Read Online Mount Pleasant by Patrice Nganang - Free Book Online Page A

there are two photographs of her in fashionable outfits. I was able to interview people in Foumban who remembered seeing her coming down the Artists’ Alley in Foumban, wearing a broad red hat and high-heeled shoes, like some showgirl right off the stage of the Winterpalast theater in Berlin. She wasn’t known as Nji Mongu—the first daughter—for nothing. So she got into the car first and asked her father to follow her, as no one else would have dared to do. Njoya had never refused her anything. I don’t need to tell you that she would also be the first woman in Cameroon to drive a car—the very same one, in fact, that she had just gotten into. Yes, she’d convince the chief to teach her to drive! For the moment, she was glowing—not because of her audacity, but out of sheer happiness. She adjusted her outfit and waved goodbye to everyone through the window.
    â€œNext time,” the chief said, “we’ll all go on a tour of the city.”
    This time, he added, he just wanted to show the sultan his new acquisition.
    â€œShow? What a joke! Then he started the engine, supposedly on account of Ngutane,” the doyenne stressed. Ngutane was the only woman who dared to be so presumptuous in the company of these powerful men. Oh, I know, maybe Sara exaggerated her character. But that’s not what’s most important, for one fact remains: the chief was always filled with a joy that had deserted Mount Pleasant. Ngutane’s rush to get into his car was just a response to the melancholy that inhabited her father’s chambers. The sultan had opted to bury himself in his scientific experiments. He had traded the responsibilities his position previously imposed on him for the comfort provided in exile by his machines. He still allowed his daughter to read him the newspapers, because he couldn’t give them up. Ngutane relished this duty, for it kept her up-to-date with the changing fashions of the European capitals.
    This child’s tastes (Njoya called Ngutane “his child,” even though she was already married and a mother herself) drew her to the Journal illustré; its pages of pictures fed straight into her dreams. The only drawback was that she often had to wait months for her copy. At least the French hadn’t outright forbidden Njoya to read European magazines, a habit of his that dated back to his friendship with the missionary Göhring.
    Göhring was the first to write an article about the sultan. That was how the friendship started. The Swiss missionary had had to translate and read the article to the sultan, who then wanted to know what else was in the magazine, Der evangelishe Heidenbote . Narcissistic curiosity is at the root of many an extravagance. After reading all the magazine’s pages, the missionary thought to continue by reading the Bible, starting with the Old Testament. When the unbelievable stories of that book failed to whet the monarch’s appetite, Göhring moved on to Thomas Mann’s massive novel Buddenbrooks , which he used both to kill time and as a pillow. And wouldn’t you know, that exemplar of German literature, a bestseller in its day, captivated Njoya, who valued family above all else.
    But let’s get back to Ngutane, who, after completing her studies at the German school, took on the role of her father’s reader, a function Göhring had held till then. Only a truly shortsighted colonial officer could have written what I saw in the archives: that Ngutane’s love of European clothing was a reflection of her vanity. How could anyone forget that she would also become Cameroon’s first woman of letters? Ah, it seems the French colonial chroniclers dismissed these reading sessions, for there is no mention in their records of a reader named Ngutane, although they made repeated reference to the “grandiloquent dreams” of the sultan’s daughter.
    â€œA spoiled child,” that’s