Bate Besong

Thank You Elon University!

Dear Brian,

You have been very determined and resolute in the pursuit of the goals of Elon University, North Carolina. Your humanity shone in your attempt to seek an intellectual haven for a most embattled scholar, and writer in the jungle of a sub-saharan Darfur.

You believed that if African Literature is to be continously used as a weapon for collective struggle and as an instrument of demolishing the squalid institutions that exploit and degrade humanity, as a scholar -historian, Elon University epitomised, in your advocacy, found in me, one whose entire career was the metonymy of the African Experience in Literature.

One Day in the Life of Ekinneh Agbaw-Ebai

Being a response to Agbaw-Ebai's "In Defence Of Egbe Tabi"

There is always a certain amount of reduction in any attempt to simplify, schematize or paraphrase complex historical encounter and the study of Re-Unification is especially vulnerable to such problems on account of the CNU/CPDM prolonged tenure and impact on all aspects of national life over the past 45 years.

It is however useful to remind ourselves that neo-imperialism has not been an identical process in different parts of the conquered territory, but everywhere it has locked the people of Southern Cameroons origin into the most complex and traumatic relationships in history.

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.

The Judiciary is a Pantomime: If Martin Essoka Eseme or John Kohtem Testify

By Bate Besong

A GAULLIST dictatorship, is by definition a prebendal, autocracy, sustained, by un-elected Governors and Government Delegates, the police, preféts, etc, and it derives its power from a Federal populist, Constitution it has had to subvert in order to cocoon itself in power.

Corruption and lack of accountability, injustice in the possession of power are metonymy of this troglodyte, francopile monolithism. Politics by its E.NAM political paparazzi is both backward and alienating providing little scope for patriotic forces or other progressive votaries to be a positive enzyme for change. The whole process of the Cameroonian Judiciary is an elaborate pantomime.

ESUKA NDOKI'S QUISLING SCNC: After The Ekontang Elad Particular

BY BATE BESONG

The POST Newspaper No. 155, Monday, January 24, 2000

We, Southern Cameroonians, have always had leaders that are archetypal mediocres: tribalistic, deceitful and fraudulent - since Foumban. Our daily lives are, therefore, viewed by the neo-colonial askari, through a distorted Quai d' Orsay prism, where the sum total of a person's character, merit, and worth is defined by De Gaulle's language. We have always been frog-marched in the limbo of marginality, alienated and directionless. In the depths of ignominy. Yet, we need someone who could give a strong sense of belonging to all, since the alternative, revolutionary front, is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by apologists, jobbers and other such thieves-of-power.

The Henry Fossung and Esuka Ndoki Mukete-Ivo Yongbang SCNC gave no leadership, clarified nothing, and confused everything.

Query To George Ewane, Presidential Mimic Man

By Bate Besong

I will not conceal my own conviction that as my former Advanced Level English Literature student, in the late 80s, at the Bilingual Grammar School, Molyko-Buea, George Ewane, has not taken to heart the repercussions of inflicting on society the cataracts of mass delusion and enfoolment, resulting, from the hubris of unmoderated greed.

Whether this reflected the hamartia of new deal lionisation or calculated obfuscation on his part, cannot now be determined by hearing the mimic man’s voice on the radio.