Bate Besong

A Critique of Churchill Ewumbue-Monono's "Men of Courage"

By Bate Besong

Churchill Ewumbue Monono. MEN OF COURAGE: The Participation of Independent and Civil Society Candidates in the Electoral Process in Cameroon. A Historical Perspective, 1945-2004. Limbe; Design House, 2006. 237 pages.

Churchill Ewumbue Monono’s MEN OF COURAGE has attracted my current analytical exploratory exercise, because the author’s quest, I am convinced, is to show that MINAT’s goal under Andre Tschoungui and subsequently Marafa Hamidou Yaya has been, to install, the medieval monster named ELECAM, a nervous condition of megalomania that would eventually efface a democratic culture, in Cameroon, with Paul Biya  as Life President and “God.”

Anne Tanyi Tang as Playwright

By BATE BESONG, Ph.D - Dept of English, University of Buea
[Paper Presented at the Hilton Hotel, Yaounde, on the 6th of December 2006]

Anne Tanyi Tang's repertory conveys a consistent message that harmony in thought and action is a sine qua non for progress and communality. A pervasive sense of contemporary history is a marked gradient in her theatrical topography.

Historical incidents provide at a conscious level the material from which her artistic periscope is fashioned. In Chief Ayito(2006), the playwright explores the possibility of the Cameroonian rich, walking in terror of the poor marginalized whose property they have stolen.

Tanyi Tang's thesis is that neo-colonial despotic rule; the political and economic struggle assumes its class character despite any and every attempt at ethnic mystification.