completely unfamiliar to me. When I read William Boyd, who also spent part of his childhood in British West Africa, I can’t relate to it either. His father was a D.O. (in Accra, Ghana, I believe). I never experienced what he describes – the cumbersome colonialism, the ridiculous antics of the expatriate white society on the coast, all of the pettiness that children take particular notice of, the disdain for the native people, of whom they knew only the faction of servants who had to indulge the whims of their masters’ children, and above all, that sort of clique that both unifies and separates children of the same blood and in which they are able to glimpse an ironical reflection of their defects and their masquerades, and that, in a manner of speaking, forms the training ground for racial awareness that, in their case, takes the place of the school of human awareness. Thank God I can say all of that is completely foreign to me.
We didn’t go to school. We didn’t belong to any club, didn’t practise 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 centimetre 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 afterwards, 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.
I N 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
