Bate Besong

Nomination of Dr. Jacobs Bate Besong for the Scholar Rescue Fund Fellowship

Letter of Support by Chief Charles A. Taku

I have the honor most respectful to nominate Dr Jacobs Bate Besong a citizen of Cameroon and lecturer in the Arts Faculty of The University of Buea, Cameroon for a fall fellowship in your program.

I am an international lawyer currently lead counsel in the trial of senior military officers accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, article three common to the Geneva conventions and additional protocols two and other international violations in the territory of Rwanda and neighboring countries.I am also lead counsel at the Special Court for Sierra Leone defending senior officers of the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra leone. I have practised law for twenty three years and specialise in international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

Letter to the Cameroon Minister of Higher Education

Professor Jacques Fame Ndongo
Hon. Minister of Higher Education
Ministry of Higher Education
Yaounde

Your Excellency,

After a most demonic ruse: The Price I am being forced to pay for initiating dialogue during the university of Buea upheavals in May/June 2005.

I was a member of a group of senior academic staff of the University of Buea, designated, by the four-man delegation led by former Minister of Higher Education, H.E David Abouem a Tchoyi, to inspect and evaluate the situation in the University of Buea students’ uprising.

Thank You Elon University!

Dear Brian,

You have been very determined and resolute in the pursuit of the goals of Elon University, North Carolina. Your humanity shone in your attempt to seek an intellectual haven for a most embattled scholar, and writer in the jungle of a sub-saharan Darfur.

You believed that if African Literature is to be continously used as a weapon for collective struggle and as an instrument of demolishing the squalid institutions that exploit and degrade humanity, as a scholar -historian, Elon University epitomised, in your advocacy, found in me, one whose entire career was the metonymy of the African Experience in Literature.

Postcolonial Alterity in Fiction:Towards a Definition of Alobwed’Epie’s 'The Death Certificate'

By Bate Besong, Ph.D (Dept. of English, University of Buea

Although Western intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt have explored the connections between the intellectual production of the colonial world and its growing global domination (Williams and Chrisman 1994:71), it is Frantz Fanon, described by his comrade and critic, Albert Memmi, “as a prophet of the Third World, a romantic hero of decolonization” (1973:39) who has emphasized the dehumanizing aspects of colonialism, thus pushing its analysis into the realm of the psyche and the subjectivity of colonized peoples, as well as their imperial masters.