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?

Virtues cannot flourish in a country where people are treated monstrously. And what is expected of a colony governed by a far away ruler who lives in France and a Parliament over whom the people have no control? And how about the Anglophone artist who is harried by day and harassed by night, by neo-colonial agents under the pretext of national integration?

Dr. Bate Besong, a playwright, poet and lecturer at the University of Buea, has not only sampled the sickening flavour of this Quai d’Orsay vilification, which bends to suppress Anglophone Cameroon literature, but has written extensively on it.

In an interview he granted GRIAD, Research Group on Africa and Diaspora Imaginary, and which was published in the international journal, Africultures, No. 60 of July-September, 2004, Bate Besong traces the trail of Anglophone literature from the Bole Butakes to the Francis Nyamnjohs, drawing a neat line between Bernard Fonlon’s genre of apologetic defence of classical and neo-classical art, and contemporary Anglophone revolutionary writers such as the Bates, who “believe in collaborative effort” in which heroes’ greatness is born from within the society and rests with them.

According to Bate Besong, the Fonlon’s kind of writing was not cut to cause any structural change in the socio-economic misery characteristic of Cameroon, whereas the alternative literature and its approach that Anglophone writers have adopted is dialectical, real-politik kind of stuff that unearths the “contradictions which bring about discrimination, injustice, exploitation and marginalistion,” which Anglophones generally have suffered in Cameroon under the supervision of their Francophone rulers.
Bate Besong boldly questions those in authority, “preferring bold statements to enfeebled imitation.” He is no cats paw.

The interview that has aroused international interest and caused quite some excitement both in Bate Besong and other scholars, stretches to embrace English-speaking Cameroonians who have scrammed their nation and turned “their backs to the ghettozisation” of their fellow Cameroonians back in the country.

The intellectual buzzards, so to say, are safely tucked away in the comforts of Europe, far away from the claustrophobic public system, the police state, the insolent snivelling, thieving and praise-singing politicians of the Natural Candidate ilk that is Cameroon. And for a pittance, Cameroon’s academics and intellectuals are easily bought off the shelf to embrace rascals whose levels of education hardly match theirs. Professors, doctors, lawyers, educationists and so on, willingly participate in the general repression and corruption characteristic of, for instance, Ahidjo’s and Biya’s rule, and partake in the rape of Cameroon. This genre of people has often satiated a ruler like Biya.

Commenting on the availability and the popularity of Anglophone literature, Bate Besong blames the New Deal politics for disrupting its progress. It has met the belligerent frowns of the power-besotted men at the “Ministry of Inquisition.” As for the writers, they live at great risk; they are poverty-stricken, socially deplored by the ruling junta and politically sidelined, while the ringleader of the oppressive regime is weighed down by tons of academic titles, honours and literary prizes won abroad, for doing nothing but excelling as a Third Millennium despot.

Bate Besong tarries a while on the threshold of a certain class of critics or reviewers of Cameroon Anglophone literature whose vocabulary, maybe, span a miserable score or so words, who force the world to pay attention only to the surface of artistry of Cameroon Anglophones. This is being unfair to the Anglophone writer, whose main objective is, according to Bate Besong, “to attempt to provide a fictional representation of the history of a people subjugated under Ahmadou Ahidjo’s feudalist imperialism, and, now, under over two decades of the dwarf vision of the “New Deal.” In short the Cameroon Anglophone writer and his art works have never ceased to be retarded by tyrannical impedimenta instituted by those who wield political power, even at the level of the university. And, Bate Besong says that Anglophone Cameroon literature is not bourgeois!

According to him, the Anglophone writer in Cameroon is a "social force and derives his credibility from the degree of attachment to his people.”

It is difficult to wind up such an incisive, intellectual and mind-gripping interview granted by an angry scholar, who wants to usher in change, blow the entire nation with pen and ink. Anglophone writers in Cameroon are not waiting until the blessed ancestors choose to intervene.

Even when they are referred to as “les ennmies dans la maison” they have no choice; they won't ever stop writing, questioning those in authority.

Comments

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