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little.
    Still, isn’t it interesting to know that the chief, Charles Atangana, never failed to furnish these colonial travelers with a girl for the night, just as he did for Njoya? Only one of these mad scribblers mentioned the “sinfulness” of the night he’d spent “in the valley of the Ewondo, which only a miracle could save.” The author of these lines was a Catholic priest! I’ll come back to him soon enough. Of all of these men, however, not one seemed indifferent to the charisma of Charles Atangana.
    In the records, the differential treatment accorded to Njoya and to the chief didn’t stop at the bedside. Charles Atangana had redefined his relationship with the French in a twist that even the sultan found difficult to understand. And how! Atangana is still mentioned in history books as the only person in the protectorate who, between 1914 and 1920, right in the middle of the war, was able to change his name, to shed the Germanic Karl and become the English Carl and then the French Charles without any uproar from the colonial public. The few scattered documents in the French archives that do draw attention to his hypocrisy, his duplicity, and above all his humble origins—they actually use the word “slave”—hardly count.
    When Sara arrived at Mount Pleasant, Charles Atangana had just returned from a trip to Paris, where he was the guest of President Gaston Doumergue and attended the opening of the Colonial Exhibition in the Bois de Vincennes. Oh, but Paris wasn’t the first European capital he had visited! He already had seen Madrid, where he had spent two years, and also Barcelona and Rome. So he could gauge his opinion of the French capital by what he had seen elsewhere in Europe, just as he could compare the French president with the German kaiser, the Spanish king, and the pope. Of course, for obvious reasons, he didn’t ever make these comparisons when he was in Cameroon.
    The friendship between Charles Atangana and Njoya dated from the period of the chief’s disgrace when, in 1920, after his return from Spain, he was stripped of his title as paramount chief by the French, who were then administering Cameroon. He was sent instead to work on the construction of roads in the region around Foumban. That’s how he found himself in the city where Njoya was struggling to maintain his former authority in the face of a new and overly capricious political force. One little word would soon rewrite the chief’s destiny, restoring the powers that had been his under the German and British administrations: the word was “cocoa.”
    I’ll come back to this later.
    Njoya’s trajectory, on the other hand, would follow the path—first torturous and then shameful (not to mention tragic)—of those who put all their eggs in the Germans’ basket: the path of collaboration. Sometimes I think that Charles Atangana, a professional translator, had relied for survival on his tongue’s gymnastics when the whole world turned topsy-turvy. Initially he had put himself squarely in the Germans’ camp, for they had named him an Oberhäuptling , a paramount chief, and he had acquired a taste for giving orders. He had followed them to Europe after the war, had testified for them before all the tribunals, where, at the end of the conflict, German colonizers sought restitution for their lost plantations. Yet the chief hadn’t hesitated to change camps, for he understood that it was the only way for him to get back home to Cameroon.
    For Njoya, colonization had been simply a game of chess, one he hoped to win with a final flourish. Yet, and this I swear, he never could have imagined that Sara, the nine-year-old child who had been offered to him by a friend, would be the one to trace a path through the labyrinth of his colonial redemption. But again, on this point the colonial archives remain silent. And that is why the doyenne’s words