By Douglas Achingale
On this fifth anniversary of Bate Besong’s demise, it is worthwhile dedicating some lines to him in the following way:
On Thursday, 8 March 2007, I was steeped in some laborious but edifying work in the news room of The Herald newspaper, in my capacity then as desk editor and columnist of the now defunct tabloid, when my phone suddenly rang. It was my good old journalist chum, Sam Bokuba, then working for CRTV Buea, who was calling. I thought he wanted to recount to me one of those thrilling tales he and I are wont to share.
“Guess what!” he screeched.
“Which varsity damsel has stumbled in your snare again?” I questioned in utter excitement.
“Far from that! Your pal, Papse (for that was the soubriquet by which Dr. Hilarious Ngwa Ambe was commonly known by folks), your friend Kwasen Gwangwa’a and your mentor, Bate Besong (BB for short) perished together with their driver, Awoh, in the wee hours of this morning along the Douala – Yaounde death trap!”
God alone knows how much tears streamed down my cheeks that fateful morning. I don’t remember having ever shed them in such generous quantity since I became a man. Not even when the old man who sired me was called home a couple of years back. Indeed my colleagues were aghast to see me shivering and drowning the sheets of paper lying before me.
Their muscular and persistent intervention was needed to put me back into physical order. But mentally, I remained lost in the wilderness. This they understood so well. So to free me and our readers from even greater embarrassment, they decided to do most of the work that was assigned to me in preparation for the publication of the next issue of the paper the following day. As a matter of fact, all I was allowed to do that day was an obituary on the fallen heroes.
I would not stop writing if I were to recount the depth of my friendship with Papse since our university days. ( Prof. Kehbuma Langmia can testify). Neither would I close my narration if I were to say the cornucopia of memorable intellectual and social encounters I had with BB since 1985 when I first met the bard.
Permit me, dear friends, to recall just one of the things the latter did that struck me most. It was a rejoinder to an article written by Mejame Njikang, one of my class mates in Ngoa Ekele, and published in the now defunct Cameroon Post in 1991.
Njikang’s write-up was captioned “Bate Besong and the language problem.” In it, he rubbished BB’s writings, saying that whatever message that was lodged in them could not go across because of what he described as the author’s grandiloquence. He cautioned the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Award winner to drop his pen, go back to school and learn how to write more simply.
Livid with rage, BB, then a teacher at Government Bilingual High School, Molyko – Buea, picked up his pen and did a rejoinder which he titled “Mejame Njikang who? Query to an ostentatious iguana!” and published, of course, in the same newspaper. (Those were the legendary heyday when the Tande Dibussis, the JK Bannavtis, etc. were spitting fire in the local press).
As a student, I did memorize the one-page masterpiece. But today only the opening lines are still ensconced in my memory. Hear them:
“I read your literary reviews in some local newspapers and I know that you are not an intelligent man. So I am not going to invite you to tango on the sacred coliseums of literary discourse and practice.
“Perhaps some day in a free and once more communal and democratic Cameroon – and that should be after I must have sanitized your Augean stable brain with some detergents, some demi-johns of eau de javel (java water) – don’t laugh, I’ll try!
“I suspect you belong to that monkey monkeying cretin circus of time-serving political lakayanas and toadies who blabber like the orang outangs – they are about a pre-Gorbachev Perestroika Cameroon, a pre-Roosevelt New Deal Cameroon – brazen plagiarism in morosity!
“So in my writings, what terrifying gravamens, what genocide-like revelations swarm the goose pimples of my Anglophone Cameroonian brothers here and those in the diaspora?...”
(Oh my God! I wish I could recall the rest of those luscious lines!! For those that followed were even sweeter than the ones captured here!!!)
And do you know what? Mejame was more than devastated! After BB’s rejoinder came out, the lad was walking on the campus like someone whose soul had left his body! (Langmo can again testifty).
I remember that Prof. Bole Butake invited BB thereafter to give us a lecture on African Literature, for we were preparing to take our final degree exam. On that day, Mejame, who was a habitual backbencher, sat right at the front. His tail between his hind legs, he was, in fact, the one who stood up to wipe the blackboard each time it had to be wiped.
Mejame Njikang’s unusual kookiness drew BB’s attention and he asked to know his name. Behold, when BB heard it, he embraced the young man in emotional fraternity, calling him “my son.”
After the lecture, the master and the student withdrew to a solitary corner and had a close-to-one-hour tête-à-tête whose subject never filtered out to any of us who watched them with anxiety, up to this day.
That was how the two became friends until the “Obasinjom Warrior” finally passed on.
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