Bate Besong

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. 

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.

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.

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.

PRODIGALS OF DANGEROUS AMBITION

A Commentary of Alobwed'Epie's The Death Certificate
(Yaounde: Editions CLE,2004, 308 pgs)

PROFESSOR ALOBWED’EPIE’s close to four decades sojourn, in Ngoa-Ekelle, Yaoundé has provided the author with an insider-view, in transmuting, into art form; the folie de grandeur of a twenty-three year clannish, despotism; convulsing, in corruption; on a road to nowhere. Tribalism as a political weapon quickly attracted the ex-seminarians of “The Council of the First Province”.

In responding to a familiar, but specific historical development, the novelist has been compelled to display an increasingly, sharper and engaged focus. Myth and metaphor operating together occasionally achieve aesthetic statements of great compression and resonance. The Death Certificate attests to this effectiveness in employing novelistic art, as an instrument of raising social awareness.

An Artist's Responsibility (A Profile of the Work of Bate Besong)

By Alfred Matumamboh (First Published in West Africa (London), 1997

A correspondent profiles the work of Cameroonian playwright Bate Besong and explores his sense of responsibility as an artist to his society.

NGUGI WAS THIONG'O the East African Marxist author, argues that every writer is a writer in politics, but what distinguishes one writer from another is whose side of the political game he belongs to – the oppressor or the oppressed.  Bate Besong is a writer who unabashedly identifies with the underprivileged of society against the exploiting ruling class.  He holds the big wigs in society responsible for the miserable condition of the masses of the people.  He writes to sharpen the public’s consciousness of its socio-politico-economic reality.

BB Profile in the Encyclopedia of African Literature

Culled fromSimon Gikandi (ed.). Encyclopedia of African Literature. New York, NY : Routledge, 2003. pp. 61-62. ISBN 0-415-23019-5

Besong, Bate, Poet (b. 1954, Cameroon)

A PhD in English and literary studies from the University of Calabar (Nigeria), the Cameroonian writer Bate Besong is primarily known as a poet. He has published several collections of poetry, including Polyphemus Detainee and Other Skills (1980), The Banquet (1994), The Grain of Bobe Ngom Jua (1985), and Just Above Cameroon (1998). He has also published important plays including The Most Cruel Death of the Talkative Zombie (1987), and Beasts of No Nation (1990).