The Disillusioned African

PART FIVE

239 PART FIVE 240 Franglotus MOUNGO Chef de Service Direction des Prix BP 16390 Bonacamkossa Douala ear Readers, The letters you’ve just read were addressed to me, Franglotus Moungo. It is true I promised Charles never to share them with others, but things are changing and a lot has happened to force me to rethink my undertaking. Charles got well and was eventually granted a visa to travel to Zaire. But not before he had told a few lies to hide his true motives. The Zairians would never have granted him a visa had they known his deep concern for the African people suppressed by an uncaring leadership. But his stay in Kinshasa was not long. Mobutu’s forces of repression caught up with him even before he had time to unpack his cases, take a shower and pay the University of Kinshasa a first visit. At the N’Djili International Airport where he landed, a mammoth crowd had gathered to welcome an opposition leader returning from twenty-five years of exile in Belgium. In fact, he had shared the same Sabena flight with the freedom fighter. What looked like a blessing and a source of pride at D 241 first, turned out a most unfortunate coincidence. Mobutu would not stomach the stubborn and triumphant return of a radical opponent. So he unleashed his dogs of war, and the airport was invaded with bullets, grenades, tear gas and looters. My dear friend and countryman didn’t even have time to sigh: “Such a bad experience never again.” He lost an arm in the process. He lost his personal effects as well, to Mobutu’s hounds of repression. And was just lucky enough to leave Zaire half dead. In Cameroon, Charles spent three weeks at the Laquintini Hospital where his left arm was amputated and healed. My family and I took care of him until he was well. We were thinking of how to help him get a job, when the Yondo Black (Douala Ten) trials came and got him all excited and involved. To him, his dream in England had come true, and the fact that it was Yondo Black not me as victim was a minor detail. He got himself too involved for my liking and for his health. But Charles is Charles. Nothing I said would tickle his ears. So I left him to his own devices. Soon after Yondo Black and his fellow ‘subversives’ were tried and sentenced by the Military Tribunal in Yaounde, came the launching of the Social Democratic Front (SDF) party. Charles knew jolly well that the government was rattled, and that its armed 242 forces would do all to stifle any attempt at genuine change. But just like the SDF, he stubbornly went ahead to do what his conscience dictated. He left for Bamenda. Nothing Monique and I said, or did in tears, would change a thing. In Bamenda on May 26, 1990, he was witness to Ni John Fru Ndi’s brave rebuff of monolithic excellence and scaremongering. But again, he wasn’t so lucky. Charles has seldom been a lucky fellow. The forces raided. Six died. Hundreds were injured. Charles seriously. He lost an arm, the other. He was hospitalised in Bamenda until the stump was healed. Then he left and came to stay with us in Douala, again. For a year he observed the political evolution of Cameroon and Africa with anxious interest. Little pleased him. He found goodwill and genuine commitment to collective betterment neither with that in power, nor with those seeking the takeovers. It seemed as though the general concern of the opposition parties was to substitute the ruling stomachs, and not the redistribution of the national cake. “It is the war of the stomachs,” Charles once remarked, in bitterness. “Their quarrel,” he observed, referring to the opposition, “is with the eaters, not with the eating.” He saw decriers of malpractice in high 243 office by the opposition as mere political gimmicks. Charles was more than disillusioned. He had studied the national executive of each and every political party legalised and operated in Cameroon since the wave of openness in December 1990, and had found that not a single one of them, not even the parties that claimed to represent the aspirations of the common folks, had an illiterate peasant in the...