A Reading of Martin Jumbam’s “From the Highlands of Nkar to the World”
Kininla P N Lola
“Historically, colonialism put us apart, the Bamoun being colonized by the French while my people fell into the hands of the British after World War One. Before the British and French, we were under the German yoke until Germany lost World War One, and the victors, the British and the French tore us apart.” (p 168)
Our class was not called “Form One,” … but rather “Siexieme,” following the French appellation. Everything on campus weighed heavily on the side of French… the French language [had] the frightening edge… In our fourth year, our two classes, anglophone and francophone were merged into what was called “la Troisieme bilingue.” At the end of the year, we sat the French “Probatoire” examination and some of us were declared successful…. Just when we arrived the Man O’ War Bay, there were frequent frictions between the two groups, usually due to the arrogance some Francophone students exhibited towards us. Not all of them, though, but a sizeable number did try to impose their will on us,and fisticuffs between the two groups were not rare… Our staff was composed mainly of French teachers, the principal himself being a Frenchman. The French teachers were all members of what came to be known as “la Coopération française,” the cooperation agreements Cameroon was said to have signed with France in various fields. There were only three French-speaking Cameroonians on staff for the four years we were in Man O’ War Bay, one was the discipline master, the other the school bursar and the third was the sports master (P 94, 95, 96).
“It is, however, the “sacrificial lambs” who received a Western-style education in missionary schools that were to emerge as the “leaders of the new emerging country”(Pg 31).
The above passages draw attention to the minority status and the unfair treatment suffered by Anglophones in the political union between the French and English cultural communities birthed from the ashes of history, and that led the Anglophone minority to consider education as a consolation and fulfilment for the said inequalities. Given the above, Jumbam’s From the Highlands of Nkar to the World (henceforth referred to as FHNW) is a mind-blowing narrative memoir of colonial and (Cameroon) national history of partition (and its impact on the collective psyche of the Anglophone Cameroonians) as dominant forces that inspired and shaped the writing of his novel. It is written in a style similar to minority literature and in language that is characteristic of novels of empire from Africa and the West[1]. Taking a step further from minority literature, which focuses on issues of belonging, identity, group power, social exclusion, and othering, and from narratives of empire which often limit their focus to the clash of cultures and the attempts of the colonised to find a voice both personal and collective, Jumbam’s innovative narrative genre can be read as personal history submerged in (Cameroon’s) national history and international history in which the writer gives a panoramic view of the life of his ethnic community in a partitioned Cameroon.
The central idea on which the memoir as a narrative is sustained thus appears to be marginalisation and the consolatory quest for intellectual and professional fulfilment. The quest for education, intellectual and professional fulfilment, which takes Jumbam through academic institutions in parts of Cameroon, the West and North America, adds a journey-motif style to the narrative, but above all, it allows the reader to see academic and intellectual achievement as a form of consolation and liberation from the inequalities that characterised the union in which Jumbam and his ethnic community perceive themselves as sojourners with no sense of belonging.
Although the book’s setting takes Jumbam from his native village-Nkar through academic institutions in some parts of Cameroon to France, Spain, the United Kingdom, America, and Canada in pursuit of academic, intellectual and professional fulfilment, its historical setting spans the colonial period to the post-independent era with emphasis on the impact of colonial legacies on the postcolonial nation-state of Cameroon in which Jumbam and his ethnic community lives. The novel’s colonial historical orientation and its consequences on the author and his ethnic community are textually manifest through religion, education, language, and administration. The narrative presents the incursions of a rival foreign culture with the introduction of European Christian religion, education and administration in Nkar and other parts of the country as a civilising mission. In the words of Jumbam, “…the first Christian missionaries, the Baptist, eventually followed by others, crossed over to ‘our own land’ carrying a Bible with conflicting messages, “aimed at rescuing what was said to be our sinful souls from Satan’s kingdom” (p. 103). As a narrative of personal experience, the novel also features the author’s personal growth from childhood through adolescence to adulthood with emphasis on his religious, moral, spiritual, academic and intellectual growth, all of which combine to create his poetic, creative, journalistic and intellectual fecundity. In an attempt to transform personal, national and international history of colonialism into literary material, the memoir narrative depicts a particular postcolonial state with a complex bi-cultural heritage featuring two groups of linguistically and culturally different people (ethnic identities) with opposing colonial and cultural experiences who were brought together into an unequal union. The inequalities and discrimination that result from this complex or bicultural linguistic/ethnic heritage constitute the trigger for Jumbam’s quest for academic and intellectual fulfilment to which we now return. A discussion of this intellectual journey would be incomplete without beginning with some of the academic institutions that the author attended in Cameroon before travelling abroad.
Like his father, whose bitter, dehumanising experiences of marginalisation, discrimination, economic exploitation, and brutality in Nigeria pushed him to send his children to school to study and secure good jobs to avoid similar experiences in the future, Jumbam also understands the quest for education as the quest for fulfilment. Regretting the ignorance of some family heads in his Nkar village who rejected Western education on the misconception that it was a breeding ground for rebellion, the author states earlier in the novel that “It is however the “sacrificial lambs” who received a Western-style education in missionary schools that were to emerge as the “leaders of the new emerging country”(Pg 31). The new emerging country in this context is the federated Cameroon nation-state that emerged from the vestiges of colonial partitioning, and that was eventually to become a unitary state through the 1972 Referendum.
It should be recalled that since the reunification of Cameroon in 1961 and the creation of the Unitary State in 1972, discontent resulting from ethno/cultural marginalisation has been manifested by some critics and also members of the Anglophone community who claim that the experience of cohabiting with the French-speaking majority in a Unitary State has deepened rather than healed the cultural/linguistic differences (Nforbin, 2023: 338). This historical perspective is clearly expressed in Jumbam’s memoir through his experience of the ethnic othering and inequalities that characterised the secondary education system at Man O’ War Bay, where two linguistic groups, the Anglophone and the Francophone systems cohabit in unequal proportions with the French authorities retaining the lion’s share in curriculum design, power and positions of authority. In the face of these inequalities,Jumbam develops a consoling quest for academic and intellectual fulfilment, which he sees as the only pathway to finding a voice within the dehumanising neo-colonial structures of the post-independent state.
As said above, Jumbam’s quest for intellectual and career fulfilment is also largely accredited to his father, Pa Mathias. Unlike some family heads in Jumbam’s Nkar village who perceived education as a breeding ground for rebellion, regarded converts as rebels “determined to challenge paternal authority,” and even disowned and intimidated those who imbibed it with threats of death, Pa Mathias had quite a positive perception of western education. The reader is told that Pa Mathias sees education, specifically Catholic education, as rewarding and determines that his children would attend school to spare themselves of the humiliation, discrimination, exploitation, brutality and unfair treatment he received while working in coastal plantations under the Igbos and Ibibios of Nigeria. The reader is told that the local workers in the coastal plantations were unfairly treated by the Ibibios and Igbos of Nigeria who occupied prominent positions because they could talk to the white man in his language.
What the local labourers found difficult to stomach was the arrogance and wickedness of their supervisors…” those … Ibibios and Igbos” from Nigeria. He could not understand why, simply because they could talk to the white man in his language, they were given the power of life and death over the local workers. It was not rare for them to cut anyone’s pay at will and if you dared complain, you were sent packing immediately, some even without the remnants of their pay… The unfair treatment of the local workers hit him deeply… He came home convinced that only education taught in Catholic schools could save his children from similar humiliation in future.” (p 28-29).
Determined to use education as a tool to fight ethnic-triggered inequalities and thereby reclaim the identity and voice that was almost silenced by both colonial structures of power, Pa Mathias tells his children:
“You must learn to talk and write the white man’s language well so that you will hold high positions of responsibility wherever you will be working. I don’t want any Ibibio or Ibo lording it over my children as they did over me” (p 29).
Pa Mathias understands that only meaningful education would rescue the marginalised from exploitation, mental slavery, subjugation, social exclusion, and poverty. An important historical fact is evoked in the above passages. The history of British Southern Cameroons under Nigeria, during which the British Cameroons suffered brutality, slavery, economic exploitation and the excesses of the Igbos and Ibibios is remembered. Through the above passages, Jumbam recreates and condemns post-independent African leaders who took over from colonial masters and became worse. He seems to say although the colonised took over from the coloniser and moved to the phase of decolonisation, slavery and a new form of colonialism still persist with blacks exploiting other blacks. He thus sees education as a form of liberation.
Like his father, Jumbam seems to drum home the message that colonialism was not altogether as bad a project as some critics have made us believe since it gave the colonised education, language, a voice with which to resist oppression and exploitation, as well as prepared the educated for better jobs and intellectual fulfilment. The awareness that Western education could result in intellectual and professional fulfilment as well as serve as a means of liberation from discrimination takes Jumbam to conferences, workshops, language immersion training programmes, translation courses, creative writing workshops, academic programmes, radio programmes, and further studies and meetings in specialised academic disciplines in France, Spain, UK, America, and Canada. It is thanks to his academic and intellectual nurture that Jumbam matures from the shy character at the beginning of the novel to discovering his passion, developing his full potential, and acquiring seasoned skills in public speaking, language proficiency, creative writing, journalism, and translation.
In featuring memoir, colonial history as well as Cameroon partition history as major shaping influences in the writing of his novel, the narrative explores the clash of cultures, issues of collective memory, inequalities, abuse of power, censorship, issues of unbelonging and social exclusion, group-based power, and the cultural tensions that characterise the Anglophone and Francophone ethnic/linguistic communities in a postcolonial state.
It should, however, be noted that an attempt to limit the understanding of Jumbam’s memoir submerged in national and colonial history would definitely narrow its scope and rob the reader of the pleasure of relishing the discourses and other enduring qualities evident in the narrative through narrative technique, blossoming poetic passages, contrast, similes, metaphors, linguistic evidence, characterisation, setting, and themes. This takes us to other possibilities of reading the memoir narrative.
Like Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo and Victor Epie Ngome’s What God Has Put Asunder, Jumbam’s memoir falls within the corpus of literature on minority featuring ethnicity, discrimination, group-based power, politics of place and unbelonging, collective memory, ‘communal voice’ (which Susan Lanser, in the context of feminist narratology, associates with marginal or suppressed communities), and identities, all of which are created through socio-cultural constructions and processes that involve ethnic othering. As is typical of most minority discourses, issues relating to minority rights, space and unbelonging, inequalities, and processes by which the dominant group dominates and promotes the othering of the ethnic/linguistic minority are recurrent and thereby position the memoir at the analytical mercy of minority theories some of which can be drawn from the insights of gender, feminism, postcolonial criticism, memory theories, theories of identity, and postcolonial narratology.
Whether you read the book as a memoir submerged in national and colonial history, a minority discourse, a historicity of texts or textuality of history (in New Historicist conceptualisation), a reservoir of collective/cultural memory, a clash of cultures, a narrative of growth, or an attempt to find communal voice, following the overwhelming incorporation and representations of personal life, collective history and historical facts, one thing that cannot pass unnoticed is Jumbam’s unrivalled sense of humour, language, contrast, simile, metaphors, apt descriptions, and characterisation, among other techniques, to tell his story. Some of these techniques are worthy of note, considering their importance in sustaining the plot of personal history submerged in national and colonial history.
For instance, notice the metaphor of marginalisation in the description of the music of seagulls that sounds like the lament from split throats of an oppressed people (p 104). Notice also the description of Buea with “foggy surroundings, bathed in a freshness that had something nostalgic” (p. 84).
What is particularly captivating is the author’s narrative technique. The memoir is rendered in a style similar to what narratologists such as Ansgar Nunning (2004), Gerard Genette (1980) and Manfred Jahn (2005) have described in different contexts as retrospective first-person homodiegetic narrative situation. The story is told by a first-person narrator who takes part in the narrated world as a protagonist in the sense that it is the narrator’s actions, personal experiences, point of view, and memories that constitute the plot of the quest for intellectual fulfilment. Using the memoir narrative technique and verbs and descriptions that suggest presence in action, the author tells the story of personal history submerged in (Cameroon) national and colonial history using the homodiegetic narrator who simultaneously plays the roles of experiencing self and narrating self. Using “I”, action-oriented verbs, and, above all, memory indicators, Jumbam creates textual grounds for reading his book as a homodiegetic memoir narrative with an internal focaliser.
It is also important to note that the author uses characterisation, for instance, as a powerful narrative strategy. The memoir narrative draws attention to the inequalities that characterised the political union between the Anglophones and the Francophones through the character of some French students in the bilingual education system at Man O’War Bay:
I must have fallen deep asleep before being awaken by a slap to my face. I awoke with a scream … [A]bove me stood a young man,… words started flashing out of his mouth in rapid succession and all I could hear was “Debout, sixieme! Anglosaxon! Debout!”… I still did not move and he suddenly sent another blow to my head which I blocked off with my fist. What was happening and why was I being so violently assaulted? … I went to class the next day where I met all my classmates, thirty-five of us in number. The French-speaking students were also thirty-five in number and there stood between us, what looked like an unscalable wall in communication…. I was not the only one struggling to understand my neighbours (p 90-92).
The way structures of power, represented by the school system, promote discrimination and inequalities in a bi-cultural postcolonial state constitute the focus of the above passage. In addition, Jumbam seems to use the bilingual nature of the education system at Man O’War as a metaphor for the ideology of unity in diversity, which is inherent in Cameroon’s political discourse.
Jumbam’s experiences in secondary school at Man O’War Bay, 1965, thus provide a staging ground for understanding the ways structures of power construct dominant and marginal identities in minority discourses. The political union of Anglophones and Francophones seem to be replicated in the education system with the cohabitation of the Anglophones and Francophones:
The day our school re-opened, Mr Kepe hired a taxi that dropped me on the spot by the post office where we had been asked to wait…the bus arrived with three other new students on board…. I greeted those who were already inside; one answered joyfully, the other two said nothing, merely staring curiously at me. Shortly thereafter, I heard them speaking French which sounded strange to my ears. “Oh my God,” I thought to myself as I listened to their conversation, which they carried out in low tones, “is this what I am getting myself into?” (p 88).
Jumbam does not fail to draw attention to the place of Nso cultural traditions in the writing of his memoir. On that note, issues such as communal values of associative solidarity, generosity and hospitality (demonstrated through Pa Mathias’ family, family members, mentors, and some friends of Jumbam, etc, worshipping of ancestral gods, polygamy, and early marriage (Young girls were proposed in early marriage to usually much older men, where they would join a big harem of other women. The more wives a man had, the more chances of having many children who would work his farms and bring in more harvest for the family’s survival in case of famine. The man’s worth was often measured by the number of wives he had and how many children he was able to sire with them), song, dance, etc. (p. 29), are given important attention in the narrative.
In conclusion, it may be safer to rely on the overwhelming autobiographical and historical evidence to say that although the voice the reader hears in the text is that of Jumbam, the historical author, the perspective that largely orientates the story of the consolatory quest for intellectual fulfilment is the collective psyche of the ethnic community to which Jumbam belongs.
[1] For typical examples of novels of empire and minority literature, see Kenjo Jumbam’s The White Man of God, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Josef Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo.
