Bate Besong

Bate Besong: Is his Poetry Too Difficult for Cameroonians?

By Shadrach A. Ambanasom

African Literature Association (ALA) Bulletin. Vol. 28(3/4), Summer/Fall 2000

© UB Ulumni e-group

Bate Besong is the most paradoxical Anglophone Cameroonian writer today in the sense that his work attracts and repels readers at one and the same time. While his poetry is relatively opaque, he nevertheless remains popular, and while his themes entice readers, his style alienates them. Even some dons are ill at ease with his jazzy, abrasive style. Yet among university students there is no literature lecturer more popular than Bate Besong, an erudite iconoclast with an exceptional range of vocabulary power. 

For Osagyefo Capitaine Thomas Sankara

By Bate Besong

Mongrelised Iscariots
Were in fact bred there.
A cruel ghommid-in-wellingtons
Wore
A canary pullover
Pulled on his putschist muffler
Dyed,
A brownish yellow

Butchered
Ceaselessly into the grey
Hours of the dawn

The Power of Bate Besong: Alfred Matumamboh Offers a Critical Appraisal of a New Drama

Originally Published in West Africa Magazine (London), 1997

In his new play, The Banquet, Bate Besong has painted for us a terrifying tragic scene of human existence.  He piles up dreadful images, in his characteristically calculated manner, to evoke a vision of the dehumanisation and calamity that the evil in man has compelled him to wreak upon himself.  The density and intensity of the frightening images and metaphors inform us of the doom that we have unleashed upon ourselves.

Drama & the Revolutionary Vision: Bate Besong's "Beasts of No Nation" and Bole Butake's "Lake God"

By Eunice Ngongkum (Ph.D.) - Department of African Literature, University of Yaounde I

Abstract
Using the Marxist, Sociological and Formalistic approaches to literary criticism, this paper aims at underscoring the centrality of Beasts of No Nation and Lake God in the evolution of Bate Besong and Bole Butake as dramatists of revolt. The playwrights do not only realistically and critically capture post-colonial Cameroon in its political, social and spiritual essence but, actually lay the basis of a future of hopes and possibilities through the actions of the oppressed in these plays. The revolutionary overture in these works lays the foundation of a developing revolutionary offensive that matures significantly in subsequent plays

Dramatic Discourse and Democratic Transition in Cameroon: Aesthetics of Liberation in Bate Besong's "Requiem for the Last Kaiser"

By Tiku Takem, Ph.D. (United States of America, USA)

Bate Besong is a widely – known intellectual and social critic whose creative corpus as well as his commentaries articulate his political and ideological anxieties towards the insensitivities of the postcolony. Consequently, he has crafted an aesthetics of liberation predicated on the impulse to map out an alternative vision for the suffering masses. Requiem for the Last Kaiser, 1one of Besong’s popular plays, is a typical example of his drama of liberation. Its relevance to the political and social affairs of contemporary Cameroon is located in its engagement with the profound contradictions of the neo-colonial state characterized by ineptitude and absolutism of political leadership.