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| Self-published on Amazon, August 2018 |
Son petit déjeuner avalé, Serge l'embrasse tendrement. La jeune femme l'accompagne sur le pas de la porte. Le coeur serré, la gorge sèche, elle a regardé la motocyclette passer la barrière et disparaître dans la brume du matin. Ses projets du jour la culpabilisent. C'est une vraie torture intérieure qu'elle subit, car elle va trahir la personne qu'elle aime le plus au monde.
Elle est prête, à présent. Passant devant le miroir de l'armoire, elle se regarde pour une dernière inspection. Elle se trouve belle. Son maquillage est léger, pour éviter la vulgarité. L'objectif est de passer pour une femme honnête en quête d'aventure, et non pour une prostituée. Elle respire profondément pour sentir l'agréable odeur de son nouveau parfum, une imitation Dior achétée au marché. Elle se penche, vérifie que son pagne dévoile sa poitrine généreuse. Elle se sent revenir des années en arrière, alors qu'à peine sortie de l'adolescence, elle parcourait la ville à la recherche de son futur mari. Elle l'avait trouvé, alors qu'il dinait à la table voisine avec son frère au Bunker, un restaurant de Nlongkack qui fait également bar et boîte de nuit. Aprés le repas, les frères étaient descendus à la discothèque. Elle les avait suivis. Trés vite, Serge lui avait tourné autour, enchainaint les pich les plus imaginatifs. Elle s'était laissé séduire, le charmant à son tour avec son regard affolant. A présent, tout est à refaire. Sauf que cette fois, ce sera dans le péché. Elle se signe, implore le Seigneur de pardonner ses mauvaises pensées et les fautes qu'elle risque de commettre plus tard dans la journée. Cependant, elle est déterminée à sauver son couple. Pour cela, la seule solution, c'est de tomber enceinte.
His breakfast swallowed, Serge tenderly kisses her. The young wife accompanies him to the doorstep. Heart tight, throat dry, she watches the scooter pass the fence and disappear into the morning mist. The project she has set herself for the day makes her feel guilty. It's a true inward torture she experiences, because she's going to betray the person she loves most in all the world.
She's ready in a jiffy. Passing in front of the wardrobe mirror, she gives herself one last inspection. She finds herself beautiful. Her make-up is light, to avoid vulgarity. The objective is to pass for an honest woman in search of adventure, not a prostitute. She breathes deep of the agreeable odor of her perfume, an imitation Dior purchased at the market. She leans forward, checks that her outfit reveals her generous bust. She feels as though she's returned to the past, when she was barely out of adolescence and went running off to the city to meet her future husband. She found him, dining at the neighboring table with his brother at The Bunker, a restaurant in Nlongkack which doubled as a bar and night club. After the meal, the brothers went down to the discotheque. She followed them. Very quickly, Serge had turned around, leading her in the [dance step called the] Fish in the most imaginative way. She let herself be seduced, charming him in turn with her frightened look. Soon, everything would start again. Except this time, she'll be doing the fishing. She crosses herself, implores the Lord to forgive her bad thoughts and the sins she's likely to commit later in the day. Nevertheless, she's determined to save her relationship. To do that, the only solution is to fall pregnant.
The Novel: Rosine is a young wife facing what, in the traditionally-minded society of modern Cameroon (or Cameroun for francophones), is a serious problem. Married for two years to Serge, a good man she truly adores, she finds herself unable to fall pregnant by him, creating tension with his parents who have never fully approved of her because she's a member of the south-eastern Béti tribe and not a shrewd western-bred Bamiléké like themselves. What they refuse to consider, as does Serge, is the possibility that he, not she, might be the infertile partner in the marriage. As the dutiful younger son of a deeply conservative family which practices polygamy and routinely consults marabouts [shamans] before making important decisions, Serge reluctantly agrees that his only chance of becoming a father is to take a second wife.
Unable to bear the thought of sharing her husband and their poor but happy household with another woman –– and more certain than ever that their fertility problem is the result of his undiagnosed sterility –– Rosine opts for the unorthodox solution of becoming pregnant by another man. While Serge is at work one day, she dresses up in her most alluring outfit and takes herself off to the bar of the Djeuga Palace, a prestigious hotel located in the center of the Cameroonian capital Yaoundé, with the intention of having unprotected sex with the first respectable-looking upper class man who tries to pick her up. Once certain that she is in fact pregnant by this stranger –– a person she never plans to see again after using him as an anonymous sperm donor –– she will tell Serge the child is his, eliminating the need to bring a second wife into the marriage. 'Jamais elle ne pourra supporter une rivale sous son toit,' she reminds herself as she sets off from their tiny one room apartment to fulfill her necessary if guilt-inducing mission. 'De plus, Serge n'a pas les moyens d'entretenir une deuxiéme femme.' [She could never support a rival living under her roof… What's more, Serge does not have the means to support a second wife.]
All goes according to plan once Rosine arrives at the hotel and finds herself a seat in its not very crowded bar. She studies the available talent while daintily sipping a beer, eventually singling out 'un petit homme maigrichon en costume cravate' [a skinny little man in a suit and tie] who is drinking a cup of coffee while reading the newspaper as being her most likely prospect. He seems perfect, a man at least twenty years her senior who looks 'si frêle qu'elle est certaine de pouvoir le maîtriser en cas de problème' [so frail that she's certain of her power to dominate him in case of a problem]. Soon, having learned that his name is Benoit Enoh and he is the Minister of Public Health (or so he claims), she is climbing into his new Toyota 4x4 to be taken to the Mont-Fébé Hotel where his all too apparent need for her can be satisfied in an even more luxurious and, because of the important position he holds in the government, more discreet environment.
Unused to such opulence, Rosine is at first intimidated by her new surroundings. 'Elle est prise de vertige pendant les vingt secondes nécessaires à l'ascenseur pour les mener au sixième étage, angoissée devant la porte de la suite, choquée en constantant que leur chambre est plus grande que son studio d'Étoudi.' [She feels dizzy during the twenty seconds required for the elevator to deliver them to the sixth floor, anguished in front of the door to the suite, shocked to realize that their room is larger than her entire studio apartment in Étoudi.] But she soon regains her confidence, explaining to Benoit as he reaches into a drawer for the condom he knows from previous visits to the hotel with other lovers is sure to be there, that she has no sexually transmitted diseases and will be the happiest of women should he manage to impregnate her. ' "Mon mari est stérile",' she confesses, ' "mais il l'ignore. Donc, je cherche l'enfant, pour éviter qu'on ne me colle un coépouse".' ['My husband is sterile… but he ignores it. So, I need to have a baby, to avoid him sticking me with a sister wife.']
Impressed by her forthrightness, Benoit agrees to become the father of Rosine's child on condition that she sign a paper the following day, absolving him of all legal and fiscal responsibility for the child after it's born. They do the deed and then Rosine returns to Étoudi to await the arrival of Serge who, to her immense relief, has no inkling of where or how she's spent the afternoon and is even willing to make love to her as soon as he walks through the door –– something that fails to happen in the end because they argue about him visiting his parents' farm on the weekend to meet Armelle, the teenaged girl they expect him to marry as soon as she graduates from high school.
And so the stage is set for what is an extraordinarily accomplished debut novel, filled with vividly drawn characters whose actions and interactions are never less than highly entertaining and often hysterically funny into the bargain. We're shown everyday life in modern Cameroon –– its political corruption, its contradictory attitudes to Christianity and to issues like polygamy, infidelity and homosexuality and its love/hate relationship with Europe and the mbenguistes [Europeans] whose lust for its women is profitably exploited by many of them via the internet –– by a writer intimately acquainted with her subject, somebody unafraid to reveal the hypocrisy of 'les Kamer' [the Cameroonians] even as she celebrates their love of life and the admirable resilience they display when confronted with what, to many Westerners, would be crushing if not insurmountable personal problems.
De Bana excels at creating authentically fascinating characters –– the self-deluding Rosine whose newfound love of luxury draws her into an affair with Benoit she never intended to pursue, Serge whose decision to take a fertility test is made only after his devoted wife has become pregnant by a stranger and his unresisted second marriage has been arranged by his family, Benoit the well-educated sophisticate who is hiding a shameful secret of his own, Rosine's nosy and jealous neighbor Prisca and her dodgy boyfriend Blaise who, seeing his chance to pull off the score of a lifetime, concocts a plan to blackmail Benoit after following him and Rosine to their regular trysting place at the hotel. These are people who live and breathe, making what some would consider to be serious life-ruining mistakes as readily as they make love or confess their sins to their parish priest on Sunday mornings. The result is a rich and satisfying work of art, spiced with sex but never gratuitously so, that also serves as an eye-opening portrait not just of Cameroon but of the entire African continent as it exists in the twenty-first century.
Les Amants du Mont-Fébé is unlikely to be translated into English and that is a pity because it serves as a fascinating
examination of a country and a people attempting to come to terms with unprecedented social, cultural and technological change. (The scenes where Rosine's clever friend Solange describes her duping of a white middle-aged Belgian via the internet are some of the funniest in the book and provide a refreshing counterpoint to the politically correct if not always accurate idea that Third World people are perpetually the 'victims' of First World lust and greed.) De Bana wisely refuses to pass judgement on Rosine whose desire to provide her husband
with an heir –– an absolute necessity in a patriarchal society where women are defined by their ability to bear and raise children –– is sincere and motivated solely by the equally sincere love she feels for him. To judge these actions, or those of any of de Bana's characters, by the standards of the
modern industrialized West would be a patronizing mistake, particularly as the women are not portrayed as victims but rather as the superior partners in most if not all adult relationships. They may not be liberated in the sense that a woman living in Paris or New York may feel herself to be liberated, but they are far from being downtrodden if Rosine's ability to bounce back from every setback without sacrificing her self-respect or her right to keep and raise her own children is any measure of her character.
I will not be surprised to see the work of Ange de Bana appear at the top of French (and perhaps even British and US) bestseller lists in the coming years. She has a lot of important things to say –– not just about her native Cameroon but about the human condition in general and women's lives in particular –– and she says them with wit, intelligence, charm and enviable precision.
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| ANGE DE BANA, c 2017 |
The Writer: The following biographical statement formerly appeared [in French] on the Amazon site of Cameroonian novelist Ange de Bana (ie. 'Angel of Bana,' a city in her native land). It has been translated and re-posted here for information purposes only and remains her exclusive copyright-protected intellectual property.
Ange de Bana is the pen-name of a young female novelist from Cameroon.
She took up the habit of writing as a teenager to help pass the time while vacationing each year in the village of her birth.
Several years later, in 2018, she published her first novel Les Amants du Mont-Fébé on Amazon. [The book was also published under the alternative title La Bouillie de maïs.]
A true lover of her country, the young woman injects her books with a tender and sometimes critical regard for her fellow Cameroonians, dealing with subjects like love, poverty, traditional village life, polygamy, infidelity or homosexuality…
Her stories are very vivid, animated by colorful dialogue which is altogether delightful!
'Writing is my hobby and I hope you will enjoy reading these slices of life drawn from the everyday life of my country. Maybe some scenes even really happened! I like to observe my compatriots because I find that the charm of Cameroon lies chiefly in its inhabitants –– the Kamers as they are called –– whether they be Bamiléké, Bassas, Bétis, Pouls or Sawas…'
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| Self-published on Amazon, November 2018 |
Les Amants du Mont-Fébé [also published under the title La Bouillie de maïs] is the first volume of a French language trilogy titled Les Kamer and was followed by La Fièvre Arc-en-ciel [Rainbow Fever] which was self-published on Amazon in November 2018. The third volume, as yet untitled, is due to be self-published some time in 2019.
Last updated 29 September 2021 §
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