It was Ndu Market day. The first vehicles that came from Ndu told of mayhem. The population of Ndu disappeared into the surrounding villages and beyond. Your entire maternal family had trekked to your village, Luh. Still too young to fathom out the actual dimensions of happenings around you, you were happy to see grandma and other members of your maternal family. But why didn’t they bring the special Ndu nching-nching and blockade? That was quite unusual. But their mere presence meant you and your siblings were going to listen to the euphonious /s/ and /z/ sounds of the beautiful Ndu dialect of the Limbum language. The Ndu dialect was a marker of style, class and modernity. It was music to your ears and you had always mockingly reproached your mum for adapting too fast to the dialect of her husband’s village. It was when your family guests began narrating their ordeal that the flair of the Ndu dialect was superseded by the awful nature of the barbarity which they recounted. They were not your family guests; they were refugees. They talked of people being indiscriminately massacred in broad daylight by gendarmes and bottles inserted into women’s private parts. How was that possible? Who ordered the killings? In the days that followed, your relationship with the mental image of Ndu and the portrait of Paul Biya which hung on the wall of the family parlour began to change. Before then, Ndu irrevocably stood for modernity and development and your mum used to reward any good behaviour from any of her younger kids by promising to take them to Ndu. The image of climbing into a car always procured a certain joyous foretaste coupled with that fabulous sensation that everything around you was gyrating in a widening gyre. Unfortunately, these promises never materialized until when you attained a certain age. Ndu stood for the promise of newness, of a new pair of school shoes, of new toys, of a new football, and above all, new Christmas dresses. Sometimes, you held your breath the whole day, counting the hours, the minutes, the seconds and then that final moment at dusk when the taxi driven by the loquacious Nya or the taciturn Sam Bob would make a redemptive stop in front of your compound for your mum to step out. But the fulfillment of the gifts depended on the fluctuating price of beans, at a time when salaries ceased to mark the actual beginning of the month. But that is another story. As for Paul Biya, you had always thanked God for giving the country such a handsome man as president. With the impeccable smile and blue suit, you had wished him to be your second father. You only wondered why he could not cure the cough that made his voice so raspy like a permanent death rattle. Nevertheless, he was still your choice for a second father and was the most handsome in the calendar of African presidents on the walls of the parlour. With Daniel Arap Moi, of course, as the ugliest. But how could your father's soldiers have committed such crimes? More than a quarter of a century later, two names were still stuck to your mind amongst the tens that were killed: Mary Bina (alias Iron Lady) and Nfor Ignatius (alias Promised Land). Promised Land symbolised end-of-month salary for he was the one who would drive your dad from Ndu at dawn to Bamenda for his salary. He was the Promise. For Promised Land, Mary Bina, Ngeh Glory, Njieta Hilary, Tonga Ferdinand, Shey Yongla, Tarla George and Regina Nkosi.
DR. NDZI SHANG GILBERT.
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