Bate Besong
Published in Nalova Lyonga, Eckhard Breitinger, Bole Butake (eds). Anglophone Cameroon Writing. Bayreuth, Germany: Bayreuth African Studies 30/Weka No 1. 1993. 205 pages
Of Pariahs and Masons
Many of the leading cultural figures of their time, in all climates, have maintained the artist’s traditional responsibility in addressing the question of meaning in endeavouring of synthesize, in seeking to weld disparate fragments into a coherent reality. And, in times like these…
The yeast of history, above all, as a creative resource can never be far from the troubadour’s mind. A writer who has no sense of history is like a sparrow without wings, for the writer must be the visionary of living truth. In fact, a writer without a sense of history is the Aesopian lion devoid of claws and teeth.
Today, one hundred and fifty-one years after his death in 1832, we are meeting at the Goethe Institute, in Yaounde, to talk about how our work, as chief banner bearers of our people, can become relevant; we are here to talk about how our roles as spokesmen of our people, can be read and appreciated by those moved by their themes of thwarted hopes. We are here for a collective catharsis.
Goethe spent the period 1770-2 at the famous University of Strasbourg. Here, the young man fell under the influence of Professor Herder who persuaded him to drop his plan to write in the French language. Could it then be reasoned that Goethe, a giant of world literature, would have died in anonymity had he abandoned his native language for the romantic moonshine of Parisian café’s and saloons?
May the vision of Wolfgang Goethe guide us here today.
An Ambushed Homecoming?
We are in affinity with the supreme colossus of the Harlem Renaissance, Dr. William Bughart du Bois. As W.E.B. said of the colour problem in the U.S.A., the Anglophone Cameroonian’s very existence is the buring question of today.
Consider: after the lunatic route we took from Foumban, as in a Dantean Inferno, the Anglophone Cameroonian occupies the center of Hell.
The surrounding concentric rings of this smouldering infernal canyon may embrace a multitude of other victims in the present Cameroonian reality, but there is no doubt that our people, subjected to perpetual mental and psychological servitude, are the story book victims of a cultural holocaust.
History has since the biblical Cain and Abel – carved no grimer monuments to its own propensity for unfathomable cynicism and evil.
Before we go, before we zoom off into the best cushioned retirement in the haven of an anachronistic aesthetic – whose accoutrements are slavish metaphors, or literary bondage, whose by-products abound with mystical and decadent overtones. Or, like some of us have recently done: withdraw, into a life of ascetic contemplation in search of masturbatory succour by resorting, ostrich-like, to the tradition of popular balladry.
Fellow writers, before we zoom off into the best-cushioned limbo of art-for-art’s –sake, a pause, please, to look at some of what three decades of re-unification has wrought for us: feudal oppression, mountains of suspicions and hate, retrogression, post-Foumban pauperization, resentment. Indeed, we bear the scars of “brotherhood.’
The gangrene-filled labyrinth of chaos that is Pax Cameroona today has put an end to our self-acclaimed title as the invisible super-heavyweight hey! hey! big-boss of the “new deal” world.
Since we are in inter-galactic nation, since we are situated somewhere between the planets Uranus and Neptune and, therefore, out of the Earth, we might have maintained our mystiques if pampered locusts had not suddenly preyed over the national treasury. In fact, we might have maintained our mystique by avoiding the last eccentric presidential elections (we did call it a renaissance of democra-zy in this part of Africa, and so we had nothing to learn from Democracy – with a capital D!)
Alas! Good-bye to the last of our hurrahs!
The landscape of the past three decades has ruthlessly shown up all our political and economic illusions under the guise ‘of the bi-cultural character of the two unifying parts”; thus, graphically lending expression to the existentialist predicament of the Anglophone Cameroonian caught in the terrifying coils of a world beyond his comprehension.
We are in the season of harrowing self-analysis. We are the products of an age of profound discontent. We are an embattled people under the cancerous embrace of national integration”, fighting against titanic odds.
We are the biblical children of Ham, profoundly affected by cataclysmic changes and traumas which seem to toss us about like an Eliotean rag doll; hollow men, without speech; caught in the broken jaw, in the lost kingdom ‘of the prickly …. Prickly’ pear at ‘5 o’clock in the morning’ sprawled in the tumid river. Alas!
And yet, there was a time when people had faith, implicit faith - in this Union – without making any investigations.
But I ask you, where is that faith now? It has vanished. So utterly! The bonds have snapped. We carry the scars of “brotherhood” in a country so unaccustomed to candour.
The literature of a people is the mirror of that community. One cannot live in society and be free from that society. Calm yourselves, Your Excellencies, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, fellow writers… The literature of an embattled people must be the mirror of that society but, tell me: could a mirror which does not reflect things correctly be called a mirror?
The creative writer, in many ways, is an intellectual concerned with discovering the truth. His protean curiosity covers many fields of learning and knowledge. He is, of course, free to say and write what he likes without any restrictions.
There certainly is nothing wrong with proving all things and finding out the truth of a matter. And one, according to Vladimir Illyich Lenin, “needs to be sure of the foundation’ of his”…creative itinerary…”, “ of the basis for the facts he learns in life.”
But if he is to be the salt of the earth, if he is to be the spice in a fragmented and spiritually rudderless society, if he is to become the leaven in a lump of dough infusing the Promethean muses’ glory in a society influenced and controlled by the mephistophelean forces of Demorgorgon – as the penetrating and relentless analyzer of Cameroon society and social realities – his, the Anglophone Cameroon writer’s questing mind that is, should be concerned with principles, purposes and the essence of things, rather than with mere appearances, rather than with mere workings.
The elysian-bred optimist may think the Anglophone Cameroon Question might be quickly resolved. That is far too blithe. The agony of the Anglophone Cameroon Question is compounded by the endless uncertainty as to whether there would ever be an end to it. Writers are inspired by the adversity of their day. So must we.
There could be no better test. There can be no better way of quantifying such human suffering. Could we draw from the memorable lines of the Jamaican-born African-American poet Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” to provide succour? Perhaps, a word of caution is still necessary.
Far be it from us to advocate any kind of monolithic, post-1992 one party national-assembly kind of literature; far be it from us to advocate a solution by means of a few key-note-decrees which, in the end, become as grotesque and laughable as the itinerant prophet who, having found the alchemist stone of literature, prescribed new nostrums for the immortality of national unity – By Decree! … Don’t laugh…
No one can speak for us. Only those who daily live through the humiliations, the third class citizenship, in the abattoir of servitude, only we can fully comprehend and explore these contradictions in a society undergoing such rapid and confusing transition.
Anglophone Cameroon Literature cannot make a single step forward until it understands – please note – the dubious and fragile environment that is National Unity, now like the skull of some prehistoric brontonsaurus, it has, in the last decade especially, become the Lake Nyos bomb of history, looming over the incubator of a poisonous brand of “national integration.’
The writer must be in the pull of action. To arouse his Anglophone Cameroonian constituency from the apathy and despair into which it has sunk, the writer’s métier must be transformed into handgrenades in his literary arsenal for venting his crusading spirit. He will fail most woefully, ostracized from his roots, as it were, if he tries to write in a style that is alien to him; very mush – indeed – like that accursed man in Achebeiana who left his burning house to pursue a fleeing rat (Aeschylusian plots, Wordworthian themes)!
True, the power of the writer is not always strong enough to change the political and social situation of his time but his art can become a fighting literature, he can write works which are artistically profound and political correct: he can write works of indictment and works that show how his world is and could be.
Time for the Creative Boom
The Anglophone Cameroonian Writer must never forget his origins. His writing must depict the conditions of his people, expressing their spontaneous feeling of betrayal, protest and anger.
It must challenge. It must indict head on. His writing must open up the Chinese Wall of Opportunity, closed to his people for over three decades.
Our literature must convey with remarkable force the moods of the Anglophone Cameroonian caught in the assimilation-nightmare of sisyphian existence. That literature must be inspired by an historical myth-informed consciousness. It must embody in bold relief the specific historical features of the entire Cameroonian reality.
We must not evade the issues raised by economic, social and political change. We will be criticized for presenting the frustration and agony of a people held as a hostage minority. But we must insist on the truth of what we write. The Anglophone Cameroonian writer at home and in the diaspora must tell the outside world the story of his tragic land from the point of view of its hostage minority.
And, such a literature, fellow writers, can only be written by you: Anglophone Cameroonian writers, in the Anglophone Cameroonian language and on Anglophone Cameroonian subjects.
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