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.
At the time I wrote short stories so this lecturer- Sister Eileen Sweeney - got us together.I was a freshman and he was in the third year. He wrote poetry while prose was my forte. So we had this discusion all day with me trying to knock down his art which I considered obscurantist and irrelevant to the people. I held up the works of Pablo Neruda as the model he should strive for. Neruda was a people's poet while Besong was a pretentious poet, a copy cat inebriated by his grandiloquent bluff. He in turn praised my literary compositions but urged my to take them further and higher or risk degenerating into a writer of potboilers ( he taught me that expression).
Over the next year until 1980 we freely and closely fraternised and I even contributed a poem in the Oracle, a poetry magazine he was producing single handedly.
In 1980 when the grandfather of African Literature - Chinua Achebe - visited University of Calabar BB was launching his first book - a slim colume of Poetry he called Polyphemus Detainee and other Skulls ( Polyphemus is a character In Soyinka's The Man Died). Achebe launched that book for him. BB was wild with joy.
BB was simply overawed by Soyinka. So that when the older writer sent him a personal letter that same year congratulating him and sharing fraternal wishes with him BB's day was made. He shared the letter with all who cared to read it and I noticed that from that moment the word fraternal always managed to slip into ever one of BB's writings,especially personal correspondences and even into some of the poems he wrote and placed on the notice boards.
At this time I had a firm conviction that BB would go places. I realised it would yield dividends to keep a dairy of our interactions. Who knows maybe do a book on the man one day. You see BB had a presence around him, an aura of greatness if you will. He was generous, ebullient, had a great sense of humour and there was nothing petty about him. True he smoked and drank heavily but it was in vogue then. We believed writers had to be eccentric, different from other mere mortals around them and how best to disply this eccentricity but to draw inspiration from a glut of alcohol and tobacco.
When I visited Bate Besong in his office at the University of Buea in 2002 I was glad when he disclosed to me that he no longer smoked or drank. As we chatted and shared reminescences he told me he regretted leaving Nigeria.
"When [General Mamman] Vatsa was executed I knew I was finished in Nigeria", he told me. Vatsa was BB's personal friend, poet and officer in the Nigerian army who influenced BB's posting for the National Youth Service corp programme to Kaduna and had wanted BB to join the Nigerian army. He plotted a coup d'etat to unseat Babangida and was caught and executed between 1986 and 1989.
As we sat in his office I read this quotation BB had copied out from the Bible and displayed prominently: When I am weak then I am strong. It was Paul writing in first Corinthians and my soul was lifted up. He was not leaving out the Bible in his voracious readings I decided.
In style and theme BB trode on Soyinka's footprints. So when the news filtered in to me that he was dead and the manner of his passing it sounded all so unreal. It was just like a scene in one of his own works or a character from one of Soyinka's - probably Sekoni in the Interpreters or professor in The Road.
It is with all fraternal feelings that I say adieu BB.
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