Bate Besong

US Ambassador hosts Café Littéraire to Discusses Writer’s “Quest for Freedom and Social Justice”

Originally posted on the US Embassy website

To commemorate Martin Luther King’s struggle for freedom and justice not only for African-Americans but also for the underprivileged worldwide, the Public Affairs Section organized a literary evening on January 19 at the Ambassador’s Residence to study “The Quest for Freedom and Social Justice in the Literary Work of Bate Besong.”

Born in 1954, Bate Besong was an Anglophone Cameroonian writer who published numerous plays, collections of poems, and essays before his tragic death in a 2007 car accident.  Participants included university lecturers, literary critics, writers, research students in literature, publishers, journalists, staff members from two foreign cultural centers in Yaounde, as well as the Ambassador and Embassy staff.

Bate Besong: The Silent Volcano

By Bole Butake, Professor.

TRAGEDY STRIKES ON DOUALA YAOUNDE ROAD

On March 8, 2007, at about nine o’clock in the morning, my phone rang. When I pressed the answer button and held it to my ear, I heard a delirious voice from the other end shouting, “Bate Besong! Bate Besong! Bate Besong!” I recognised the voice as that of Babila Mutia and tried to ask in as calm a voice as I could muster, “What is wrong with Bate Besong?” I knew that he had been engaged in launching his latest book entitled Disgrace the day before in one of the amphitheatres of the University of Buea where he was lecturing in the Department of English. The desperate voice on the other end of the line weighed down more forcefully: “Hilarious Ambe! Hilarious Ambe! Hilarious…” Realising that there was no way to get Babila to be more coherent, I switched off the phone and rang Hilarious Ambe’s number. After a long and nervous wait a voice answered from the other end. But it was clearly not Hilarious Ambe’s voice. Speaking in English, the person identified himself as a gendarme officer and went on to announce to announce what I feared the most.