The One Who Makes Death Tremble

By Francis B. Nyamnjoh

The chronicle of Celui-Qui-Fait-Trembler-La-Mort was not a biography of a man, but the ledger of a vacuum. From the moment of his conception, he was a challenge to the natural rhythm of arrival and departure.

I. The Name of the Curse

In the village of Ekang, Celui-Qui-Fait-Trembler-La-Mort’s father – a man of blunt edges and short temper – had greeted the news of the pregnancy with a heavy, impatient silence. He did not want a son to carry his legacy. He wanted a world that required no heirs. When the boy was finally born, the father looked into the cradle and saw a ‘shadow wearing skin’. At the naming ceremony, the mother bypassed her husband’s lineage entirely, reaching back into the deep, dark well of her own ancestry. She named the boy after her great-great maternal grandfather, a name that translated in the old tongue to ‘Longstay’. It was a name that sounded less like a blessing and more like a sentence of endurance. She whispered it into the infant’s ear as if she knew he was destined to be a guest who would never take the hint to leave, while the father, in his quiet venom, continued to wish for the boy the shortest possible life.

II. The Reluctant Sacrament

The father’s rejection was soon mirrored by the rejection of the divine. When the boy reached the age for baptism, the village priest, Father Jean de Dieu – a man who had survived lions and smallpox – turned pale as the child was brought near the font.

‘I cannot’, Jean de Dieu whispered, his hands trembling. ‘The water… it recoils. There is a presence here that predates the Fall.’

‘He is a child of God!’ the mother screamed. She unleashed a primal, jagged wail that shook the icons from the walls. She stormed the altar, forcing the priest back against the tabernacle. ‘Baptise him, or I will burn this house of wood and stone to the ground with the fire in my lungs!’

Reluctantly, sobbing with a fear he could not name, the priest flicked the hyssop. As the water touched Celui-Qui-Fait-Trembler-La-Mort’s forehead, it did not bead or run. It evaporated instantly with a soft, hungry hiss. Rumour began that day: the priest had sensed that Satan had not merely visited the boy, but had moved in, brick by brick, erecting a fortress of malice where a soul should be.

III. The Scourge of St. Jude’s

By the time he reached school age, ‘Longstay’ had become a boy of unsettling stillness. Mr. Pierre Buba, the headmaster of St. Jude’s Academy – a God-fearing man of immense local respect – initially refused his admission. He looked into Celui-Qui-Fait-Trembler-La-Mort’s eyes and saw not a student, but an ‘epistemic void’.

‘I will not have my school captured by the dark forces that lurk within this boy’, Buba declared. ‘There is a frost in him that will kill the harvest of learning.’

But the mother, a virtuoso of guilt, cornered him in his office. ‘How would you explain to the Almighty, sir, that you let prejudice and superstition get the better of you?’ she asked, her voice a sharp blade of righteousness. ‘Will you tell Him you turned away a child because you feared the weight of his name?’

Trapped by his own piety, Mr. Buba yielded. It was the last mistake he would ever make.

‘Longstay’ did not need to fight to dominate. He simply existed, and in his presence, the school began to rot. He turned the sanctuary of the classroom into a theatre of horror. Teachers who attempted to instruct him found their memories slipping away like water through a sieve. They would stand at the chalkboard and forget the alphabet. They would look at Celui-Qui-Fait-Trembler-La-Mort and find they could no longer remember the names of their own children. One by one, the finest educators at St. Jude begged for transfers out of the village and the region, fleeing the ‘energy leech’ who sat in the back row.

Mr. Buba, the man of iron faith, withered into a husk. He was found dead at his desk six months later, his face frozen in a mask of silent screaming. There was no medical cause – his heart had simply stopped trying to beat in an atmosphere that had become too thin for the living.

When the final examinations arrived, Celui-Qui-Fait-Trembler-La-Mort took his seat without so much as cracking a spine. While other students scribbled with desperate, scratching energy, he remained still, peering into the ‘eyes of his mind.’ Whispers soon spread that he was harvesting answers directly from the collective consciousness of the examiners – reaching across the psychic void to drain the knowledge of those who truly possessed it. When the results were posted, his distinction was so flawlessly perfect it bordered on the grotesque.

As if to mock Father Jean de Dieu’s conviction that he was merely a pawn of the devil, he sought entry to a seminary. He was met with the same wall of rejection, culminating in the Archbishop’s decree that the boy would be ordained only over his dead body. Embittered, he departed for Muzunguland where, rumour has it, he found a strange bliss within the darkest shadows of its so-called civilisation.

This early mastery of extraction set the template for his presidency. He transformed the nation’s governance into a ‘cosmetic democracy’, where he acted simultaneously as the star player and the final umpire. He perfected the art of the ‘rigging caravan’, turning elections into a standing joke where ballot papers were distributed or withheld as if by divine whim, ensuring he remained the only ‘national’ entity while his rivals were reduced to dying regional flickers.

Under his watch, an election was treated like a football match where the winner was determined before the first whistle. One simply had to ‘corrupt the referee’ or ‘consult the witchdoctor’ to ensure the result. He organised these polls knowing full well he would win, mocking the opposition by telling them they had only themselves to blame for not knowing ‘what to do’ to secure a victory.

He learned that power was not about building, but about the ‘Simba’ – the art of the predator. By surrounding himself with praise-singers who danced and shouted to drown out the silence of his sterile heart, he created a facade of strength that paralysed his enemies. He maintained a ‘legal cage’ known as the Flight of the Hawk. He encouraged his subordinates to feast upon the national treasury until they were bloated with graft, only to ‘swoop down’ with sudden, righteous investigations the moment any subordinate grew too popular or ambitious.

This created a ‘war of the bellies’ where his officials fought not over ideology or vision, but for a seat at the ‘mangeoire’ – the high-table of state resources. In this system, patrons and clients were occasionally questioned, but the act of ‘eating’ the national cake remained a sacred, unquestioned prerequisite of power. By criminalising the very loyalty he demanded, he ensured that every potential successor was either already in a dungeon or living in the terror that they would be the next to be ‘harvested’ by his selective justice.

He reinforced this terror with an elaborate bureaucracy of exclusion, decreeing who ‘quite belonged’ in the political landscape based on their ‘sociological components’. His policy of ‘regional and ethnic balance’ was far less about stability than it was about ‘nation-deconstruction’, ensuring that no one could ever put together what his system had put asunder.

Like a master juggler, he played regional elites against one another, making it a crime of ‘anti-patriotism’ to seek solidarity across ethnic lines. By ensuring the only thing that united the people was a shared sense of mutual suspicion, he maintained his grip. By labelling any voice of dissent as an ‘ethnic stranger’ and forcing opposition supporters to chase their voting rights between distant villages and indifferent cities, he ensured that most of the population simply gave up.

The people retreated into a cynical ‘waithood’ where they no longer even ‘tapped their own bodies’ in protest. Mimboland thus became ‘le pays de on attend’ – the country of waiting – where the people developed an infinite, elastic capacity to endure misery while waiting for an ‘infant’ of change that never arrived. Their collective refrain became ‘on ne se tape même plus le corps’, a surrender born of the realisation that they were merely pawns in a chess game played by a power elite who used them for their own ends and then abandoned them to ignorance.

He did not lead. H e hypnotised, using the ‘eyes of his mind’ to anticipate every move of those who dared to dream of a Mimboland without him. Under his rule, Mimboland became a ‘paradis des paradoxes’. Even when objective conditions like salary cuts or the total decay of infrastructure should have sparked violent outbreaks, nothing happened. It was as if the entire country had fallen victim to a ‘hypnotic spell’ cast by a sorcerer state that rendered the population incapable of sustained resistance.

IV. The Great Eraser

Celui-Qui-Fait-Trembler-La-Mort’s rise to power in Mimboland was an inevitable flooding. By the time he ascended to the presidency, the sterility of his soul had become the official policy of the state. He governed for sixty years without a single achievement to report – unless one counts the meticulous ‘total erasure’ of his people’s future.

He perfected the art of ‘rule by absence’, spending months at a time in a mirrored hotel atop a distant, snow-capped mountain range, far from the dust of Mimboland. From this alpine sanctuary, he governed by silence and shadow, ensuring that his physical presence became a rare, terrifying epiphany rather than a daily reality. This distance turned his administration into a ‘phantom state’, where ministers lived in perpetual fear of a telephone call from a man who was everywhere in influence but nowhere in person.

Under his reign, Mimboland became a taxidermied nation: a hollow shell that looked like a country on a map but was stuffed inside with the straw of his silence. To protect this hollow shell, he raised a ‘Shadow Guard’ – an elite phalanx of soldiers trained in silence and lethality who answered only to his whisper. While the regular army crumbled into disrepair and shared the poverty of the streets, this private shield was fed the finest riches of the state.

These soldiers stood as a wall of iron between the ‘vampire chief’ and the people, ensuring that the groans of the hungry never reached the soundproofed chambers of the palace. As the national infrastructure regressed into a ‘Stone Age’ of dry taps and dead power grids, the physical body of the state decayed in inverse proportion to the President’s unnatural persistence.

While stadiums became abandoned husks and electricity turned into a flickering memory of a bygone era, Celui-Qui-Fait-Trembler-La-Mort sat in a palace illuminated by the siphoned vitality of the youth. He remained a ‘vampire chief’ presiding over a kingdom of ghosts and dry pipes. To the outside world, his ledger boasted an ‘impressive’ 4.5 percent economic growth, though this was merely a spin-doctored mathematical ghost existing only in palace reports and international briefings.

Yet beneath these polished numbers, the nation’s roads became a ‘shame’ and public buildings were left to rot in a state of terminal neglect. Rodent-infested refuse mountains rose as toxic sign-posts and health hazards throughout cities the administration insisted were modern, effectively burying the daily reality of mass misery.

Families reached a breaking point where they could no longer afford to send even a single child to primary school or purchase basic first aid drugs for the dying. As children went hungry, the elite few swam in the opulence of embezzlement and kickbacks, feasting on a diminishing national cake and treating honesty as a laughable luxury.

This ‘Longstay’ was fuelled by a predatory and occult style of governance. Celui-Qui-Fait-Trembler-La-Mort became the ultimate ‘sang-sue’ – a void of power that gripped the nation’s throat while masking his true nature behind a facade of permanent lethargy.

Whispers spread of his membership in dark orders and secret rituals involving the consumption of ‘adenochrome’, enhanced by the life-force of the innocent to rejuvenate his failing heart.

As the youth of Mimboland fell into a collective, exhausted sleep, their vitality was harvested to ensure he outlived every rival, friend, and family member. He grew sleeker and younger, thriving in his isolation, while his nation turned grey and withered under the shadow of his eternal reign.

To legitimise this era of stagnation, he maintained a ‘vocalist’ of high intellectual standing, a tragic figure reminiscent of Professor Griot-Sans-Cesse. The President had no use for virtue or meritocracy, preferring ‘loyal mediocrity’ over ‘critical excellence’. He promoted second-rate academics specifically so they could provide the conceptual rhetoric needed to justify his highhandedness and ‘cosmetic’ reforms, while genuine intellectuals were denied promotion and left to rot in an induced ‘misère intellectuelle’.

Occasionally, when the ‘confusion and drama’ of his stalled process threatened to boil over, he would perform a public ritual of ‘cleansing’ by sacking a high-ranking minister on national radio. This provided a temporary ‘semblance of legitimacy’, a ploy to make it seem as though the ‘vampire chief’ was finally yielding to pressure. In reality, such theatre only reinforced the core tenet of his reign: that the boss is always right, even when he is standing in the ruins of his own making.

While the President remained unmoving, the Professor withered into a ‘meagrelette’. Once his academic prestige had been fully drained, the Professor was discarded with ‘great indifference’, left to die in skeletal ruin while his master’s reign continued, unabated and absolute.

V. The Rejection of the Damned

As he neared his centenary, Celui-Qui-Fait-Trembler-La-Mort sought a final ‘completion’. He flooded the Holy See with gold, demanding a Papal visit. But when the Pope arrived, he could not look the man in the eye. During the High Mass, the wine turned to vinegar the moment he approached. ‘I cannot bless a vacuum’, the Pope whispered.

Furious, Celui-Qui-Fait-Trembler-La-Mort turned to the shadows, joining the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and finally, a nameless Satanic Order. In a basement beneath the palace, he summoned a Prince of Darkness, but even the demon recoiled. ‘Hell has no room for you’, the demon growled. ‘You are more Satan than I am. If I take you, you will put out the fires of the Pit with your boredom.’

VI. The Man Death Runs From

Now, at ninety-nine, Celui-Qui-Fait-Trembler-La-Mort was stranded. He travelled to the ‘Edge of the World’ to find the Spirit of Death. He found a gaunt figure in a linen suit packing a suitcase. ‘Take me’, he demanded. Death didn’t look up. ‘I am a harvester of life, Longstay’, Death explained, using the name his mother had hidden like a curse.

‘I take those who have lived, those who have suffered, and even those who have sinned. But you are a ‘vampire chief’ of the present moment. You have turned your people into meagrelettes to keep your own skin smooth. If I touch you, I will be contaminated by your sterility, and the universe will be stuck in a permanent, suffocating stasis.’

Death picked up his suitcase and began to run – fleeing in terror from the man whom even the end could not accommodate.

‘Hilarion Nyamnfuka Pmia’, the name etched into the sterile ledgers of official administrative documentation, returned to his mahogany throne. He sat and he waited as the years stretched into a permanent, frozen state of ‘waithood’.

Centuries passed, and his skin eventually took on the calcified texture of a monument. Even as the nation around him crumbled into a hollow, taxidermied shell, his lungs maintained their rhythmic, sterile vacuum.

He became the ‘Infinite Ancestor’, a living statue in a museum of the forgotten where every collective aspiration had long since been erased. He had won the ultimate battle against change, only to receive the most terrible punishment of all: to remain the only entity in the universe that was never allowed to end.