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I am addressing you Emm. As you told me some days ago that you knew nothing of my life before, when I was a young girl over there [in Africa]… I know that the memories we keep, even with images, the smells, none of it can be communicated, but, for me, they are moments of bliss and I would like that you know it, and all of you with you.
There is no chronology to these facts, because happiness is something whole, built from small things, one next to the other. And this is what makes up the memories of a life.
From December 1937 to 1949, from Cameroon to Belgian Congo, then 1949 – a full year dedicated for us to discover France, the multi-storeyed houses, the sea in Cannes.. as we were all bound to leave Africa to study in France. I left Africa in 1955 for the boarding school “La Clarté” in Villars de Lans where I got my baccalaureate… La Clarté, the Lycée of Villard de Lans [had been] recommended to Mum by Canon Douillet.
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They are memories, either in Black and White or in colours, but they are so cumbersome in their beauty that I would like to make this gift to you, because life is beautiful, but short, and I wish [the memories] are not lost.
I hope my father, the one that made me live this Africa, will guide me to try and make you understand the beauty of landscapes, its smells, its silences too. He was a great hunter, loved nature and his friends. The populations had been there [in Africa] since so long … Friday evening, as soon as the office finished, he was leaving in his Ford pickup truck equipped for his expeditions, with his hunting friends* and his favourite driver Boniface.
*[His friends were] Ulundu, François the nurse, and others I forgot the name about (Donatien).
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My father was a hunter, loved nature since his start in Africa in 1914. He never succeeded in killing a greater Kudu… He was only killing one beast he selected and the shooting angle was studied to kill cleanly. I remember seeing animals with no apparent wound at all…
I would like to add right away that my father hunted only for the art of shooting and enjoying the trail itself. Always alone. Since he was 14 years old, it was his only reason to live, the wide open spaces of Africa. He killed only to feed his 3 or 4 black friends.
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He took us hunting once. The heat on the dry long grass, arriving at the camp. The amphibious fishes that burrow in the mud when the ponds dry up, only to come back to life during the rainy season.
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I dream to be reincarnated as a nightjar: an evening bird, black and white, a bird of silence and mystery, who flies off when the car arrives after, back from a picnic on the Bunkeya road.
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“It’s a long way to TIPPERARY, it’s a long way to go”. Daddy sand this song in the car when we were leaving for a picnic…
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Rueil-Malmaison, France, 8 March 2009
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You just read a straight translation from the notebook of my mother.
The wording as close to the original as feasible.
Nothing added.
Nothing retrenched.
That notebook is not Claude Bollon – mother of Pascal and Emmanuel, wife of André – writing. It is Claude-Anne Bollon-Dulière, the name she chose herself.
My mother was born on the 2 December 1937, in Yaounde, Cameroon. That Claude spent her youth in a hut (“case”) in a prospector station in Bangbel until she was 4, then in a bungalow in Panda, Jadotville, Congo, until she was 18. The plan was for her to study in France, and so she landed in 1955 in Villard de Lans, near Grenoble. The best re-acclimatation resort money could buy. Towering mountains, a landscape that closes in on you. Silent meadows, stunted vegetation and Northern light. She would meet my father there.
She never returned to Africa.
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