Brice Albin

My mother Nancy Hartwell turns 80 today!! What a blessing it is to be able to celebrate her and still have her in my life. My father's history is extraordinary and well documented. My mom’s life is extraordinary too, and too few know it. I want to take a moment to honor her, and her remarkable story. She was born Nancy Jean Hartwell, in West Virginia, and grew up in Tampa, Florida, where she lives again today. At 17 she moved to Washington, DC to study International Relations at American University, and there she met my father, who was completing a Doctorate in International Comparative Law at Georgetown University. They wanted to marry in Maryland, but for this blond, blue eyed American and this dark handsome Cameroonian, interracial marriage was, and had been, illegal there for over 300 years. Maryland finally repealed the ban and then the US Supreme Court struck down the remaining state bans in Loving v. Virginia. My parents immediately married. The newly married couple moved to Cameroon and I was born shortly thereafter. Nancy, or Bessem as she soon became known, quickly integrated into her new country and made it her own. She set out to learn local languages, including my father's language, Kenyang. She became fluent in Bassa and Ewondo, since for those she could support her learning with books and tapes. She still speaks them today. She also had to learn French, and since that wasn't enough, she has added many others since, including Arabic, and taught herself to read Egyptian hieroglyphs. My mom is a world published author. Her best known works are her plays, written under her pen name Jeanne Ngo Libondo, translated into multiple languages and broadcast on the BBC and ORTF in the 1970s: "Joseph, Haven't You Got Your Bicycle Yet?" and "Oh, How Dearly I Detest Thee!" Both are still being staged in theaters across Africa, half a century after she wrote them. She still writes, and has published novels on the theme of human trafficking, such as "Prince Ibrahim's Favorite" and "Harem Slave." In Cameroon she became one of the first women to hold an executive position, as directeur administratif at Socamac. She had also worked at Guinness and Crevettes du Cameroun. Then there were her cakes and her cookies! Some here will remember. She might have made your birthday cake. One memorable one was for Ahidjo's daughter's wedding in Garoua, for thousands of people. And then there were those peanut butter cookies of hers, sold at Monoprix in Douala. When other girls my age were given dolls, my mother gave me books. Not just one at a time. She would literally bring me boxes full of books, in English and in French. She loves to travel and I was lucky enough that she would carry me with her, so that by the time I was twelve I had been to more than fifteen countries. And her house was never only ours. Someone was always staying, for a week or a term or a decade, and several of those people are simply my family now. And there is this thing about my Mom. She's like Wikipedia. She will tell you the most random details about history, geography, linguistics. Always learning. She has never accepted an answer she did not believe. When her friends the Mpondo family were murdered, my mother and I had been amongst the last to have seen them alive. When the official account did not make sense, she did her own investigation, and under Cameroon's Ahidjo regime, it almost cost her her life. It did cost her the country she loved and had made her own. She was forced to move back to the US and start a new life. She then worked for companies like Chemonics before starting her catering business. She is now retired in Tampa, Florida. There is so much to say about her, it could fill a book. But on this very special day, I wanted to share with you a bit about her story because it deserves to be written, deserves to be shared. Happy 80th birthday, Mom! Nancy Jean Hartwell. Nancy Hartwell Enonchong. Bessem Enonchong. Jeanne Ngo Libondo.