BY BATE BESONG
Signs of vacuity and morbidity appeared on the horizons. Implosions here and there.
The country was witnessing social oppression, economic chaos and the forces of neo-colonialism. The nation had become balkanised along lines of the very rich and raggedly poor.
Cameroonians were struggling to exist in difficult situations and thus the beliefs they held were attempts to make sense of their situation and guide their everyday actions.
The CPDM, then, was the veritable government-as-leviathan. It avoided difficult choices and hard decisions.
The launching of the Social Democratic Front, SDF, in May, 1990, brought my friend into national limelight. On that day, with his Mao Tse Tung haircut, no one was more courageous than he – on the front row! It was not in his character to allow his lamp to be extinguished at the approach of darkness. He knew that a man who excels in his work, stands freely before the tribunes of the empire, and not before unknown men. He preached the changeability of archaic institutions.
As opposed to our “organic intellectuals” (a Gramscian term), who abhor views that run counter to state policy or the interest of the governing classes, in my friend, the ivory tower, at last, found a theatre historian and literary critic, who believe that the alter-native Cameroonian politician must chart the course of revolutionary struggle.
Professor Asanga’s commitment was not mere protest as it embraced social, political or economic view of Cameroonian society. He was devoted to the imperative and process of change, which involved the deconstruction of the past, and the reconstruction of the present and the future. As one who single-handedly wrote the SDF Manifesto, Asanga believed that reality is a dynamic process produced by men and can be changed by men. It was part of his liberation theology of justice confronting power.
Asanga would not abuse ethnicity. He did not allow cruel antonyms of sectarian strife (Northwest: Southwest, Francophone: Anglophone) to immobilise him. Radical politics would become the instrument through which the truth of the Cameroonian nation would be told.
He was mentally and spiritually prepared so that he would not be surprised when opposition and other problems came his way. Even when apostasy made its appearance early in SDF’s tricky tongue, never did he lose his focus in the hope that Cameroonian people would triumph over tribal molochs of his 26 May, 1990 Revolution.
Tornadoes of persecution by the CPDM government, blackmail, and discouragement did not cause his zeal to wane. The more he suffered, the more he loved the revolution that he was its ideologue mentor.
In sum, we can say that Siga Asanga’s commitment was dialectical. A socialist vision, which showed the changeability of the Cameroonian world in all its contradictory concreteness. It was a commitment that entailed going to the roots of the problem by unearthing the class formations in the struggle for the attainment of noble objectives. This, then, is the blueprint on which Asanga’s concept of the SDF inspired Cameroonian revolution is moulded.
Those who propelled professor Zacharias Siga Asanga into premature death, should lock themselves up in their prison cells inside their hives, for they are the cougars of tribal power, who twisted the clear teaching of a populist, revolutionary alter-native party into knots of ethnic deceit.
They have proven that their much vaunted “Power to the People” slogan had only fleeting value.
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