Dulu Mengue: Mengue's Journey

By Essam Mengue m’Obama (EMO)

On August 8, 1952, at just twenty-six years old, Mengue learned, while in Zoetele where she had gone with her four young children, the youngest one just three months old, that her husband had been killed in a traffic accident in Yaounde. Dulu, which means journey, is the story of this young woman as she tried to come to terms with her life, which had just been blown to pieces by this tragedy: the sudden and brutal realization that she was now the head of the family and the sole provider for her young children, something that she was totally unprepared for; the intense grieving she was going through; the greed and cruelty of her in-laws who had their eyes set on inheriting her late husband's assets and depriving her and her children; how to find the wisdom, strength, determination, and commitment to prioritize and fund the children's education; and the bewildering struggle to understand and internalize the fact that she and her children now faced a life without the man who had sustained and defined them. All this was happening in a society dominated by men and still under the grip of colonization. Perhaps, more than anything, her predicament forced her to have a fresh look at many of the things she had taken for granted all along including the prevalence of pain and suffering, her religious beliefs, and what determines what one becomes in life. For the first time, she became conscious that she was and had been different from almost everyone else around her in the village. For that reason, she came to the conclusion that she could confide her innermost thoughts, doubts, struggles, anguish, and challenges only to her husband through long late-night monologues: she could not trust anyone else. It is a journey filled with tragedy, loss, pain, and suffering--all of which she was able to overcome because she had a vision and hope for the future and a strong determination, courage, drive, will, and strength to fulfill her dream, her vision. In the end, it is a story of resilience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9798890612199

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Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Families

The Encounter and the Union

The Early Years of Matrimony

The Thunderbolt

The Immediate Aftermath of the Thunderbolt

The Expulsion

The New Beginnings

Back to Zoétélé: The Dawn

The Pension

Reaching for Your Dream, Our Dream

Digging In

The Search for Why

Floating like a Butterfly and Stinging like a Bee

The Hope and the Promise

The Rosary

Epilogue

About the Author

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Dulu Mengue

Mengue's Journey

Essam Mengue m’Obama (EMO)

Copyright © 2024 Essam Mengue m’Obama (EMO)

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-89061-218-2 (Paperback)

ISBN 979-8-89061-219-9 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

To my late parents and to my children and grandchildren.

Acknowledgments

Writing about my mother's journey required that I dig deep and reconnect with as many people as possible over the course of several years. I am deeply indebted to everyone who helped me put Dulu Mengue together—for their encouragement, wisdom, insight, and constructive suggestions. I enjoyed having many conversations or written exchanges with friends and relatives of both my parents. My mother was an inexhaustible source of information on my father, his family, her own family, and their respective relatives and friends. My siblings Gaston Essindi, Agnès Mbida-Obama, Berthe Affana, and Charlotte Mbida-Essindi shared many insights and facts that I was not privy to and were patient in answering my many questions. I am also grateful to my own children, Patricia Eyenga Jordan, Marc Mbida-Essindi, Alvine Mbida Ferguson, Mélanie Mbida Lewis, and Elizabeth Mbida, who were kind enough to discuss with me or read successive drafts in part or in whole to help clarify certain aspects and make worthwhile suggestions. I would like to particularly mention my youngest daughter, Elizabeth Mbida, who thoroughly and patiently went over many versions of Dulu Mengue and offered helpful, useful suggestions and insight. She also helped with the editing process. My cousin, Pauline Bedoli Ngono, read the manuscript and assisted with great suggestions and encouragement. As did my friends Emmanual Mbi and Janvier Kpourou Litse, my brother-in-law Daniel Epangue, my sons-in-law Michael Jordan and Donald Lewis, and my daughter-in-law Milva Simoes-Mbida.

Introduction

In his memoir A Promised Land published in late 2020, Former President of the United States Barrack Obama writes about how those Americans who'd lost loved ones on 9/11/2001 understood what we'd done—killing Osama Bin Laden—in more personal terms. He then goes on to mention the specific case of a young woman called Payton Hall, aged fourteen years old in 2011, who had lost her father in the Twin Towers bombed by planes on September 11, 2001. Payton Hall had written to him that all her life, since she was four until she was now fourteen, she had been haunted by the memory of her father's voice, along with the image of her mother weeping into the phone.

One thing that is striking in the tragic story of this young lady is that what happened to her at four was, by her own account, indelibly etched in her memory and conscience and continued to haunt her ten years later, and probably would do so all her life. Her father had called her mother from the Twin Towers when he realized that he would not make it home from there.

Dulu Mengue, or Mengue's Journey, is born of the memories of a child, from the time he was just three months shy of his fifth birthday, who watched his young mother, aged twenty-six and with four small children when she lost her equally young husband from a traffic accident, struggle to make sense of that sudden tragedy. The narrator tries, based on what he remembers starting from childhood, to retrace the journey that his mother embarked on to deal with this blow that shattered her young life, manage her grief, and build a future for herself and her children by overcoming the challenges that she faced immediately after she was widowed and during the many years that came later.

Her journey took many forms and phases: physical, emotional, psychological, moral, and spiritual. One of the most poignant moments of her journey was when she found herself in the cabin of a merchandise truck with her three-month old baby and the three other children, none older than eight. Her relatives rode in the open back of the truck in a drizzling rain through the dangerous and at times nearly impassable rural muddy roads from her village to that of her late husband in South Cameroon. She was desperate to at least be able to attend her beloved's burial.

The story covers the first forty years of Mengue's life, with the narrator using a variety of sources of information. The first one is his own recollection and experience of the events as he witnessed them, including seeing his mother's raw emotions and hearing her cry to her late husband, starting in the days and weeks immediately following his burial and for a considerable period after that. The second one is made of the late-night monologues he heard her embark on when she could not go to sleep. The third is the conversations she had with her friends and relatives, as well as some of her late husband's friends and some of his relatives she kept in contact with. The fourth consists of the conversations that the narrator had with his own siblings, family members, and friends of the family. The final source is his own conversations with his mother in various circumstances, including after he had become an adult with his own family and children. These latter conversations were facilitated by the closeness he had with his mother and involved almost any topic, ranging from her life experiences before and after she became married and widowed. Many of these conversations took place after his mother had become more settled and was enjoying her children and grandchildren.

Mengue often talked to her late husband late at night. Some people have a habit of going to the cemetery and talking to the departed loved ones at their tombs through cement, laterite, or whatever material has been used for the grave structure. Since Mengue was chased from her husband's village and burial place, the option taken by the narrator for her to relate to him away from his grave is the use of the epistolary form, with the understanding that it is not based on a verbatim rendering of what she had said, but on an effort to provide overall coherence to what she is understood to have said in various circumstances and cases. It is hoped that this effort, combined with the use of as many sources of information as possible from a variety of persons, will have significantly reduced the risk of too selective a recollection of facts and views, bearing in mind that such a risk cannot be completely eliminated altogether. The narrator has lived with big chunks of this story within him for decades and struggled with whether or not to write them down and, if so, in what form.

The Families

Father was born around 1923 in a village called Medjeme in South Cameroon, not far from Akonolinga, as Mbida-Essindi, later baptized as Marc in the Catholic church, and was affectionately called Marcus. He had one older and one younger sister, four half-brothers, and four half-sisters, with the older sister called Bella-Essindi and the younger one called Mengue m'Essindi. Following the passing of his father, Essindi-Bella, who had three wives, his brother, Essama-Essindi, married Father's widowed mother, Affana-Nkodo, and they had five children, three boys and two girls.

Grandpa Essindi-Bella was probably born around 1888 and passed away around 1934 at forty-six when Father was about twelve years old or so from a smallpox outbreak. Father may have also been infected because his face had pockmarks similar to those that smallpox sometimes leaves behind. Grandma Affana-Nkodo passed away in 1994, aged more than ninety years while still articulate, lucid and doing house chores until a few months before she died in the house of her eldest living daughter, Mengue m'Essindi.

After becoming orphaned, Father was left with no financial support. His older sister, Bella-Essindi, had moved to Akonolinga, the nearest city, which was about seventy kilometers from Medjeme, where she made a living by doing odd jobs in families. She had no schooling except for a few years in primary school. These jobs and her boyfriend provided her with enough revenues to bring Father to Akonolinga and enroll him to continue in primary school. She kept insisting with Father that education was very important, a top priority, and that he should dedicate himself to attending school and to learning. He, however, did not go beyond primary school because his sister passed away shortly after or just before he had finished primary school at about age seventeen. He was said to have been inquisitive and eager to learn as much as he could, including on his own.

Faced with the necessity to support himself and his siblings, he applied for a job as a cash crop quality inspector. This entailed providing advice to cocoa farmers on cocoa planting, growing, plantation maintenance, harvesting, extraction of cocoa beans from the pods, fermenting, drying, cleaning, and bagging the beans before selling them to exporters' agents. He was hired through a test and went through training before he was posted to his first assignment in Zoétélé, a small town or local government center where his future wife lived, in South Cameroon near Sangmelima. In the end, Father became the sole financial support for his family up to when he passed away.

Mother's parents, Ella-Bisa'a—also called Efayong, an alias that he brought from the war front, which literally means the one who shines light on his people—her father, and Obama-Odou, her mother, were married in a traditional ceremony in 1917 in Zoétélé. Grandpa Ella paid a dowry of 500 Francs and two sheep. The Franc was then officially called FCFA, or Franc des Colonies Françaises d'Afrique (Franc for the French Colonies of Africa). That dowry would be equivalent to about CFA 500,000, or $868 today. The official marriage certificate was, however, established eighteen years later, on October 27, 1935. By that time, Mother and her siblings were already born. Grandpa Ella fought in World War I with the German Army. Whether it was a result of his war experience or his natural disposition, he was known to be decisive, demanding, and a disciplinarian.

Cameroon was a German colony from 1884 to 1914, carved out of French Equatorial Africa following negotiations at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. The conference followed the decision by Otto von Bismarck, the conservative Prussian statesman who dominated German and European affairs from the 1860s until 1890 and was the first Chancellor of the German Empire between 1871 and 1890, to establish a German empire in Africa. At the Berlin conference, France and Britain agreed to cede some of their African colonies—including Togo and Cameroon—to Germany. When World War I broke out in 1914, the two German colonies in the Gulf of Guinea, Cameroon and Togoland, found themselves in an untenable position, sandwiched between French and British colonies: between Ghana and Benin for Togo, and between Nigeria and Equatorial French Africa for Cameroon. By early 1916, the British and French forces reclaimed control of both colonies.

It is not clear when Grandpa Ella left the army, but it was probably sometime in 1916. Shortly after his return, he rekindled his interest in marrying Grandma Obama, which resulted in their getting married in 1917. By that time, he already had a son with his first wife. He married two other ladies after Grandma Obama and had a daughter and a son with one of them, and two sons with the other. He therefore sired a total of ten children from four wives, with Grandma Obama having five of these children, three of whom survived into adulthood.

Mother had two younger brothers, Ngbwa-Ella, called Enguelbet, and Mezang m'Ella, called Anton, and two younger sisters. The first one, Odou-Ella, died a toddler, and the second one, given the same name, died during childbirth in 1952 while still a teenager.

Mother was born in or around 1926 as Mengue m'Ella, or Mengue m'Obama, and grew up in Zoétélé. Her birth certificate was established only on January 13, 1956, following a hearing at the First Degree-Tribunal of Zoétélé. Three witnesses attested under oath that 1926 was her rightful birthdate. She attended primary school where teaching was initially done in her native language called Fong or Bulu before French was gradually included in the curriculum. She and Father met in 1942 when she was around sixteen to seventeen and Father was about nineteen to twenty.

Mother came to life under difficult circumstances. After Grandpa Ella and Grandma Obama were married, they experienced problems conceiving a child. Being barren risked making Grandma Obama irrelevant in her marriage, all the more so that her co-spouse already had a son. Her family was particularly concerned because the state of women's health services in Cameroon then, especially in a small town, made it nearly impossible to address her apparent infertility problem.

Grandma Obama's family lived not far from Zoétélé, in a village called Nkolasok, within about four hours of walking from Zoétélé. It was reported that sometime in 1924, one of her uncles told her in a dream that she should look for a plant that looked like a liana, and he described the kind of tree, which it drapes itself around. A liana is part of a family of long-stemmed, woody vines that are rooted in the soil and use trees to climb up to the canopy, the uppermost part of the trees, to get access to well-lit areas. The liana is characteristic of tropical moist forests.

Grandma Obama was told to collect the leaves of the liana-like plant and to cook and eat them, which she did. She subsequently conceived a few months later. While she was pregnant, her father requested that Grandpa Ella let her return to her family and stay there until she would give birth, which request was acceded to and implemented. To his village folks, her father insisted that as soon as she gave birth, he should immediately be informed so that he would come home from wherever he would be to cut the umbilical cord. He emphasized that he, and only he, should cut it. To make sure he would not be too far away, he stayed around the village when it was felt that the delivery time was near. After giving birth to Mother, Grandma Obama and the baby girl stayed in Nkolasok for a few months before she came back to Zoétélé sometime in late 1926 or early 1927, when Mother was just a few months old.

These events resulted in her parents having a special attachment to Mother from her childhood. As she was growing up, she also became attached to both of them. Using an herbal treatment also given to her in a dream by her uncle, Grandma Obama was known to have helped other women with fertility problems for free. She passed on this traditional medicine knowledge to Mother, who also became interested in and adept at treating jaundice with the bark from a particular tree. She cooked the bark as part of a dish that she gave to her patients. She continued to treat jaundice all her life, also for free.

The Encounter and the Union

When he arrived in Zoétélé as cash crops inspector, Father had the usual problem faced by teachers in rural public or missionary schools and by public servants in general in finding a place where to stay in a rural or small-town setting—there was no real estate market for those wanting to rent. The normal practice was for the newcomer to contact the village chief or one of the elders, introduce himself, and then ask for help in finding a place to stay. If he happened to be married, he would also inquire about the possibility of having some land allocated to him and his wife so they could farm it in order not to have to rely indefinitely on handouts from the local residents. At that time, there were rarely, if any, female professionals who found