Bate Besong

Till Death do Us French!: On Bate Besong, Cameroon, and Matters of the Marrow

By Afam Akeh (Originally published in Gboungboun Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 2. November 2007)

For me, he was more the playwright than the poet. But in another time, in another place, it was his poetry and my poetry that had brought us together as fledgling writers – a coming together much in mind two decades later as I traveled cyberspace seeking the man for our interview. And we thought we already had him in our pages – alive, provocative, as he can be, angry even, we dared to hope. But death was also plotting. It took the man. It took our interview...

Book Review - Their Champagne Party Will End! Poems in Honor of Bate Besong

Joyce Ashuntantang & Dibussi Tande (eds). Their Champagne Party Will End! Poems in Honor of Bate Besong. Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2008. 76 pages. Paperback. Available from African Books Collective (UK) £12.95 and amazon.com and affiliates (international) $19.95

The celebration in verse of the life and works of Bate Besong, Cameroon's most influential and controversial poet, playwright and scholar. Published by Langaa RPCIG.

With Contributions from 27 poets from Cameroon and Africa and a forward by Ba'bila Mutia

Tributes to Bate Besong: The Day The Sun Set In The Morning

By Azore Opio

There is a Bafut joke about  an angry man who went to the village and shouted - Ngwa! And how 800 young men answered the call in unison. My bosom friend, departed Dr. Hilarious Ngwa Ambe, answered to that call when an angry god called that name last year, March 8.

When the people living in Buea went to bed on March 7, they had no way of knowing that during the pre-dawn minutes of the following morning they would be jarred from their peaceful slumber by shock waves that Bate Besong and his 'clone' Hilarious Ngwa Ambe, Ngwangwa Kwasen and their driver, Awoh, had died in a car crash.

Launched Into the Labyrinth of the Unknown

By Sammy Oke Akombi

I sat in the crowd watching, tense
The performance of intellectuals
As they used words to polish words.
I simply moaned, at a point.
Thank God, all isn’t lost yet.
Our country’s still very hot.

Then I listened to the brevity of the one
Who had just given birth to “Disgrace”
I’d rather it was Grace.
Yet I yearned that his life won’t be as brief
As he had been brief.

Eruption (For Bate Besong et Al)

By Mathew Takwi 

The entire nation quaked like the Buea Mountain,
To erupting sounds of a book launch: Disgrace
Obasinjom Warrior again to lash out oligarchs
Chief Masters of thievery and misrule

Worrying their tinted sleep and quiet fetid acts to change;
For in a dreadful drench we daily drip
A zombie his appearance to them really looked
A talkative whip his pen truly was

Ikot Ansa Blues (To Bate Besong: The angry poet who died and left us in anger)

By Agbor R. Agbor

Ete Song Songooo!
Ete Songooo!
Would have been the shout
After the last tramentano
Alas!
Unbelievable!
But as Gregory Obenson
And as Ada Ugah
Great icons of their time
Son of Jacob power
Ah do not forget Lobe
Nor Udokpani, Afei-udomifiok, Adiasim

A Life Fulfilled (To BB - One Year After)

By Neba-Fuh

A year just leapt passed!
We wailed in pain, that fateful March day,
In wonderment of Nature's unexplained course.

Yours, was a life fulfilled,
Constantly greasing your  brain nerves with  intellectual oil.
Stiffening your stance on evil deeds,
Never hating the doers.

You molded young scholars with ethics clay,
Feeding their intellect with literary
masterpieces,
You toiled for a better society,
Living the realities of the folks you defended.

You denounced injustice,
Rejected hypocrisy,
Lampooned sycophants,
Shunned tribalism,
Mocked quislings,
Attacked the status quo.

You led a life of humility,
With undiluted bravery;
Your world wasn't here indeed -this corrupt world of ours.

Today, we experience what you prophesied yesterday;
A country's future hijacked by con cronies;
Attempting to steal a blank cheque to rule  ad infinitum.
Great Sage, you left a bad situation that is turning worse;
Options, dwindling to the last -violence.
If only they could hear you then, now.

Rest in peace, Master; as your spirit lives on.

Who's Afraid of Anglophone (Cameroon) Theatre?

By Bate Besong

First published in West Africa (London), 7-3 July, 1997 1106-1107; 14-20 July 1997, 1146

An unpublished 1979 doctoral dissertation submitted to the School of English, University of Leeds, England by Hansel Ndumbe Eyoh reports the Francophone Cameroonian playwright Guillaume Oyono-Mbia as having said that although Cameroon enjoys the position in Africa, being by far the country with the largest number of known dramatists – in the French speaking section alone –

“The Anglophone region of Cameroon has been less fortunate” for neither the existence of the Editions CLE in Yaounde…nor..the training programme organisized by the French and the American cultural centres in Yaounde and Douala nor the theatre Ecole in Yaounde, have affected play-wrighting from this region” (vi-vii)

Drama and Politics: A Study of Bate Besong’s "Beasts of No Nation" (1990)

BY Kelvin Ngong Toh

Drama is one genre in Literature whose functionality in society cannot be under estimated. It is an active and practical genre because; there is harmony and a practical relationship between the audience and the dramatis personae. It thus imitates its society at best. From this, it is difficult to separate drama from politics; politics being a science that deals with the state and the condition of the human society.

Bate Besong is one of the most renown Cameroonian playwright of English expression, besides Bole Butake, Victor Epie Ngome and John Nkemngong, who is of the younger generation of Cameroonian playwrights in English. Even then, Bate Besong’s plays have not gained impetus in the eyes of critics. But examining the content and form of Beasts of no Nations, a play he published in 1990, one can rightly conclude that Bate Besong is an experimentalist playwright and a reformer.

Bate Besong: Is his Poetry Too Difficult for Cameroonians?

By Shadrach A. Ambanasom

African Literature Association (ALA) Bulletin. Vol. 28(3/4), Summer/Fall 2000

© UB Ulumni e-group

Bate Besong is the most paradoxical Anglophone Cameroonian writer today in the sense that his work attracts and repels readers at one and the same time. While his poetry is relatively opaque, he nevertheless remains popular, and while his themes entice readers, his style alienates them. Even some dons are ill at ease with his jazzy, abrasive style. Yet among university students there is no literature lecturer more popular than Bate Besong, an erudite iconoclast with an exceptional range of vocabulary power. 

For Osagyefo Capitaine Thomas Sankara

By Bate Besong

Mongrelised Iscariots
Were in fact bred there.
A cruel ghommid-in-wellingtons
Wore
A canary pullover
Pulled on his putschist muffler
Dyed,
A brownish yellow

Butchered
Ceaselessly into the grey
Hours of the dawn

The Power of Bate Besong: Alfred Matumamboh Offers a Critical Appraisal of a New Drama

Originally Published in West Africa Magazine (London), 1997

In his new play, The Banquet, Bate Besong has painted for us a terrifying tragic scene of human existence.  He piles up dreadful images, in his characteristically calculated manner, to evoke a vision of the dehumanisation and calamity that the evil in man has compelled him to wreak upon himself.  The density and intensity of the frightening images and metaphors inform us of the doom that we have unleashed upon ourselves.

Drama & the Revolutionary Vision: Bate Besong's "Beasts of No Nation" and Bole Butake's "Lake God"

By Eunice Ngongkum (Ph.D.) - Department of African Literature, University of Yaounde I

Abstract
Using the Marxist, Sociological and Formalistic approaches to literary criticism, this paper aims at underscoring the centrality of Beasts of No Nation and Lake God in the evolution of Bate Besong and Bole Butake as dramatists of revolt. The playwrights do not only realistically and critically capture post-colonial Cameroon in its political, social and spiritual essence but, actually lay the basis of a future of hopes and possibilities through the actions of the oppressed in these plays. The revolutionary overture in these works lays the foundation of a developing revolutionary offensive that matures significantly in subsequent plays

Dramatic Discourse and Democratic Transition in Cameroon: Aesthetics of Liberation in Bate Besong's "Requiem for the Last Kaiser"

By Tiku Takem, Ph.D. (United States of America, USA)

Bate Besong is a widely – known intellectual and social critic whose creative corpus as well as his commentaries articulate his political and ideological anxieties towards the insensitivities of the postcolony. Consequently, he has crafted an aesthetics of liberation predicated on the impulse to map out an alternative vision for the suffering masses. Requiem for the Last Kaiser, 1one of Besong’s popular plays, is a typical example of his drama of liberation. Its relevance to the political and social affairs of contemporary Cameroon is located in its engagement with the profound contradictions of the neo-colonial state characterized by ineptitude and absolutism of political leadership.

The Enchantments of Kangsen Feka Wakai’s Poetic Pantheon

By Bate Besong (Published in The Herald, No. 1784, Wednesday, 26-27 April, 2006)

“The poet speaks not for himself only but for his fellowmen. His cry is their cry, which only he can utter. That is what gives it its depth. But if he is to speak for them, he must suffer with them, rejoice with them, work with them, fight with them.” George Thomson (Marxism and Poetry. New York: International Publishers, 1946, p.65)

It was the Hungarian theoretician, Georg Lukacs, who, in the previous century, revived the full thrust of the Aristotelian concept of mimesis according to which the literary artifact is regarded as pushing beyond the world of surface appearances to capture, crystallize and reflect “the essence of things.”

The Ghost of Um Nyobe (Musings from the Other Side of the Bridge)

By Dibussi Tande

They say you died in enemy territory
They say you died on the wrong side of THE BRIDGE
But what better place to die
- On the other side of the bridge -
Than in the Sanaga Maritime -
The sacred land of the Ngog Lituba
The springboard of Cameroun nationalism
The heartland of the Cameroun resistance;
Purified with the blood of thousands of patriots
Who said NO! to the imperialists and neo-colonialists?

Bate Besong: A Tribute on Canvas

A Portrait by Abidemi Olowonira

BB was introduced to me by a very good friend mine, Kangsen Feka Wakai, also from Cameroon. He told me about BB's influence on the Cameroonian and African literary world. I had read few of his poems and essays and was looking forward to meeting him one day.

Unfortunately this will not happen on this sorry earth... perhaps in AFTER-AFRICA.

BB will forever be missed in the realm of the young African pioneers and his legacy will forever remain with us. Su' n re o baba (sleep well baba).

The Mountain Weeps

By Ilongo Fritz Ngale (Originally published on IlongoSphere)

The mourning seems to have no end
As the morning star of joy seems to have fled,
For the mountain bleeds
Its flanks red with blood
Which copiously flows through the pores of its kids,
Poor souls taken off into tragedy lane
Slain before their times

Farewell BB

F. Akemfua (Bonanjo, Douala Cameroon)

You knew too well the face of this day
These seasons that fed us with hunger and pain
You wailed out loud
As the cloak of darkness fell
As the chanting of the anthem fell out of rhythm
To the resonating sounds of the drums
You saw the scar- faced land, your land
And the knife sharp and stained with blood
You saw the desecration of the alter of Dreams

Flowing like a stream (In memory of Bate Besong)

By Ekpe Inyang

Materials
as building blocks
to make
the message crystal-clear
and safe for public consumption
must flow like a stream

Bad Boy

By Ekpe Inyang

Obasinjom warrior
Alias BB
Brave Boy
Bad Boy!?!
Tireless warrior

You intoned the tune
Of reformist chants
And charted the course
Of bad boys’ march

Bate Besong: The Family Remembers

BB's Wife and Children Interviewed by Elvis Tah (Culled from The Post)

Happier Times: Bate Besong and Family

Besong: The Man, His Ideas, His Vision And His Life

By Babila Mutia Bate

Prof. Babila Mutia fluting in tears to the tune of "lead kindly light"at BB's funeral

Besong was born on May 8, 1954 in Manyu Division, at that time called Mamfe, in the then Southern Cameroons. He attended Hope Waddell Training Institute in Calabar and later came to study at St. Bede's Secondary School in Ashing, Kom, where he obtained his GCE A Levels. He left Cameroon after his A Levels and went to Nigeria where he was admitted into the University of Calabar in the Department of English and Literary Studies.

Décès de Bate Besong: Bate Besong a trouvé la mort dans un accident de la route

Né au Nigeria de parents camerounais, auteur d'une dizaine de pièces de théâtre et d'une demi-dizaine de recueils de poésies, Bate Besong était incontestablement l'une des plumes les plus constantes et les plus représentatives de ce qu'on pourrait appeler la deuxième génération de l'émergente littérature camerounaise d'expression anglaise.

Enseignant au département d'anglais de l'université de Buea depuis le milieu des années 90, Bate Besong était également connu pour ses prises de position sans concession et ses déclarations à l'emporte-pièce. Très populaire parmi la jeunesse anglophone scolarisée, il était aussi la bête noire d'une frange importante de l'intelligentsia anglophone.

Polémiste redouté que certains observateurs n'hésitaient pas à comparer à Mongo Beti, l'auteur de Obasinjom Warriors whith Poems after Detention était la figure emblématique d'une littérature camerounaise d'expression anglaise à la recherche de ses marques, tour à tour cassante et tendre, incisive et controversée.

(c) Africultures

African Writers Mourn Prolific Poet, Besong

From The Guardian (Nigeria), March 26, 2007

Click here to print or download complete article in PDF format

Remembering Bate Besong (Frontpage of the Special Edition of The Post Newspaper)

After Academic Honours: Bate Besong Buried In Ndekwai

By Walter Wilson Nana & Elvis Tah (The Post Newspaper)

The Faculty of Arts has lost its pride, its pearl. I doubt if Cameroon would be able to produce another BB in the next four or five decades - Prof. Albert Azeyeh, Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Buea.

Dr. Jacobs Bate Besong, Lecturer, Department of English, University of Buea, UB, who died in a ghastly car crash, March 8, alongside two other Cameroonian literary juggernauts, Dr. Hilarious Ngwa Ambe, Thomas Kwasen Gwangwa'a and a driver, Samson Tabe Awoh, was Thursday, March 22, laid in his final resting place in his native Ndekwai in Mamfe, Manyu Division.

Tribute to Bate Besong

Paddy Ezeala - Lagos, Nigeria

I am a Nigerian friend of Bate Besong. I met him in early 1990s at the University of Calabar in the house of Ada Ugah, a Nigerian literary scholar and prolific bilingual writer. Professor Ugah, my former teacher, himself died in a similar circumstance two years ago. Besong had returned to complete his Ph.D while I was rounding up my Masters programme.

University of Buea - Academic Honours for Late Bate Besong

By Regina Liengu Etaka [Cameroon Tribune]

Last Thursday was a day of grief at the University of Buea as academic honours were paid to late Dr. Bate Besong, fondly called BB. The ceremony, which took place in the Amphitheater 750, brought together over 4,000 people who did not only come to mourn BB but also to celebrate the works of the great poet. For the Vice Chancellor of UB, Professor Vincent Titanji, the death of BB has inflicted a deep wound in the University community. He said BB was a man of an independent spirit.

Bate Besong: The Final Journey (III)

BB Lying In State at the Amphi 750 of the University of Buea

Bate Besong: The Final Journey (II)

BB's Children Lead the Funeral Procession

Bate Besong: The Final Journey (I)

March 21, 2007 - Posthumous Academic Honors for Bate Besong at the University of Buea (Pictures Courtesy of The Entrepreneur Newspaper)

Bate Besong: Jeremiah In Cameroon (A Review of BB's "Disgrace")

Reviewed by Innocent Futcha

Indeed the poems in this book individually and collectively, are loaded with tons of emotions, crafted in a rich array of stylistic devices and heavily charged with enough semantic venom to have the impact of a plastic bomb". Beban Sammy Chumbow

Disgrace Emanya - Nkpe, Bate Besong's latest collection of poems, displays the following assertion as a kind of frontispiece:  "These people leave nothing but deceit and disgrace as an inheritance for future generations" The letter of Jeremiah, 47. This seeming quote from the Bible is nowhere to be found in the book of Jeremiah. It is made up by the poet who, by so doing, indicates that he should be looked upon as Jeremiah in Cameroon.

In the Old Testament, the prophet Jeremiah is known as a very sensitive person who deeply loved his people, to whom he spoke with deep emotion to warn them of the disaster that was to fall upon them as a result of their misconduct. Some of the most remarkable passages in the book point to the day when there would be a new covenant.

Farewell Master Of Obscurantism

By Azore Opio (The Post Newspaper)

It was 1996. Early in the evening of a summer day, I stood staring out my Hong Kong apartment window at a hazy grey horizon. The Pacific, calm at this moment, was lapping lazily on the stony shores of Stanley. The sweet and sour smell of frying pork wafting from a nearby restaurant tickled my nostrils. In a few days I would be flying to Cameroon, missing America by so many longitudes.

Coming from the skyscrapers and the bubbling waters of rocky Hong Kong, I felt like a gigantic object sailing along the rubber-tree and banana-lined strip of tarmac that wove towards Buea. I had planned to do two years in Buea and keep on going on my itchy feet (I have done 10 so far).

Beast on the Rampage (For Bate Besong)

By JK Bannavti

Bugle of the muzzled and lyre of the hurting fools
Milk of the starved and spring in the scourging noon
Path of the legless and staff of the blind
Machete of our fathers and warrior with the prize
Shower of Munchi Doga and grace of the hunchback
Pain of Ednouay and dread of Adinginging
Rain in his wedding and urine in his wine
Eye in his cupboard and fangs on his crimes
Reviled visitor, it is night
The beast is on rampage
Beast of no nation

The Painful Exit of a Literary Juggernaut

By Uche Eze Nkatta Idika (National Youth Service Corper - Oceanic Bank International Plc. -Abuja, Nigeria)

The News of BB’s death
When I received a phone call in the early hours of that Thursday morning, I was delighted to observe that it was a foreign call coming from Cameroon. I could readily recognize that the number belonged to a friend; Ngala Ndi. I was happy I would have a chat with an old friend who was still at home; that we’ll talk of old memories and discuss future prospects. After exchanging pleasantries, Ngala did not know how to convey the news to me, perhaps owing to the fact that he knew how close I was to BB. So he started by saying that BB had an accident on his way to Yaounde. I screamed and said BB just sent me a mail a day earlier, informing me of his new book to be launched on Wednesday 7th March 2007.

BB Goes Down But Stands Tall

By Adams Bouddih (Originally published in The Sun)

It might have been wishful thinking when BB sang the dirge of the dictators around him in Requiem for the last Kaiser. Ironically, the Kaisers are still around and would learn of BB’s requiem with guessable pleasure.

When BB an outspoken critic wrote The Most Cruel Death of the Talkative Zombie, about the dehumanised race (the living dead or zombies) that he and his kith and kin had been reduced to; or is it the talkative zombies they have become, he didn’t think he would die in the cruel way he did. BB was talkative – or better still, penkative - as his pen never stopped flowing while bemoaning the plight of the downtrodden. But he didn’t know he would die in so cruel a way. Indeed, “What a way to die?” - to borrow from another prolific writer and teacher, Dr. Linus Asong.

A Baobab Fell in the Forest But Did They Notice? Bate Besong or the Symbol of the Cameroon Divide

By Dibussi Tande (Originally published on Scribbles from the Den)

“And yet, there was a time when people had faith, implicit faith - in this Union – without making any investigations. But I ask you, where is that faith now? It has vanished. So utterly! The bonds have snapped. We carry the scars of ‘brotherhood’ in a country so unaccustomed to candour.” Bate Besong - 1993

A common (in fact the most prevalent) theme in Bate Besong's writings (fiction and non-fiction) is the fate of Cameroon's English-speaking minority whom he referred to in his famous Beasts of No Nation as 'nightsoilmen" locked up in the antechamber of the bilingual republic; a people whose culture, history and even existence was an afterthought to the French-speaking majority of the bilingual Cameroon Republic.

Tribute To Bate Besong

Victor Epie'Ngome (Culled from The Sun)

BB, you must have known
That the requiem was at hand -
Yours before the Kaiser's -
So you sang with haste
Both psalm and antiphon
While the congregation yawned
Which now sings dies irae

BB, Gwangwa'a, Ambe and Awoh ... Rest softly

By Kenneth Komtanghi (Wanaku)

How does one write an eulogy for friends/brothers
prematurely and roughly harvested from the garden of life,
when one can still taste the salt from one's tears?

 

On My Dying (Message from Beyond):

Christmas Ebini
(A Poem Bate Besong Would Write Now)

I leave you
With no regrets
As I see the porter
Of the beautiful gates
A broad smile
On his face
With a bunch of keys
In his broad hands

It Seems Like it Was Only Yesterday...

Ewome Esoni

I have been speechless since I heared of Dr Ambe and BB's brutal death.Worse of all is the thoughts which keep coming to me especially during our recent exams in which BB came to the hall with that his usual smile and seriousness.It is unimaginable to think that he is gone,but what can I say.As a final year student in the English department of the university of Buea, and on behalf of all the level 400 students, I want to say we will really miss BB's lectures and his presence.There is so much to say about BB because we were so fond of him but I will express my regret in the following lines of this song:

"May Bate Besong the Great Bard Find Eternal Rest"

By Philip Effiong(Nigerian Novelist, Poet)

Today (15 March, 2007) I just received an e-mail from a former schoolmate at the university of Calabar informing me of the tragic death of Bate Besong. Although we were in the same department (English & Literary Studies), Besong was two years ahead of me and among the first English graduates of the University of Calabar.

"Bate Besong Trode on Soyinka's Footprints" (Reminisces of a Former Classmate)

By Vahid Enow Ashu

The name Bate Besong first confronted me in the pages of The Nigerian Chronicle, that Cross River State Government-owned paper.This was in 1978 and his poems featured regularly in the literary column. I was to meet him in the flesh a few months later in October of that year when I went to the University of Calabar to take a degree in English and Literary studies, the same course BB was reading.

It happened this way.

Memory Lane: Change Waka and His Man Sawa Boy (Book Review)

Review by Chris Dunton, National University of Lesotho (African Book Publishing Record, Vol. XXVIII NO. 2, 2002 PP. 123 -124)

Change Waka and His Man Sawa Boy. Yaounde: Editions CLE, 2001. 65 pp. price not reported pap. ISBN 1723501434

Bate Besong is a Cameroonian poet and dramatist, an out-spoken critic of his country's regime and especially of its handling of the status of western ("anglophone") Cameroon (witness Besong's recent journalistic comments on the death of the veteran politician, S.T. Muna, one of the enablers of Cameroon's unification). Earlier plays, such as The Most Cruel Death of the Talkative Zombie and Requiem for the Last Kaiser, are scathing satires on the Cameroon polity and on its use of a formidable repressive apparatus. Change Waka continues in the same vein, but here the specific focus is on election rigging, the most significant stage prop for the play being a (fatuously) transparent ballot box.

GOODBYE BB

George A. Ngwa, Ph.D. - United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Pretoria, South Africa

I'm just feeling a bit raw. Since the horrible news struck on Thursday, March 8th, like a bolt of lightning from the netherworld. I have been struggling to make sense of it all, but have little to show for the effort except in deep denial. But the facts are there, and I have to reconcile myself to them.

Bate Besong (aka BB) was a friend and a former colleague in the University of Buea. I knew Thomas Gwangwa when, with Robert Ekukole, Benn Bongang, etc., they trained as producers for the toddling CRTV in the ‘80s. Hilarious Ambe got to Molyko after I had left. But I knew him through his postings on various websites.

Death Of A Literary Baobab, Teacher And Counsellor: Bate Besong aka BB

By Canute Tangwa

Prologue: Thanks to Auntie Becky Ndive, the late Teh Che Augustine and I used to present a Literary Half Hour programme over CRTV Buea. We invited writers and freethinkers from within and without the academy. When Teh Che left, I ran the programme alone with the assistance of Edward Aminkeng.I decided to invite my teacher, friend and counsellor, Bate Besong alias BB, the Obasinjom Warrior and The Writer As Tiger! It was vintage BB.

Bate Besong As Seen By Kwasen Gwangwa'a

This was a tribute to Bate Besong, which Kwasen Gwangwa'a read on the day of Bate Besong's Book Launch, several hours before their demise

Before the introduction of television in Cameroon, Bate Besong was well known by regular readers of Cameroon Tribune through his popular column: "The Writer as Tiger" in which he highlighted the visionary role of writers, x-raying some leading writers as models.

The radio and later on television were to follow suit in popularising Besong the artist, the writer and his works.

The radio and later on television were to follow suit in popularising Besong the artist, the writer and his works.

Bate Besong: Sample Tributes from the Literary World

Olabisi Gwamna (Professor of of Communications, Iowa Wesleyan College, Mount Pleasant (USA)

"I used to call him Okigbo’s nephew, and he would laugh, his eyes twinkling through his glasses. Bate Besong was my colleague in the Masters program in the 80’s at the University of Ibadan’s English Department. Even then, more than twenty years ago, Bate’s creativity was unrivaled in the area of poetry, and his excellence sparkled through the twenty eight odd essays those professors made us write."

Requiem for the Genuine Intellectual

By Peter Vakunta

He’s not here;
yet far and away
echoes of his prolific
erudition resounds.

He’s not here;
but the legacy of his
intellect lives here.