SCALE BOY

The noted Cameroonian novelist recounts a “happy childhood” in a tumultuous era.

In whole or part, Cameroon, in West Africa, was alternately ruled by the French, Germans, and British, so, Nganang writes in the opening pages, his hometown of Youandé is “the only African city that has a German name with French accent aigu.” The tension among the colonizing powers expresses itself materially when Nganang decides to become a “scale boy,” weighing people on the street, and has to choose between a French and a German brand of scale. He chooses the German—in a touching moment toward the close of the narrative, one of his sisters finds the same model and gives it to him as a remembrance—and sets to work. It seemed for a time as if that make-do job was destiny, the natural course of events in an impoverished nation ruled by a dictator. Nganang, strong-willed and disciplined, had already rejected work with better prospects, apprenticing in a mechanic’s shop staffed by Chadian refugees fleeing civil war at home, subject to the prejudice of Cameroonians who, though of many ethnicities, always had room to disdain outsiders as they “metonymically blemished their ethnic group in general for the deeds of one.” Nganang’s happy childhood turns out to have had its Dickensian moments (“When I made a mistake at home, Papa would slap me….When the mistake was more than grave…he would ask me to go and select the whip he would use to flog me”), but it provided him with a fine education in the ways of the world that informed his writing early on and steered him toward his life as a storyteller, of which he writes, “From my three mothers, I have the conviction that great literature is gossip mixed up with philosophy.”

An elegant, closely observed memoir of challenges overcome on the path to becoming a writer.