By Bate Besong
It so happens that creativity
is the highest instance of human
intelligence at work … This is
plain and logical.
AYI KWEI ARMAH
History is ever reminding The Present
of any society even you shall come
to pass away. Tomorrow will be the
present; and The Present will be The
Yesterday.
NGUGI WA THIONG’O
National unity is a festering injury that has not been treated with the right balm. The Cameroon Republic has a whole army of Jean Stéphane Biatchas in the “Opposition” with vested interests in keeping Cameroonians divided.
We continue to recognize primitive instinctive animals, at the top of the CPDM political totem pole, who flaunt wealth looted from the public treasury.
What is more, political power is personalized and concentrated in the hands of one man who besides identifying himself with the state itself, has become a Divinity to be worshipped.
Our country looks like a vessel that needs total replacement to help hold the spring that is the oil of good governance and national unity.
We have not pursued the objectives of Foumban with vigour, commitment and sincerity that it deserves.
Tribal atavism engendered the ignoramus vision of dividing Cameroonians according to the language of former colonial masters. Or, as recently, in the decapitated, pseudo-insurrectionary SDF; of North West and South West.
We cannot afford the hypocrisy of the past.
PEOPLE ARE PROUD OF BEING THIEVES
Kwame Nkrumah submits that great historical advances can hardly ever be achieved without high cost in effort and lives. For writers whose ways of life have changed rapidly and who have often moved between two alien cultures, the epic theatre is a natural literary from of self-assertion:
Mr. Besong’s …play is a clear political pamphlet directed at the regime in power that is held responsible for the economic crisis, favouritism and capital flight to foreign banks. The author holds the thesis that Francophones in power are responsible for the economic crisis because they are producers of waste matter, and embezzlers of public funds. Among the Francophones (Frogs) special emphasis is placed on the Betis, friends and brothers of President Biya, who are more responsible for the present state of Cameroon (Translated from the French by Professor S.A Ambanasom 1993: 222, 223).
The role of the writer is not to wallow in the wind, but to make sense of a turbulent neo-colonial world.
But, Jean Stéphane Biatcha, the feeble-minded Fochive mole, who manages billons of Cameroonian people’s money under the aegis of First Lady Chantal Biya’s phantom philanthropies, demurs.
After putting up with this play, I had to get up, by way of protest,
accompanied by the Chief of service for Student Association and cultural
Clubs, to quit the hall just at the time when Mr. Besong was concluding
his fiery exhortations. While we were leaving the hall I was booed in
these word; “Man no run” and “Owona,” “Owona.” I think, in my
opinion, that at the time when government is exerting great and constant
efforts to make Cameroon a united country in which the two communities
co-exist in all brotherliness it is abnormal and unacceptable that
intellectuals should promote division and conflict.
In any case, the University ought not to be the forum for such
ill-intentioned ventures.
(Translated from the French by Professor S.A Ambanasom 1993:
222,223)
Committed Anglophone-Cameroon literature began when Gaullist domination and “new” deal apartheid forced the people of Southern Cameroon’s origin to think of themselves as culturally and racially distinct.
Chinua Achebe submits that “Problems help create literature. The West… may not have ….anything very important to worry about now. And so they create literature that is easy going, personal, even frivolous (Interview, The Guardian 1998:25)
To kneel or not to kneel before a degenerate god, that is the question. The theme of the agent provocateur on campus is seen in this context. Arrogance has to do with a toadie of Stephane Biatcha’s frog mould behaving in a proud and superior manner.
The theme of arrogance and power, are all inculcated in the attitudes of the kleptocrats and lootocrats who now adorn the visage of the Yaounde Kondengui Maximum Security prison.
We reject the glorification of l’etat c’est moi myth as the locus for power in the unitary state [that] we inherited from Ahmadou Ahidjo, and the artificial chords of national integration that we are trying to forge from the Mitterand borstal of Essingan hegemony.
Biatcha is obdurate. But, fundamentally, he is a gangster. To this day, I cannot tell whether these breed of mongrelized and demented psyches which the regime belches are mere props to the mystical leviathan:
The author equally affirms, and this is the central thesis
(philosophy) of the play, that the Anglophones in
Cameroon are marginalized and confined to undignified
roles like that of “carriers of excrement.” They do not
have any good status and are even deprived of any professional
identity cards, which they are asking for in vain. According
to Mr. Besong, the Anglophones in Cameroon is considered a
traitor and a slave. At the end of the performance, the
playwright took to the stage to publicly declare that the future
of Cameroon is uncertain and that chaos can set in at anytime,
especially from the other side of the Mungo. Consequently he
appealed to the audience, for the most part Anglophones,
to get themselves ready to carry out their choices……
Unfortunately, the programme of theatre activities
conceived by the Ministry of Information and Culture
did not allow us to preview this play, a copy of which I
bought at the exit of the hall… this experience which is shocking
and disappointing enough will help me to be more vigilant and
diligent with regards to all other cultural manifestations that
will take place on the university campus
Signed: Jean Stéphane Biatcha (6)
(Translated from the French by Professor S.A Ambanasom 1993:223)
Yesterday’s role models, now; clown figures, transformed; into ghostly shapes, struggling; to retain a feeble hold of themselves, and of their space. KONDENGUI.
There is J.M. Akono Ze, President of the Cameroon Boxing Federation and Chief of Oman Village, South Province, who looted billions of francs paid by Cameroonians as audio-visual tax…
So, when will you come for Jean Stéphane Biatcha?
We may summarize: 15years of persecution by agents of the Biya regime. Kidnaps and police detentions. 15 years of exclusion and blackmail. Abortion of fellowships and humiliations.
15 years of Internal Exile imposed on me by a regime that maintains structures that make people proud of being stupid.
The human spirit will always triumph over the malignant forces of President Biya’s a quarter of a century Kaiser mode of governance.
LESSONS FROM JEAN STÉPHANE BIATCHA
On the 6th of March 1997, on the occasion of Ghana’s fourtieth independence anniversary, the late President of Tanzania, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, said this about Africa’s greatest son:
Kwame Nkrumah was [Ghana’s] leader
But he was our leader too, for he was
an African leader…He was a visionary…
He had a great dream for Africa and its
people. He had the well being of our people
at heart. He was no LOOTER. He did not
have a SWISS BANK ACCOUNT. He died POOR
(New African, February 2006, 21, italics supplied)
The lessons for the demonization of progressive forces are many and varied, but it is important to note that the enemy in its various chimera-like forms and shapes, is watching very closely what the poet is doing.
It would not therefore be too much to claim that the compass that the Anglophone writer in Cameroon fashions for himself has much in common with the Zanzibari thinker, Sheikh Abdurahman Mohammed Babu: to expose the ideological basis of neo-colonial historiography and, by adopting the perspective of the marginalized, victimized and exploited people, to reveal the hooligan, psychotic interests that are the motive force of Cameroon Re-unification History.
Comments