By Azore Opio (The Post Newspaper)
It was 1996. Early in the evening of a summer day, I stood staring out my Hong Kong apartment window at a hazy grey horizon. The Pacific, calm at this moment, was lapping lazily on the stony shores of Stanley. The sweet and sour smell of frying pork wafting from a nearby restaurant tickled my nostrils. In a few days I would be flying to Cameroon, missing America by so many longitudes.
Coming from the skyscrapers and the bubbling waters of rocky Hong Kong, I felt like a gigantic object sailing along the rubber-tree and banana-lined strip of tarmac that wove towards Buea. I had planned to do two years in Buea and keep on going on my itchy feet (I have done 10 so far).
When I stopped in Buea, I met the last rains still occasionally tremendous in their fall, and beer. And not a day has passed without me paying tribute to the congenial bottle.
Preamble
For several months, I sampled the local foods and drinks and asked questions. The question that connected me to, or rather connected Bate Besong to me, I posed to a lady friend - Who is the top writer in this country? Bate Besong was the prompt answer. Five years would stretch away before our 'tissues' would connect in The Post newspaper.
Bate Besong's 'J'accuse' that was running in the Arts & Culture column of The Post of 2000, had somewhat dulled my feelings when I found nothing akin to art or culture. The doubts I expressed in the same paper drew phlegm from the scholar. That is how we met. And that is when I coined the compelling title of a protracted intellectual duel "Obscure Intellectualism."
I quote Bate Besong's venomous tirade in The Post Edition No. 231 Monday, December 11, 2000 titled "On Your Hired Orang-utan: Azore Opium Opinionist":
"To whet your mortician's appetite, you have resurrected the retarding, divisive, and wholly destructive beast whom you thought Re-unification and post KNDP impotence had collared, and tamed…Will you ever exorcise this Akriyé daemon? Zygotes of pygmies gather along yellow journalism roadside of the formidable The Post Independent newspaper to receive the akpeteshie -demented opinionist from Koforidua {Ghana}…Indeed, even your Lyrical Virus from quixotic exile now makes his entrance through your trap-door!....
Was this hired thug, this spectacular moron - Azore Opium - destined to fulfil your maligned agenda - as Mr. T.T Tabenyang's wry rebuttal had recently indicated? Then: Listen, Sir. The rest is the mortuary mind of Azore Orang-utan Opium…
Bate Besong, Bonduma, Buea."
Vintage Bate Besong!
I would learn that soon. From his raving you could see that Bate Besong didn't know that I, Azore Opio, existed, mistaking me for, as he mentioned, a hired intellectual assassin from Ghana.
When I fired back a mouthful of snub-nosed, bloodsucker invectives, Bate Besong had his head in his rectum. When I boiled up a follow-up of several elements of sugared expletives together with some barbed descriptions, accompanied with a mug shot of mine, in the paper, in what amounted to a threnody of grief for the scholar, Bate Besong erupted into a violent paroxysm. He swore never to talk to me, Francis Wache and Charly Ndi Chia nor give his darling newspaper, The Post, even just a fleeting glance.
But that oath would mellow and dissolve into a friendship that lasted till Bate Besong died. But before that there was a battle, not of frogs and mice; not a tiny struggle around a small pond.
This didn't make me a better Besong. And in the course of this bitter exchange, I learned that I wasn't really cut out to be like Bate Besong and I didn't really want to be one, for any of a variety of perfectly sound reasons. Four years later, after Bate Besong had simmered all his anger, chilled and thawed, he did a pirouette. We had a chance meeting.
And there is nothing like a meeting of two 'arch enemies' when beer is the agreeable moderator.
Disarming BB
I would first disarm Bate Besong by reviewing his Change Waka and His Sawa Boy in The Post. I must tell you that I attained multiple intellectual orgasms as I chopped up Change Waka and His Sawa Boy, took the carcass apart and sewed it back in a less intricate fabric. I did not only crack the Besongian codes, I did it with panache.
Bate would suffer a rupture of enthusiasm [stomping and ululating] which we only doused with bottles of red wine. With the ice broken and our relationship warming up, I again enthralled Bate Besong with another pot-boiler of a review of an interview he granted GRIAD, Research Group on Africa and Diaspora Imaginary, which was published in the international journal, Africultures, No. 60 of July-September, 2004.
I had met a warrior powered by Odin.
I am A Scholar, A Big Man!
I don't mean to examine Bate Besong like a palaeontologist studying old Mammoth bones…he was a 'Viking'; unromantic and an out and out realist.Of all the memorable characters in Cameroon literature, none is quite like Bate Besong. From his first appearance as an erect figure, and there was not a boyishness in his rather quick movements, his bespectacled moon face quite defiantly thrust forward,
his hair sparse greying tufts picturesquely dotting his egg head, which he kept a glimmering sheen and an equally grey patch under his chin, with his sensitive nostrils, Bate Besong could become frantically excited at an instant's notice. And yet there was a kind of contemplative glint in his eyes and broad smile which made him frightfully handsome.
'Greedy' for knowledge and freedom he was, and singing his own praises Bate Besong was a strugglist subjected to miseries by stooges of the vampire regime, but still a poet and dramatist. A scenester, Bate Besong was fond of snatching people, especially those he was inclined to hate, and bundling them into sarcastic verse. Every mediocre, tyrant and stooge, sometimes even friend, was grit for his mill. But he was a boxer who never liked to receive jabs although he enjoyed delivering punches.
Everything Bate Besong did and said bore the stamp of an individual achieved by the very multiplicity of roles he played. The ruthless poet was also the poet of his own grief and the grief of every other Cameroonian. Bate Besong was an enemy of rulers and berserks over freedom, democracy and the dignity of humans.
Ambitious in all that he did and full of life, Bate Besong lived out his life as a great warrior. He was hated and would say, self-hating, and feared all at once. He confirmed these by his triumphs and sufferings in verse.
Ideologically, I was attached to Bate Besong - the cachexy of the Cameroon political system tended to leave both of us none too sanguine about the future. I am still paralysed by the terror of his death and it is something I have not managed to feel good about.
Till We Meet Again, Adios
At the start of the new millennium, when freedom-hungry Cameroonians woke up to embrace this era with greater enthusiasm to right the wrongs of the common enemy, Jacobs BB was a leading figure in this venture.
Azore had just ferried himself into Cameroon, little known to most Cameroonians especially of the English -speaking regions, and still trying to cope with the perpetual not-friendly intellectual environment of the University of Buea; as I would later learned.
I could remember those infamous articles titled 'Obscure Intellectualism' published by The Post (2000) , pregnant with figurative innuendoes, filled with 'competitive' grandiloquence on both parties. I must confess it was really nasty. Level headed men - call them intellectuals, were carried by the waves of Maslow's basic desire to satisfy their limited ego-thirsty audience.
I sent a reaction to The Post. The article was never published. I was politely told the roar between BB and Azore on 'Obscure Intellectualism' has been settled.
I was later told Azore was a resident of Cameroon, from another African country, lecturer- Faculty of Arts-University of Buea. I understood then why he found it difficult to understand the writings of Jacobs BB.
Honestly, except you are well versed with the history and politics of Cameroon, the obscurantism of Jacobs BB's works can be frustrating.
In my opinion, only time could bridge the cleft that separated Jacobs BB and Azore.
Reading now from Azore that, they both built that bridge, is a sign of intellectual humility. That is what should count, when all 'real' Africans are continually fighting to get released from the claws of our gruesome oligarchs.
As we mourn the moving on of a man emancipated from mental slavery-Dr Jacobs BB,
let's all keep his flame burning, never to be extinguished. Mr Azore Opio, you are already doing that.
Neba-Fuh
[email protected]
Posted by: Neba Fuh | March 25, 2007 at 07:11 PM
correction: 'later learned' should read 'later learn'
Posted by: Neba Fuh | March 27, 2007 at 04:28 AM