By Afam Akeh (Originally published in Gboungboun Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 2. November 2007)
For me, he was more the playwright than the poet. But in another time, in another place, it was his poetry and my poetry that had brought us together as fledgling writers – a coming together much in mind two decades later as I traveled cyberspace seeking the man for our interview. And we thought we already had him in our pages – alive, provocative, as he can be, angry even, we dared to hope. But death was also plotting. It took the man. It took our interview...
[email protected]. This email address has remained on a literary blog he tended with the same sense of care a life of ordering words imposes on a writer. The suddenness of his departure… There had been discussions with African Writing, of which I am the Editor. He was to do an interview for our pilot issue, something pungent on Cameroonian Literature. We wanted to hear about the tensions in Cameroonian Literature, especially in Anglophone Cameroonian writing, ensconced as it were as a “hidden space” in a context so overwhelmingly Francophone. He would also provide us with some of his poetry. For me, he was more the playwright than the poet. But in another time, in another place, it was his poetry and my poetry that had brought us together as fledgling writers – a coming together much in mind two decades later as I traveled cyberspace seeking the man for our interview. And we thought we already had him in our pages – alive, provocative, as he can be, angry even, we dared to hope. But death was also plotting. It took the man. It took our interview.
It was then with a sense of being cheated still wanting one’s own piece or part of what had been taken, that the eyes paraded his blog pages wanting to reclaim him. And mail him. And hear him again. And have that promised discussion on Cameroonian literature. And we did want to find out whether he would reject a provocative re-classification of his work to include it in diasporic Nigerian Literature, since so much of his training, influences and interests were Nigerian. But [email protected], that email address, no longer functions. It is now one of the symbolic remnants of a life mostly lived in print; as an address it now only leads to Besong, the memory. The man is long gone. A curious thing is death. One moment one is, and the next one is not. The agony is in death’s customary stripping of our certainties, even the possibility of closure. It takes, breaks, but does not conclude. Memory is installed into the space the dead leave behind – and memory is a living thing.
When Bate Besong died on 8 March 2007, from car crash injuries, a radical and industrious Cameroonian life of letters was rather hastily taken from us. His friend, the writer and public intellectual, George Ngwane, remembers the formative Nigerian years of Besong, a time of political instability, literary ferment, and radical commitment to Africanist ideas and Afrocentric ideals, all of which would influence the creative and political choices of his literary career. Ngwane speaks familiarly of his departed friend in his work, Bate Besong (Or the Symbol of Anglophone Hope), (Nooremac Press, Limbe, 1993):
His academic ambition propelled him to the land of literature – Nigeria – where he obtained his “A” Levels at Waddell Institute, Calabar, then got a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literary Studies from the University of Calabar, before crowning his academic pursuit with a Masters Degree (emphasis on African Poetry and Drama) from the University of Ibadan… Nigeria at that time was at the cauldron of military dictatorship and Bate Besong did not sit watching idly. He contributed to literary journals like Opon Ifa, Okike, Anthology of Oracle Poets, West Africa magazine, Quest magazine, Drumbeats and the African Concord. He also acted as a ghost writer to …Mamman Vatsa, edited some of the fine poems of Niyi Osundare and published his first book, Polyphemus Detainee andOther Skills, launched in April 1980 by… Chinua Achebe… Yet he chose for mentor, Wole Soyinka…And so Bate Besong had unconsciously become…[part]… of the Nigerian condition, caught in her political complexities and with her social mores: he was all Nigerian but for his origins, for he fused so intimately with the society and its authors that the temptations of homecoming [to Cameroon] were kept for a distant future.
Besong did return to Cameroon in 1982, at a time of significant political change. Ngwane paints the following picture of this excitable Cameroonian period, and the role Besong was suddenly thrust into:
the bells of patriotism were jingling, calling him to serve this country as a visionary, urging him to raise this nation from the abyss of despair to the pinnacle of hope. He came back, armed like an Obasinjom Warrior, not with the brawns of a soldier but the brains of an intellectual, not with the gun of a fighter but with the guts of a writer. His only missile was his pen. It was in 1982 at the dawn of a New Deal that Bate Besong came to Cameroon, at a time when Cameroonians were slowly recovering from the deep dictatorial amnesia that Ahmadou Ahidjo [a former President of Cameroon] plunged all of us into for twenty-five years, at a time when Paul Biya had suddenly become our President…
Initially Besong would be one of the cheerleaders of this moment of national expectations. But the political leadership dashed any hopes of progress, and Besong’s radical writings soon began to displease the state and its security enforcers. He was arrested, accused of stirring revolts through his writings and drama presentations. But Besong also had an engaging life outside politics. He took various teaching appointments, worked in media editorial positions, traveled abroad, got married to his wife, Christina, and had children. All this time he continued to write and perform his poems and plays. Stability and senior professional positions would come when he joined the University teaching service at Buea, a place regarded by Cameroonian Anglophones as an ancestral capital and refuge center in their continuing difficulties as a minority in a largely Francophone country. His play, Requiem for the Last Kaiser, a satire influenced by Wole Soyinka’s A Play of Giants, would later win the Association of Nigerian Authors Drama Prize in 1992, emphasizing again Besong’s close connections with his other life in that next-door land to Cameroon. Indeed, his work is featured in Nigerian Theatre in English: A Critical Bibliography (Chris Dunton: Hans Zell, 1999).
In addition to essays on Cameroonian and other African literatures published in academic journals, Besong has left books of poetry and drama, including Polyphemus Detainee and Other Skulls (Poems, 1980), The Most Cruel Death of the Talkative Zombie (A Faery Play in three parts, 1987), Obasinjom Warrior with Poems after Detention (1991), Requiem for the Last Kaiser (A Drama of Conscientization and Revolution), 1991, The Banquet (A pageant), The Grain of Bobe Ngom Jua (1997), Just Above Cameroon (Selected Poems, 1980 – 1994), Change Waka and His Man Sowaboy (2003), Three Plays (The Achwiimgbe Trilogy), 2003. Much of the work of this poet-playwright has remained rooted in the radical aesthetics of his earlier 1980s Nigerian intellectual experience. They seem dated to that time just before the challenges and uncertainties of postmodernism and recent cultural theory seized the imagination and the codes of discourse in the Nigerian academy. For a literary oeuvre inspired by and dedicated to the streets, markets and barrooms of his Cameroonian experience this aesthetic privileging of political commitment over the ambiguities of theoretical perspectives actually worked to advantage. Besong’s work spoke with the ‘still engaged’ alternative voice of African Literature, more recently represented by the cosmopolitan complexities, exilic anxieties and uncertainties of its diasporic and expatriate writers.
It may be that in the end, though he was taken in the prime of his life, death did not really cheat Bate Besong. Bate Besong cheated death. He has left behind these many publications. Then there are the many children his wife bore him. And even more ‘children’ out there, his literary children, those whom his teaching, intellectual and political interventions have inspired and informed, especially in Anglophone Cameroonian writing. His legacy lives. Death did not conclude him. And, about that interview with African Writing on Cameroonian literary and political tensions, we even found a way of cheating death by interviewing his friend George Ngwane instead, and Mwalimu Ngwane was just as forthright in his responses as Besong might have been. I was interested in the Cameroonian situation as an African thinker, especially as a Nigerian writer, as one from a country with so many rooted divisions and parochialisms it is sometimes impossible to raise the eyes, look beyond, and imagine a unified Nigerian or African perspective or position able to contest as one the resource and power spaces of the world.
Regarding the tensions in his homeland, I will leave the final words here to George Ngwane, and to all conscious Africans the sorrow of his damning verdict. So we conclude this memorial with a lamentation, but the tears are not for the one who has gone. The agony is for the living in an Africa castrated by its many conflicts. I had asked Ngwane whether these parochial, often sectarian, linguistic, ethnic and racial tensions that inform our African experiences and seek to influence our creative choices affect him significantly as a Cameroonian writer and thinker. His response:
Absolutely. Even when one considers oneself as having gone above the foreign cultural binary of Anglophone and Francophone, the [political] leadership’s inability to address the fundamental state of the union and implement development policies that reflect the [principle] of derivation still places one within this parochial language niche. And here the issue [or solution] is not about appointing Anglophones to positions of status [but not real power]… It is about respecting the spirit of the Foumban brotherhood and forging for all of us a common citizenry [which] does not necessarily erase the separate linguistic identities that laid a solid foundation [at independence] in 1961...I was extremely scandalized to note that no Francophone writer attended the burial of the celebrated Anglophone writer Bate Besong (who died on 8th March 2007 in the company of two other Anglophone literary luminaries), even though he was one of the few Anglophone writers to have attended the burial of the celebrated Francophone writer Mongo Beti a few years ago. More so, not a single Francophone newspaper (except the Franco-bilingual Cameroon Tribune newspaper) carried elaborate front-page coverage on the tragic death of Bate Besong.
Poet and critic, Afam Akeh is the author of Stolen Moments. He lives in London and is Editor of African Writing.
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§ Editorial Note:
"In African culture, death is the final arbiter, the ultimate peacemaker and uniter. Acrimony, petty quarrels and divisions cease in the contemplation of death. If Francophone Cameroon won't acknowledge the death of an African writer and a son of Cameroon just because he did not speak French, could that famous phrase - "colonised to the bone marrow" - used as a recurrent trope in discussions of Francophone Africa's legendary unwillingness or inability to sever her umbilical cord from France, be even deeper than imagined?"
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