Bate Besong

Who's Afraid of Anglophone (Cameroon) Theatre?

By Bate Besong

First published in West Africa (London), 7-3 July, 1997 1106-1107; 14-20 July 1997, 1146

An unpublished 1979 doctoral dissertation submitted to the School of English, University of Leeds, England by Hansel Ndumbe Eyoh reports the Francophone Cameroonian playwright Guillaume Oyono-Mbia as having said that although Cameroon enjoys the position in Africa, being by far the country with the largest number of known dramatists – in the French speaking section alone –

“The Anglophone region of Cameroon has been less fortunate” for neither the existence of the Editions CLE in Yaounde…nor..the training programme organisized by the French and the American cultural centres in Yaounde and Douala nor the theatre Ecole in Yaounde, have affected play-wrighting from this region” (vi-vii)

Post –Unification Anglophone Exile Poetry: Introducing Simon Mol & Kangsen Feka Wakai

By Bate Besong, Ph.D

Forthcoming: Inter’Actuel, 2006 (ed) Professor Robert Fotsing Mangoua, Universite de  Dschang, Cameroon.

Abstract
Anglophone Cameroon poetry, just as its dramaturgy and prose fiction counterparts, is a product of two distinct soci-aesthetic forces: the received traditionalist aesthetic practices and the aesthetics overdetermined by the nuances of Re-unification. The research seeks to correctly apprehend the artistic focus and ideological primogeniture of Anglophone exile poetry from an ideo-aesthetic perspective since, in the main, a study of Simon Mol (2002, 2004) and Kangsen Feka Wakai (2006)cannot be separated from the socio-historical,socio-political and socio-cultural contexts of “horizontal colonialism” [Doh 1993:]

The Fall of Sesekou E. T. Egbe and The Book of his Life

By Bate Besong

SESEKOU’S entourage is distraught. When rumours circulated, in 2002, that the old man had passed on during a heart surgery in the U.S that cost the family 50 million FCFA, the Presidency, promptly, suspended the roving ambassador’s stipend. It was never reinstated until his death, in Easter, 2005.

And now this: The children are angry that their father "would not have died" but for the "combination of blunders" at the Yaounde Referral Hospital.

Nationhood in Dramaturgy: Marginality and Commitment in Victor Epie Ngome’s “What God has Put Asunder”

By Bate Besong

Abstract of a BB article in the critical anthology, "Figures de l’histoire et imaginaire au Cameroun" a co-publication of the Universities of Buea and Franche - Comté of Besançon, France, which will be published in early 2005

V. E. Ngome’s What God Has Put Asunder (1992) can be considered as a successful attempt at producing valuable information about Cameroonian society and, also helping to bring about change since it records the history of the colonial, imperialist intervention on the individual psyche and society at large.