Bate Besong

Till Death do Us French!: On Bate Besong, Cameroon, and Matters of the Marrow

By Afam Akeh (Originally published in Gboungboun Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 2. November 2007)

For me, he was more the playwright than the poet. But in another time, in another place, it was his poetry and my poetry that had brought us together as fledgling writers – a coming together much in mind two decades later as I traveled cyberspace seeking the man for our interview. And we thought we already had him in our pages – alive, provocative, as he can be, angry even, we dared to hope. But death was also plotting. It took the man. It took our interview...

Book Review - Their Champagne Party Will End! Poems in Honor of Bate Besong

Joyce Ashuntantang & Dibussi Tande (eds). Their Champagne Party Will End! Poems in Honor of Bate Besong. Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2008. 76 pages. Paperback. Available from African Books Collective (UK) £12.95 and amazon.com and affiliates (international) $19.95

The celebration in verse of the life and works of Bate Besong, Cameroon's most influential and controversial poet, playwright and scholar. Published by Langaa RPCIG.

With Contributions from 27 poets from Cameroon and Africa and a forward by Ba'bila Mutia

Tributes to Bate Besong: The Day The Sun Set In The Morning

By Azore Opio

There is a Bafut joke about  an angry man who went to the village and shouted - Ngwa! And how 800 young men answered the call in unison. My bosom friend, departed Dr. Hilarious Ngwa Ambe, answered to that call when an angry god called that name last year, March 8.

When the people living in Buea went to bed on March 7, they had no way of knowing that during the pre-dawn minutes of the following morning they would be jarred from their peaceful slumber by shock waves that Bate Besong and his 'clone' Hilarious Ngwa Ambe, Ngwangwa Kwasen and their driver, Awoh, had died in a car crash.

Launched Into the Labyrinth of the Unknown

By Sammy Oke Akombi

I sat in the crowd watching, tense
The performance of intellectuals
As they used words to polish words.
I simply moaned, at a point.
Thank God, all isn’t lost yet.
Our country’s still very hot.

Then I listened to the brevity of the one
Who had just given birth to “Disgrace”
I’d rather it was Grace.
Yet I yearned that his life won’t be as brief
As he had been brief.

Eruption (For Bate Besong et Al)

By Mathew Takwi 

The entire nation quaked like the Buea Mountain,
To erupting sounds of a book launch: Disgrace
Obasinjom Warrior again to lash out oligarchs
Chief Masters of thievery and misrule

Worrying their tinted sleep and quiet fetid acts to change;
For in a dreadful drench we daily drip
A zombie his appearance to them really looked
A talkative whip his pen truly was

Ikot Ansa Blues (To Bate Besong: The angry poet who died and left us in anger)

By Agbor R. Agbor

Ete Song Songooo!
Ete Songooo!
Would have been the shout
After the last tramentano
Alas!
Unbelievable!
But as Gregory Obenson
And as Ada Ugah
Great icons of their time
Son of Jacob power
Ah do not forget Lobe
Nor Udokpani, Afei-udomifiok, Adiasim

A Life Fulfilled (To BB - One Year After)

By Neba-Fuh

A year just leapt passed!
We wailed in pain, that fateful March day,
In wonderment of Nature's unexplained course.

Yours, was a life fulfilled,
Constantly greasing your  brain nerves with  intellectual oil.
Stiffening your stance on evil deeds,
Never hating the doers.

You molded young scholars with ethics clay,
Feeding their intellect with literary
masterpieces,
You toiled for a better society,
Living the realities of the folks you defended.

You denounced injustice,
Rejected hypocrisy,
Lampooned sycophants,
Shunned tribalism,
Mocked quislings,
Attacked the status quo.

You led a life of humility,
With undiluted bravery;
Your world wasn't here indeed -this corrupt world of ours.

Today, we experience what you prophesied yesterday;
A country's future hijacked by con cronies;
Attempting to steal a blank cheque to rule  ad infinitum.
Great Sage, you left a bad situation that is turning worse;
Options, dwindling to the last -violence.
If only they could hear you then, now.

Rest in peace, Master; as your spirit lives on.