Interviewed by Christopher Ambe Shu (Published in Ohmynews - Korea)
Dr. Bate Besong is a Cameroonian playwright, poet, outspoken dissident and author of over ten books in creative writing and numerous academic papers in peer review journals. Despite official displeasure and exclusions, he continues to write in newspaper columns and to speak out fearlessly at book launches on the deteriorating political culture after a quarter century of the imperial presidency of Paul Biya.
When his political protest play "Beasts of No Nation" (1991), which combines music, poetry, history and folk imagery in a post-modernist experiment to comment sharply on "the tribal apartheid and kleptomania that characterized the Biya regime," was staged on the campus of the University of Yaounde in March, 1991, over 2000 Cameroonians watched the enthralling performance. The minister of higher education promptly banned the production of theater activities in Cameroon's six state universities for over a decade. Besong was subsequently kidnapped and detained.
Educated at the Universities of Ibadan and Calabar, Nigeria, where he took B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in literature, Besong teaches African Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Buea, Cameroon, where he claims he still continues to face a situation akin to internal exile because of his literary inclinations.
On June 12, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan brokered a deal between Nigeria and Cameroon over their longstanding dispute over the oil-rich Bakassi peninsula. In the deal, Nigeria agreed to withdraw its troops from the peninsula. A 2002 International Court of Justice ruling gave sovereignty over Bakassi to Cameroon.
Although the Greentree Accord, named for the city in New York where it was made, has been highly acclaimed, Besong describes it as a farce. This interview with Dr. Bate was conducted on June 24 in the town of Buea, Cameroon.
Sir, what is your assessment of the diplomatic relations between Cameroon and its neighbor Nigeria now?
It would be unimaginable for British Prime Minister Tony Blair to dictate the foreign policy of Abuja from No. 10 Downing Street. The federal government of Nigeria has checks and balances based on the separation of powers, with independent judicial and legislative branches of government which control its diplomatic relations. Nigeria has a freely elected lower house and senate which is broadly responsible for its external relations or foreign policy. This is not the case with the cringing submissive and sycophantic mentality of Cameroon's house of marionettes [the National Assembly] tele-guided from Cameroon's presidency, at Etoudi. From time to time, I do not have to remind you that the great man himself [Paul Biya] reminds his Radio Monte Carlo audience that he is "Mitterrand's Best Pupil." Both Messieurs Chirac and Pasqua, as I have illustrated in my historical drama, "The Banquet" [see Three Plays: The Achwiimgbe Trilogy, Yaounde Editions CLE, 2003], are the neocolonial vultures of the Cameroonian cemetery.
Last June 12, in New York, Cameroon and Nigeria signed what is today known as the Greentree Accord, in which Nigeria agreed to withdraw its troops from the oil-rich Cameroonian peninsula of Bakassi within 60 days and to later pull out completely from the region. You were born in Nigeria, where you did your entire university studies. You also, in 1992, won the Association of Nigeria's Authors' highest literary award for your play "Requiem for the Last Kaiser" -- so you quite understand Nigerian politics. Do you think Nigeria will respect the Greentree Accord?
President Obasanjo's report card indicates that he has never had the vision, the intellectualism, the creativity of mind, the background or perspicacity to lead a country that gave birth to renowned writers Chinua Achebe and the late Christopher Okigbo, Africa's poet laureate. Nigeria has a vibrant civil society that monitors government policies and provides alternative forms of political participation. That revolutionized polity is presently putting in place credible institutions for the conduct of free and fair elections. Obasanjo violated the public trust placed on him by the electorates. He had been forced to surrender, most humiliatingly, his third term bid to the will of the people of Nigeria by an articulate, dynamic, and visionary senate.
As a widely acknowledged straw man, Obasanjo was therefore merely playing his assigned role at Greentree. There is no need to beat about the bush. I am strongly of the opinion that, in the political calculus of the Nigerian state, ex-Gen. Mathew Aremu Olusegun Obasanjo, is something of a castaway, an outsider, someone in disgrace, a decaying iguana fit only for his Otta chicken farm.
Can you say the Greentree Accord is a big diplomatic victory for Cameroonian President Paul Biya and his government officials, as the world is made to believe?
They have never been inventive, patriotic, or prescient. It is the same blind, self-deceitful ambition. "His Excellency is our Messiah for ever, and ever; he will lead us for all the time to come!" They refuse to learn from history, which is the best judge. (Pause) There is neither free speech nor democratic choice ... A small tribal, greedy elite from His Excellency, the Life Monarch's center and south provinces dominate economic and political decisions.
Diplomatic success or politics is therefore seen largely in terms of power to be used for the benefit of an imperial president and his party barons and for the oppression and victimization of opponents, especially those perceived as enemies, real or imaginary. The views of the ruling class, Marx and Engels remind us, are the ruling ideas.
It is only through free speech and democratic choice that the perceptive watcher could ascertain whether the farce at Greentree, especially as it deals with the political and territorial rights of Cameroonians, would have been subjected to discussion, debate, dissent and criticism, which -- I need not remind you -- are central to the processes of generating informed and reflected choices. Under a dictator's thumb, as Fidel Ramos has summarized: people need not think, need not choose and need not make up their minds. Or, give their consent!
What implications do you foresee should Nigeria fail to implement the Greentree Accord?
Falsehood may triumph a hundred years, but it surely fails. President Biya's political party, the Cameroon People Democratic Movement, CPDM is actually a new agbada [Nigerian garment] for the incorrigibly Francophile-partisan and Foccart-engendered Cameroon National Union, CNU of the late President Ahmadou Ahidjo. That pro-French cabal has neither been committed to the ideals of the Cameroonian Federation and Reunification that took place in the ex-East Cameroon town of Foumban in 1972, nor has His Excellency in mimetic relationship to his "illustrious predecessor," strengthened, deepened or widened the reunification horizon.
Oil deposits in the Bakassi peninsula may evoke strong emotions that may be mistaken for the glue of national integration, democracy, or patriotism. The people of Southern Cameroon origin have, paradoxically, been largely left out of the Bakassi question. The New Deal regime of Paul Biya has not been able to guarantee a set of opportunities for development and social progress for the people of this region. It would not therefore develop the capacity to mobilize the Cameroonian people for a deeper involvement or commitment if the gong strikes, that is, in the event of war -- which nobody wishes -- with the Federal Republic of Nigeria... National integration empowers people to press for politics that expand social and economic opportunities. But this may never happen in a Quai d'Orsay [French ministry of foreign affairs] designed formula.
Critics say the Western powers (Britain, the U.S., Germany) by that Greentree Accord, which their envoys personally witnessed, are cleverly trying to prevent Nigeria from becoming a superpower. What is your reaction to this?
Bakassi is an opportunistic diversion from the catastrophe in the Orient. America, Australia, Germany, and Britain are approaching their second Vietnam in Iraq. Particularly France: she has made too many Dien Bien Phus. Abuja is the mythological Osiris Rising. A new Isis in the image of the Madiba, Nelson Mandela! This may not be in the interest of the oil-dependent, capitalist, and imperialistic West.
Before the Greentree Accord, President Obasanjo had been hesitant to hand over the Bakassi peninsula as ruled by the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 2002. What lessons can be learned from Obasanjo's previous behavior?
There has always been something about Obasanjo which calls to mind Vaclav Havel's visionary statement that "whosoever fears to look his own past in the face must necessarily fear what is to come. Lies cannot save us from lies." Obasanjo must render a full account of his betrayal of Chief Moshood Abiola. He must tell Nigerians who ordered the assassination of Cicero Bole Ige, his own attorney general. His Iscariot role in the Nigerian Civil War that led to the subsequent imprisonment of Wole Soyinka after the botched Lt. Col. Victor Banjo's revolution. He destroyed the Murtala Mohamed liberation torch and stymied the African revolution by giving monstrous birth to the right-wing Shehu Shagari landslide and more.
The man is a subject for the "caricatural" frenzy of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. Did Obasanjo and Abacha deserve each other? Was Abacha right then to have prepared him for the fate of Shehu Musa Yar'Adua?
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