Reviewed By Bate Besong - The Post No 611 of Friday, Oct. 22, 2004.
Francis Nyamnjoh (2003). The Convert, Botwana, Mmegi Publishing House, 44pp.Preliminary Remarks
Professor Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s academic and creative writing itinerary has embraced a wide range of subjects and moods. The topography of Mind Searching (1991) and its sequel The Disillusioned African (1995), for instance, fundamentally explore fragmented landscapes in which ethnic consciousness; bigotry, exclusivist sentiments and narrow-minded irredentism have become the determinants of an evolving material culture.
These abnormalities have given rise to the institutional and systemic defacements ingrained in the aberrant mode of national intercourse, further adumbrated by sham-democratisation circuses that have given rise to the massive concussions to the inebriated, neo-colonial Cameroonian state structure.
The visionlessness of successive Francophone leadership and their legendary obduracy and antagonism to utilise the gifts and gains of Reunification, for the affirmation of national consciousness, has rendered the federal mode of governance artificial in structure and content (See Richard Joseph, 1978: Piet Konings & Nyamnjoh (2003).
Clearly, then, the Reunification agenda has been imprisoned in an imploding time capsule.
As most expository prose writers and socio-cultural activists do, Nyamnjoh has tried to observe, as closely and objectively as possible, the character, the patterns, and dynamics of the evolution of the killer-incisors of the Cameroonian monster state apparatus, to revisit old ideas and beliefs in line with new findings and realities in his academic writings (1999, 2003).
By targeting the mediocre calibre of educated Cameroonians emerging from the Federal behemoth since 1972, in his fictional writing, the novelist of the satirical pieces Mind Searching and The Disillusioned African, was making a statement on the idiocy of political leadership (Francophone and Anglophone) in which a nation’s historical journey has been one of constant omissions and ineffectualities.
But, although, the combative and utilitarian aspects of these novels were recognised and identified, Mind Searching and The Disillusioned African manifest no overt ideological commitment.
Conflict, which by its modus operandi suggests contrast, is important to Nyamnjoh’s novels, but even more vital to the unity of dramatic structure of The Convert (2003), for it reinforces the exploration of the complex and ambiguous relationship between reality and illusion in this new aesthetic experiment.
In this play, set in Gaborone, Botswana, Nyamnjoh is fascinated with the ethically complex issue of Christian fundamentalism. The preoccupations of members of the Ultimate Church of Christ for better or worse has been the focus of his dramaturgy. The fictive UCC provides a unique window through which to appraise the explosion of Pentecostal belief system, tapping into the deep veins of human desperation.
The social problems and psychological pressures, which give rise to the born-again phenomenon, and the strong addiction of fundamentalist ecstasies, are given full rein in The Convert. Dialogue has, therefore, been used to establish distinctions among characters and reveal a great deal about traits, occupations or social status.
The playwright’s blend of styles: satiric commentary, tense confrontation and heightened ritualistic comments, challenge not only audiences but production teams as well.
At the core of the implicit philosophy in Professor Nyamnjoh’s The Convert, then, is the theatrical manifesto that contemporary society has not only to liberate itself, and its productive powers from “Pentecostal”, freak religions and distortion, it also has to liberate these same productive capacities from their present prostration.
There is a deep, engaging humanism that pervades The Convert, but it is a humanism emblematic, to speak analogously, of the Aeschylean variety.
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