BY BATE BESONG
Prolegomenon
I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible except getting off his back. Leo Tolstoy
Augusto Boal, the famous Brazilian theatre umpire had so presciently noted long ago (1979) that in the dialectical theatre of the German Marxist playwright, Bertolt Brecht, we are witnessing the death knell to the illusionistic or naturalist tradition. By unquestionably preaching the changeability of archaic institutions, Brecht’s commitment, which embraces both a political, social or economic vision of man, demystifies capitalist myths by attacking the perpetual peazantisation of the masses or lower classes. In turning official historiography and mythopoesy on their heads, the playwright’s artistic vision “clarifies concepts, reveals truths, exposes contradictions, and proposes transformations” (106).
Ba’bila Mutia’s Before This Time Yesterday (1993) is predicated on Jacques Focart inspired genocide that characterised Gaullist-France’s colonial policy in Cameroon (Richard Joseph, 1978, Victor Julius Ngoh, 1987).
The playwright explores the savagery employed by the Ahmadou Ahidjo puppet-government in Yaounde, in the “Pacification” of the UPC, Cameroon’s first mass populist revolutionary alternative political party whose messiah – martyr, Reuben Um Nyobe, was assassinated by a French Expeditionary Patrol, on September 18, 1958, near his birth place, Boumnyebel (see for example Mongo Beti’s fictive accounts: Remember Ruben (1980), Perpetua and the Habit of Unhappiness, (1974).
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Posted by: nkam linda | November 23, 2009 at 07:05 AM