Bate Besong

1991 (Memory Lane): The Pen and the Penitentiary

In an incident that made national headlines back in 1991, Bate Besong was arrested in Yaounde shortly after the Yaounde University Theatre performed his play, Beast of no Nation. This was at the behest of one Jean-Stephan Biatcha, a a low-level University of Yaounde employee but an alleged spy of the CENER, the Cameroonian Secret Service, with connections in high places. Immediately after the conclusion of the production, Biatcha had dispatched a blistering report to his handlers at the Presidency complaining that BB's "subsersive" play was a threat to national unity in Cameroon. Within hours of the report being received at the Presidency, the Boys from CENER came calling... Here is an excerpt of the report that landed BB in hot water:

Bate Besong by Chris Dunton

Culled from Chris Dunton, Nigerian theatre in English : a critical bibliography / . - London ; Munich [u.a.] : Zell, 1998. - IX, 366 S. ; 24 cm. - (Bibliographical research in African literatures ; 5). - ISBN 1-873836-71-6 :

76. Besong, Bate. The Most Cruel Death of the Talkative Zombie (a faery play in three parts with a revelry at the Requiem). (Limbé): Nooremac Press, (1986). (For a biographical note on Besong, which addresses the question should his work be discussed as a contribution to Nigerian or Cameroonian literature, see Bernth Lindfors, "Response to Dunton on Bate Besong", Journal of Commonwealth Literature, xxx / 1, 1, 1995, pp107-08. A more recent discussion of Besong’s work (Matumamboh 1997) identify him unambiguously as a "Cameroonian playwright";

The Political Grotesque as Reelected in Bate Besong's "The Most Cruel Death..."

By Alfred Matumamboh
The Herald, Nov. 18-19, 2002

Bate Besong’s dramaturgy generally deals with political decadence in the higher echelon of the political structure. In The Most Cruel Death of the Talkative Zombie, the grotesque form of the play provides the energy that animates and amplifies its political content. The play deals with organized state terrorism inflicted on a people in that some of the members of this region are "secessionists" and "subversives". So in a bid to crush the so-called separatist element, hell is let loose on the region. Indiscriminate arrest, torture and massacre are carried out. The character Toura, at the end of the play summarizes the point, "And to trap a handful of secessionists, he decided to Hiroshima a whole region".

BATE BESONG: ANGER AND AFTER

By Okokon ASUQUO (M.A.)

THE DEFENDER, Calabar Cross River State, Nigeria. Thur. 14TH – Monday 20th Jan. 1992

When he published Polyphemus and other Poems in 1980, with Scholars Press Uyo, as a student of English at the University of Calabar, many had thought Cameroonian poet and critic and Essayist, Bate Besong was merely engaged in an ego trip to get some recognition or passing mention.

Amongst those who wrote profusely as students then, Emmanuel Anametemfiok, Ishola Dina, and Francis Archibong, only Bate Besong can be said to have sustained the student yet prolific tempo and romantic temper that has now made him the symbol of resistance in Cameroon.

Anglophone Cameroon Literature At Cross Roads - A Review of Bate Besong's Interview

By Azore Opio

The Post No. 0613 of October 28, 2004

After the miraculous transcendental literary flowering of the sixties and seventies, probably topped by late Mongo Beti, Cameroon’s writers dropped from the consciousness of readers. Since then, many complaints have been made about the vexatious habit of not reading in Cameroon. In a New Year message, Paul Biya, Cameroon’s Life President, paid lip service to this malady when he said apathy had stricken the people. But who first cultivated the infernal habit of lying in clover, equivocating and shuffling, so deeply rooted in the very soul of the King Beast himself?