Culled from Chris Dunton, Nigerian theatre in English : a critical bibliography / . - London ; Munich [u.a.] : Zell, 1998. - IX, 366 S. ; 24 cm. - (Bibliographical research in African literatures ; 5). - ISBN 1-873836-71-6 :
76. Besong, Bate. The Most Cruel Death of the Talkative Zombie (a faery play in three parts with a revelry at the Requiem). (Limbé): Nooremac Press, (1986). (For a biographical note on Besong, which addresses the question should his work be discussed as a contribution to Nigerian or Cameroonian literature, see Bernth Lindfors, "Response to Dunton on Bate Besong", Journal of Commonwealth Literature, xxx / 1, 1, 1995, pp107-08. A more recent discussion of Besong’s work (Matumamboh 1997) identify him unambiguously as a "Cameroonian playwright";
it is the case, though, that he has spent much of his working life in Nigeria). The prologue and first part of the play comprise a dialogue between two outcasts, Toura and Badjika, beggars or "leprous troglodytes", who comment on the neo-colonial dictatorship of the Ahidjo regime in Cameroon (or as he terms it, the "Babacracy". The novelist Mongo Beti satirizes Ahidjo as "Baba Toura": Besong’s satire on the regime frequently echoes Beti’s – in, for example, his novel La Ruine Presque cacasse d’un polichinelle, a work whose title has a similar ironic cadence to that of Besong’s play). Focal points are French political domination of the nominally independent State, the use of torture by the security forces, the marginalisation of the Anglophone population and resistance to the regime by the (in 1986, still outlawed) UPC. The dialoque of Toura and Badjika is erratic, fragmentary, with spasms of role-play and of direct address to the audience, the satire ferociously barbed. In places the effect of the vitriolic sparring and swapping of abusive jokes between the two marginals has the liberating afflatus of a satire that has no holds barred; elsewhere the material is so wild and fragmentary (a dialogue modeled on Beckett, but with the characters in the throes of a fit) the effect is bleakly disturbing. It is also fairly unremitting: this initial dialogue between Toura and Badjika runs to 30 closely packed pages of text. The second part of the play (I’l n’ya pas de Dieu ici- "There is no God here") opens with a frenzied depiction of torture in a State detention center that includes an extraordinary sequence of multiple role-playing for the actor playing the torturer Yara Amichive; the remainder of the act returns to the burlesque / satirical vaudeville of the two beggars. The third act comprises more of the same, with (as throughout) satirical ballads such as the "Song of the Party Stooge", and a final, and very harsh, dialogue between the two and the Surgeon-General as Yaro Amichive writhes on his deathbed. One of a kind, this play: its violent idiosyncrasy is reflected in the printer’s setting- which uses different type – faces with wild inconsistency.
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