Is it possible that one who so early has achieved the pinnacle of success, having entered the most luminous palaces, would long for the most forsaken and nameless place on earth? Is it possible that one who has faced the sun would long to disappear like a moon’s crescent on a silent night? In June 2023, I saw on the newsfeed of my phone a photo of Kylian Mbappé in the Cameroonian embassy in Paris. A strange photo, clumsily ordinary, the lens not even straight: Mbappé in an office, dressed in yellow and black sportswear, sweat visible on his careless attire, his eyes as puzzled in the photo as mine were in seeing it.
I first thought it was photoshopped, the pre-AI word we used to say. And thus, I looked at it the way one passes evidence. It had to be photoshopped, for who goes dressed like that to an office? In the photo, the usual dirty files were scattered on the floor behind Mbappé, requests rendered meaningless by negligence, probably stories of the defeated quests I knew so well, having been at many Cameroonian embassies. I had even been at this same one in 2011, to protest the illegitimacy of Cameroon’s sanguinary ruler, Paul Biya. And on the wall was the official portrait of the man I still protest, a 1984 photo that is classic for Cameroonians not because it hangs on the walls of all offices, but because it is probably our first encounter with a photoshopped image. Of the North Korean style here.
There were just two people in the photo. Next to Mbappé was a young, smiling woman with a plastic ID hanging on her neck—from her features, a Southerner like Paul Biya, from her attire, a regular bureaucrat. The powerful heads of the embassy were not there, even though this was a place in which two years prior Spike Lee was welcomed by the Cameroonian ambassador himself, together with the whole staff, dancing to the tune of Manu Dibango. It seemed too impossible to be true. Why would Mbappé have gone to the embassy like this, seemingly with no entourage, no paparazzi, no ceremony? I continued scrolling my newsfeed, as all of us are used to doing when confronted with a fake. But soon, I found myself looking at the same photo, and then, I landed on it again, a third time. The image was going viral, propelled by the logarithm of Cameroonians’ questions, at the top of which was: Is Mbappé going to Cameroon?
The only possible reason was that he was applying for a visa. Cameroon doesn’t have dual nationality—but who has ever seen a football player applying for a visa in this way, let alone a player like Mbappé, in order to go to one of the two countries of his heritage? There was no footballing reason for a visit. The dissonance of the scene flew in everyone’s face. The photo was an immediate birther of conspiracy theories, a spiral of gossip, mostly of the congratulatory kind. But for me, there were only more questions. After all, this was a transitory moment for the French player, a time when he was moving from Paris-Saint-Germain to Real Madrid, from a place he called home, from a country with which he had been so identified, to a foreign one for the first time, with suggestions of ego, money, greed. The drama of his departure was being played out in public, a soap opera of an exit that came months after the dramatic World Cup final against Lionel Messi, a former Parisian, and the aftermath in which the French president himself, Emmanuel Macron, descended to the soccer field to console his quite deflated showboat.
As they operate at this level of incredibly volatile fortunes, athletes probably need therapy. Was it a couch Mbappé was looking for at the Cameroonian embassy? Instead, a Freudian ear had appeared here in the form of a bureaucrat trivially dressed in a leopard print shirt and a plastic ID, who probably asked him for a photo after receiving his filled visa application and promptly posted it on her social media handle. You have to feel for him in some way, exposed in this moment of unexpected vulnerability, when probably what he needed was the hug of a distant nation, the whisper of his father’s home, the friendly word of a continent. What I saw—and what most Cameroonians in chatrooms saw—was a lost boy searching for closure, and it was this that prompted me to follow Mbappé’s trip home.
Shortly after, Mbappé flew out to Cameroon for a two-day visit that turned out to have been quickly improvised: no pomp from a nation that knew this one of its sons only from television. All discovered him on television again, but this time around, in the house of Franck Biya, the dictator’s son, for a lunch and photo opportunity to which a few of the athletes at hand were quickly invited—Francis Ngannou, Joakim Noah. No interview was aired, only the silent display of his smile that is known from many other similar photos—but here placated in an environment as strange as the people gathered. It was the first time that Franck Biya, a fellow as elusive as his father, was seen with athletes—and the first time for anyone to see the interiors of his house, to know that he lives in the Mbankolo neighborhood of Yaoundé, on a promontory from which the rest of the capital city stretches below like the gigantic slum that it is. This detail will prove prescient three months later, when a flooding in the Mbankolo valley will leave thirty people dead and Frank Biya, here for the first time again, will visit the destroyed homes of his pauperized neighbors and say a few words of comfort to the distressed, playing the role of the president of the republic that people fear he will assume once his father passes.
The Yaoundé valleys are called “elobi.” In Ewondo, the local language, elobi means mud. An elobi is not a place to live in: it is a place that is home to all sorts of maladies; it is a place that is made of improvised homes, of shacks, of misery; it is a place that is prone to inundations and used to the visitation of rainwater; it is a pauper’s habitat in a city that has no proper river but is one of the rainiest places on earth. I was born and raised in an elobi. Elobi is the name I give to my heart’s palpitations. It is the title of my first book, a collection of poems I wrote in French and published in 1995, a chronogram of my distress in a country I saw drowning. An elobi is also how Mbappé’s home looked like—an island named Jebale on the shores of Douala, a watery wound a few kilometers from the coast. Jebale, a place that entered history on July 15, 1884, as Jibbaret, when the local chief, together with the chief of Sodiko—written Sorrokow on the Germano-Douala Treaty—and other Douala chiefs, sealed our fate with German merchants, propelling Cameroon into colonial hands. An unfinished story.
Mbappé’s mother went with him to Jebale, but not his father. An uncle stood in his father’s stead. His mother proved to be the enforcer he needed during moments when things seemed to sway towards chaos: the dictator’s BIR special police, the local version of ICE, tasked to secure his whereabouts and hitting a young man with his gun; Mbappé’s entourage jumping on top of each other and some man falling into the sea waters; his mother yelling here and there. And then, what a bedlam! Broken homes, muddy ways, abandoned school buildings, a church that rose from the 19th century with its colonial construction, only with signs of neglect. Why did Mbappé decide to come to this pandemonium, even for the few minutes that his visit lasted? Why did he decide to visit this abandoned hell, before joining Madrid? No one will ever know. His mother reassured the surprised crowd by saying that it was not his first visit, that he already came to Jebale as a child, and yes, twice, and yes, with his dad, the Jebale native, though that only left one pondering with the local populace. If Mbappé had known how desperate Jebale was, why had he not done a thing for the town that, drawn on waters with the promise of a touristic paradise, palpitating with history, had only poverty to show?
To Mbappé, home is maybe like it is to me; an open sore. In a way, we are both casualties of a tyranny. I too always flew there ahead of major steps.
Home, a rusted talisman.