Lies, Love, Blood

By Bill Fairbairn

Lies, Love, Blood is living proof of duplicity craving wrath. Heed this cautionary tale as we track rascal and scholar Daiga, his loyal, faithful bride-in-waiting Mungwi, and his duped and deserted wife Monica in their three-ring circus of intrigue, passion and despair along Cameroon and Germany’s cultural crossroads.

It drives home with a vengeance this timeless truth of war and wedlock:

“We must love one another or die.”

W.H. Auden

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jul 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685626365

Bill Fairbairn

Bill Fairbairn is the editor emeritus of the independent community newspaper Riverview Park Review in Ottawa, Canada. His journalism career since 1950 took in full-time stints in Britain, France, Africa and Canada. His first job, after leaving high school at age 15, was on the Jedburgh Gazette, in the Scottish Borders. Then came the Blyth News, the Derby Evening Telegraph, the Sheffield Telegraph, the London Sun, the Scotsman, the Vancouver Province, the Williams Lake Tribune, the Montreal Star, Radio Canada International (CBC), the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen (part time) and Legion Magazine. He taught journalism full time on the aboriginal reserve near Kamloops, British Columbia, and evening class journalism in Ottawa. Bill spent five years in the 1960s in Africa, working consecutively as a journalist for The Rhodesia Herald, now located in Harare, Zimbabwe, the Northern News in Ndola, now Zambia, and the Daily Nation in Nairobi. This book is his fifth. Bill’s full name is William Douglas Fairbairn. He had two grandfathers who served Lairds of the Manor in the Scottish Borderland. On his father’s side, Grandpa David Fairbairn was the laird’s butler; and on his mother’s side, Grandpa Peter Darling worked as one of the laird’s farmhands. He had an uncle, James Douglas, a well-decorated World War I soldier, who, at Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford home, served descendants of the famed novelist and where, during school holidays and when his mother was ill, Bill was nurtured in Scottish literature.

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Dedication

Especially written for Dylan and Kieran.

Copyright Information ©

Bill Fairbairn 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Ordering Information

Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Fairbairn, Bill

Lies, Love, Blood

ISBN 9781685626358 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781685626365 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023908918

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

[e-mail]

[phone]

Acknowledgment

Morgan Almeida of London for this book’s title and its cover design.

Thanks to any noble old African elephant whose incredible memory of friends and foes may teach errant humans to examine carefully the cruel drive for ivory.

Thanks to Cyprian Fernandes for including on front cover and inside his book, Yesterday at the Nation, author’s headshot and story about Elsa, the lioness star of the 1966 film Born Free.

Yesterday at the Daily Nation.

My wife, Janina Nickus, for her thorough editing and proofing.

Montreal-born, Hollywood-trained child actor and singer of Ukrainian refugee parentage Bobby Breen, for inspiring children like me in their Scottish homeland during World War II. How much he is still needed in his native land!

Historical Background

A Ray of Light on the German-

Cameroon Colonial Past

Postcard of the former Colonial Memorial in Bremen, Germany

***

Germany and Cameroon are thousands of kilometers apart, but their colonial history connects them to this day as it does in my novel on a Cameroon immigrant’s life in Germany. The problems of immigrant man and his German wife are here written in the raw. Düsseldorf in Germany and Dschang in Cameroon are about 5,000 kilometers apart, but still closely linked. Their shared history dates back to 1895, eleven-years after Cameroon became a German colony following an arrangement struck by German imperial commissioner for German West Africa, Gustav Nachtigal, with King Rudolf Douala Manga Bell of Doula, in Cameroon.

They agreed to transfer sovereignty and administration of the region to growing European power.

Dschang, a city about 200 kilometers inland from the port of Douala located in today’s West Province, was first documented in an exhibition at Düsseldorf’s Stadtmuseum.

In particular, the exhibition focused on German colonial explorer Zintgraff’s contact with Galega I, the fon (king) of Bali, who saw in Zintgraff’s expedition the opportunity to expand his territorial control over the surrounding region.

For Stefanie Michels, curator of the Düsseldorf exhibition and leading researcher of the joint enterprise on the German side, this story of European and African cooperation to achieve respective gains at the expense of others, reflects the historical reality of German and European colonialism.

There was never a sharply defined vision between colonizers and colonized. The colonial project always depended on intermediaries and networks with people in different positions and with different choices. Zintgraff arrived in Dschang in 1895.

Michels’ aim for the research project is to paint a more nuanced picture of colonialism than the popular depiction of evil Europeans conquering poor Africans. She insists on transcending the language of perpetrator and victim in an attempt to combat harmful stereotypes of helpless Africans needing Europe’s support.

She believes that her joint enterprise is far from whitewashing colonial crimes, but instead countering views of somewhat well-intentioned Europeans.

In Cameroon, they stress that today and in the past, they have always had their business agency. From this writer’s experience as a journalist working in Africa on leading newspapers of four African countries, two under colonial governance and two with independent rule, this (stereotype of helpless Africans) really applies only to Europe. Recognizing this may help Europeans interact with people from former colonies on a more level playing field.

Michels’ call for an assessment of German and, by association, European colonialism without categories of perpetrator and victim, apparently was just one controversial talking point at the research project’s podium discussion.

Wilfried Nausel, a priest in the Rhineland evangelical church and vocal critic of a colonial memorial in Düsseldorf, hit back against his fellow panelist saying the colonial project was implying that Europeans need to do something more concrete than recognizing African agency to improve future relations.

There was also a clash over whether to change street addresses named after figures involved in colonialism as has occurred in Britain. This debate came after one of the panelists, Philipp Koep, a history teacher at a local comprehensive school, started a campaign to rename Wissmannstrasse, in the Unterbilk district of Düsseldorf, which is a name that honors the colonial administrator of German East Africa, Hermann von Wissmann.

The topic of colonialism’s ongoing impact on African identity resonated with Albert Gouaffo, a specialist in German studies at the University of Dschang, who is leading the research project on the Cameroonian side.

Appearing to clash with research partner Michels, Gouaffo and others suggested that European history of colonialism continues to blight the African continent today.

He further said that colonial exploitation still goes on. That similar infrastructure is still there although cosmetic help in the form of development aid has been introduced. It means that colonial adventurers do not go direct by ship and take African products. Instead, they cooperate while their henchmen do the same as before.

Gouaffo also had much to say about today’s ongoing migration crisis for Europe. He believes it is being exacerbated by European leaders who, in confusing the consequences and causes of migration, are displaying ignorance of Europe’s colonial exploits. He said that when someone’s life is on the line, and they have got to the point where they have to cross the Mediterranean on a lifeboat, then one has to say that they have lost all hope. And when Europe reacts with barricades that are being erected not just in Europe, but in Morocco and Libya, then perhaps one has not studied history.

For those involved in this joint research on Germany’s colonial connections in Cameroon, the hope is that despite years gone by Europe’s leaders will start to engage intelligently with their continent’s colonial past for the sake of Africa.

Article sources are author Bill Fairbairn, nephew Michael Fairbairn and his father Lindsay.

Cultural Differences

The exploration of cultural differences in this novel represents a past and predicts a future that is relevant to all who live on this small planet. It tries to tell us that W.H. Auden’s words ring true today:

"All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky;

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die."

Chapter 1

Here Comes the Bride

The atmosphere around Ntafoang Church in north-west Cameroon heralded a big wedding. The bride and groom’s family members wore gorgeous long dresses and smart suits with flowers in the lapels. Children, in dresses or shorts, ran hither and thither chattering in a mix of Pidgin English, French and even some German. Camfranglais, some intellects called this linguistic mix. Two choral groups rehearsed near the church entrance. With lively melody and song, they intended to follow the bride up the aisle to the waiting groom before taking their choral places above the congregation.

The pending wedding followed Cameroon’s independence some time earlier leaving the African country under a semblance of unity run by Muslim President Ahmadou Ahidjo.

Did the happiest event of his life finally lie ahead of groom Daiga Foncham? He had returned home rich and university educated from Germany to marry his childhood sweetheart Mungwi. Fluid in Cameroon’s two official languages of English and French plus German and with a B.A. degree in political science from the University of Stuttgart in West Germany, he was poised for a diplomatic post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in his multicultural country still split by French-British rivalry.

For his wedding, Daiga looked as elegant as any man could look. Everything from his white suit, the red carnation in his buttonhole and his shiny black shoes fitted well. No one could have mistaken the groom among the scores of people mingling and chatting outside the church or already seated in the front row awaiting the arrival of the bride.

Mungwi had waited more than four long years for her fiancé to return home to marry her. She had almost lost hope of ever seeing him again when told by one of his student friends, returned home from studies in Paris, that he thought, but could not confirm, that Daiga had married the daughter of a German business magnate and likely intended to stay in Germany. Even then, she could not but keep him tucked deep in her heart not bearing to consider involvement with any other man. She had rejected several suitors before his letter told her he was coming home and asking her to arrange their wedding. She had obeyed his words irrespective of reports she considered were rumors of his infidelity in Germany. Those stories she had brushed aside. Her wedding day was a dream come true so forgiving was Mungwi in her love for Daiga.

A wedding day tradition in Cameroon is that the bride tactically delays her arrival at church to uncover what concern this shows in her waiting groom. Mungwi’s arrival was too much delayed for many. Pastor, bridesmaids, choir groups and parents were already bored with waiting and those outside the church tiring under the hot sun. The earlier excitement was giving way to nervousness about the prospective marriage that had come about so unexpectedly after such a long time.

The groom, waiting at the altar, shivered despite the heat as he fumbled with his handkerchief to wipe from his brow drops of sweat. He could understand why Mungwi was keeping him waiting, but not why for so long. He visualized that outside the church everyone’s eyes were turned in one direction hoping to see the Mercedes Benz he had hired to carry her and her family to the church. The delay certainly was having the desired effect on Daiga. He was thinking that maybe she had deserted him at this last minute because she had waited years for his return. He knew that one of her friends was in church monitoring his reaction. Mungwi would find out later the visible degree of his concern and likely tease him about it.

Suddenly things happened so fast that no one knew what was going on! First the bell in the church tower began to chime rapidly the moment the Mercedes Benz carrying Mungwi appeared from Prescraft Street headed for the church. At the same time, something most peculiar happened inside the church. As the bell chimed, a roughly dressed boy ran through the church door, rushed up to the altar and whispered something in Daiga’s ear. This made Daiga turn abruptly to inform his best man. I must go with this boy. There has been an accident. One of my reception singers is hurt. I’ll be back in a minute.

No! protested his compatriot. Your bride has arrived. I’m sure the Mercedes has just driven in. You can’t leave with Mungwi at the church door.

Don’t worry, insisted Daiga. I’ll be back in a jiffy. And off, outside by the back door, he quickly followed the urchin to disappear behind the church building. The church bell stopped chiming. The choirs took over with "Here comes the bride," and proceeded, with the pastor leading, into the church.

The bride, on the arm of her father, followed by the maid of honor and bridesmaids, entered the church with the wedding march playing on the organ and the choir singing. Reaching the altar, Mungwi raised her downward cast eyes to look for Daiga then turned to the empty seat reserved for him. Her heart sank when she realized, he was not in front or beside her. She quickly ran her eyes along the front church seats but, of course, Daiga was nowhere to be seen. She presently took a seat, waiting in trepidation, knowing Daiga was always up to something. Soon the congregation quieted down not knowing where Daiga had gone and the choir members sat down leaving the church for a moment almost silent.

The presiding pastor raised his hands questioningly. The best man did so too then dashed from the aisle and out of the church back door in a panic, turning in the direction he thought Daiga and the urchin might have taken. The congregation waited in a silent trance as minutes ticked by. What was clear to everyone present was that Daiga was not where he should have been. After ten-minutes, the best man ran back panting to be met with an avalanche of questions from those close to him in the aisle.

Where is Daiga? Have you seen Daiga? The bride awaits. Where is he?

Is he not back? the best man responded in a deep voice that alarmingly reached the ears of almost everyone in the silenced church. Is he still not here? Then, I don’t know where he is!

There was fidgeting as words passed from mouth to ear along the pews that the groom really was missing. Two men from the congregation accompanied the best man out for a second search. After a short time, others followed. By this time, the congregation was in disarray. The bride tried to leave but her father, trying to console her but really not knowing what to do, stopped her. He conducted her back to her seat and urged her to wait. She again stood up asking, Where is that Daiga? What has happened to him? What is he up to? In consternation her father cradled her in his arms and to his further dismay heard her mutter, I should never have taken him back. He has deserted me at the altar!

Questions were on the lips of everyone in the church. Little did they know that Mungwi’s wedding crisis was the result of an avenging scheme hatched in West Germany thousands of kilometers from Ntafoang Church.

Chapter 2

Paris, Here We Come!

Four-years before their planned wedding Daiga had left Cameroon and Mungwi by air for his final destination in Stuttgart, West Germany, via Paris.

After a good flight, the bell on the plane rang and a uniformed attendant announced, Ladies and gentlemen, we are beginning our descent. The time is 6:20 in the evening and the temperature seven degrees centigrade. Tighten your seat belts and extinguish any cigarettes. Touch down is due in about five-minutes. In a short time, it will be supper time for you in the City of Light.

Daiga’s heart leaped in anticipation and he adjusted himself in his seat to tighten his seat belt. Only he and God alone knew what clandestine plan he had for Europe besides his German language studies. One of his classmates, Louis Jaguar, sitting next to him, tapped him on his leg and said, Soon your dream will come true. You will be touching the white man’s soil with your own two feet. What do you make of that?

Also touching a white woman with my own two hands, Daiga boasted in jest. First a French then a German woman!

Lecherous beings like you can’t think of anything better than other women in your life, another classmate, Maria, scolded him from behind. Remember your fiancée back home in Cameroon, Mungwi will expect you to stay true to her. Do so! She will probably be thinking of you right now.

In a low voice Daiga, without turning, replied, Mungwi is far away in Africa. We are in Europe.

Daiga had meant his remarks to be a joke. All but Maria did laugh as the aircraft’s noisy engines deadened and the plane made a sharp turn on its downward glide to Orly Airport. Through the small window, Daiga could see lights from buildings and shops and he thought he took in a dim glimpse of the Seine.

Europe is years ahead of Africa. Compare this with what we have back home, he commented, but not credibly to Maria’s ears.

The white man surpasses us in almost every way, agreed Julius, also sitting behind Daiga. Europeans left us in their tracks and took with them most of Africa.

Be sure to drop a postcard to Mungwi soon after you leave the airport, Maria broke in to Daiga. She expects you to do so. She will be lonely. I know she loves you. And Julius, I’m not so sure Europeans surpass our people in Africa. Let us wait for proof down below. You should remember to write to Nameh.

Of course, I will!

The wheels of the aircraft bounced twice slightly before screeching on the tarmac. After taxiing to gate 27, it halted. The students dragged out their bags from overhead bins and prepared for customs, immigration and possible health checks.

Nine Cameroon students from Ecole Normale Supérieure of Bambili were flying to different European countries for government supported, nine-month language courses. Six of them had elected to remain in France while two would continue to Spain. Daiga, who had chosen to study German, was bound for Stuttgart. The three of those going onward were due to spend one night in Paris before continuing to their destinations.

Administrative control had taken an unnecessarily long time in Daiga’s opinion when he reached the immigration desk. There, to his dismay, he was curtly told that his visa was for only West Germany. To Daiga, the French immigration officer did not seem to want him to enter France. The six who had valid French visas passed through quickly. Two bound for Madrid were detained together with Daiga.

We can’t let you into France, sir, you do not have the correct visa, the immigration officer coldly informed Daiga a second time.

"Well, wait a minute. I’m just passing through. I do not intend to