Bate Besong: Beware, Frog Brother (To the Ajasco Gerontocrat of the African Writers Hall of Infamy)

By Bate Besong (Published in Arts & Culture No. 00207, Sept 2000)

(i)
You fail to read the
physiognomy of the CPDM regime
mirrored in the face

of its frozen
consistency towards your
psychopath revelry, which

like your plague-
ridden ever-ready marabout
black mamba wrapper- wrapper

You had neither skill nor will
To mend.
BEAST
Get rid of all gris-gris.
In spite of your apostasy
If you decide, decide.
Pray intensely and often, Debauched
Prophet of Ya Mboka

(ii)
Having succeeded in unsaying all that
you had said. And,
Faced with seasons which were sadly
Out of point… Every night now
You are on prime-time-Television
Your pygmy torso of Nuremberg still to atone
For your eleventh-province dubiety.
You compose memoranda in a vacuum
trying to offset you irrelevance
by sham activity.
Though guilty of exposing you pubic hairs
To a minor of the opposite sex;
colobus monkey who speaks
two languages, at once
black and white literary infamy with a past, which
Could hardly survive inspection
Through the lorgnette
Of the revolutionary sublime.
Greedy dog that barks at his own
Reflection from a lagoon;

In a phantasmal leap to reverse
the flow of the noble river
BEAST
Wild, wild,
You loot the Southwest Treasuries
With a toady’s crown

Isn’t it better to use your eyes
today to see than
to use them tomorrow to cry?

Beware, Frog Brother

(iii)
Your pick-axes and mattocks will soon be blunt.
You who roost at the same place
that you drop your crackpot droppings, seedy Sub Slave;
You munch guguru with your fellow-buccaneers
and your crocodile Wouri mamiwater
I feel sorry for you.
As your nimbus is distinctly wearing
Thin, at age: near 70
While some writers make history,
some others mar it-
Don’t form hasty conclusions.
The fall of a yellow leaf is a warning
to the green ones-

In another country
The Sphinx departed in shame
& the Thebans, in joy at the end of
their bondage, elected their poet their Sango

Beware, Frog Brother.

April 2012