Bate Besong

The Painful Exit of a Literary Juggernaut

By Uche Eze Nkatta Idika (National Youth Service Corper - Oceanic Bank International Plc. -Abuja, Nigeria)

The News of BB’s death
When I received a phone call in the early hours of that Thursday morning, I was delighted to observe that it was a foreign call coming from Cameroon. I could readily recognize that the number belonged to a friend; Ngala Ndi. I was happy I would have a chat with an old friend who was still at home; that we’ll talk of old memories and discuss future prospects. After exchanging pleasantries, Ngala did not know how to convey the news to me, perhaps owing to the fact that he knew how close I was to BB. So he started by saying that BB had an accident on his way to Yaounde. I screamed and said BB just sent me a mail a day earlier, informing me of his new book to be launched on Wednesday 7th March 2007.

BB Goes Down But Stands Tall

By Adams Bouddih (Originally published in The Sun)

It might have been wishful thinking when BB sang the dirge of the dictators around him in Requiem for the last Kaiser. Ironically, the Kaisers are still around and would learn of BB’s requiem with guessable pleasure.

When BB an outspoken critic wrote The Most Cruel Death of the Talkative Zombie, about the dehumanised race (the living dead or zombies) that he and his kith and kin had been reduced to; or is it the talkative zombies they have become, he didn’t think he would die in the cruel way he did. BB was talkative – or better still, penkative - as his pen never stopped flowing while bemoaning the plight of the downtrodden. But he didn’t know he would die in so cruel a way. Indeed, “What a way to die?” - to borrow from another prolific writer and teacher, Dr. Linus Asong.

A Baobab Fell in the Forest But Did They Notice? Bate Besong or the Symbol of the Cameroon Divide

By Dibussi Tande (Originally published on Scribbles from the Den)

“And yet, there was a time when people had faith, implicit faith - in this Union – without making any investigations. But I ask you, where is that faith now? It has vanished. So utterly! The bonds have snapped. We carry the scars of ‘brotherhood’ in a country so unaccustomed to candour.” Bate Besong - 1993

A common (in fact the most prevalent) theme in Bate Besong's writings (fiction and non-fiction) is the fate of Cameroon's English-speaking minority whom he referred to in his famous Beasts of No Nation as 'nightsoilmen" locked up in the antechamber of the bilingual republic; a people whose culture, history and even existence was an afterthought to the French-speaking majority of the bilingual Cameroon Republic.

Tribute To Bate Besong

Victor Epie'Ngome (Culled from The Sun)

BB, you must have known
That the requiem was at hand -
Yours before the Kaiser's -
So you sang with haste
Both psalm and antiphon
While the congregation yawned
Which now sings dies irae

BB, Gwangwa'a, Ambe and Awoh ... Rest softly

By Kenneth Komtanghi (Wanaku)

How does one write an eulogy for friends/brothers
prematurely and roughly harvested from the garden of life,
when one can still taste the salt from one's tears?

 

On My Dying (Message from Beyond):

Christmas Ebini
(A Poem Bate Besong Would Write Now)

I leave you
With no regrets
As I see the porter
Of the beautiful gates
A broad smile
On his face
With a bunch of keys
In his broad hands

It Seems Like it Was Only Yesterday...

Ewome Esoni

I have been speechless since I heared of Dr Ambe and BB's brutal death.Worse of all is the thoughts which keep coming to me especially during our recent exams in which BB came to the hall with that his usual smile and seriousness.It is unimaginable to think that he is gone,but what can I say.As a final year student in the English department of the university of Buea, and on behalf of all the level 400 students, I want to say we will really miss BB's lectures and his presence.There is so much to say about BB because we were so fond of him but I will express my regret in the following lines of this song:

"May Bate Besong the Great Bard Find Eternal Rest"

By Philip Effiong(Nigerian Novelist, Poet)

Today (15 March, 2007) I just received an e-mail from a former schoolmate at the university of Calabar informing me of the tragic death of Bate Besong. Although we were in the same department (English & Literary Studies), Besong was two years ahead of me and among the first English graduates of the University of Calabar.

"Bate Besong Trode on Soyinka's Footprints" (Reminisces of a Former Classmate)

By Vahid Enow Ashu

The name Bate Besong first confronted me in the pages of The Nigerian Chronicle, that Cross River State Government-owned paper.This was in 1978 and his poems featured regularly in the literary column. I was to meet him in the flesh a few months later in October of that year when I went to the University of Calabar to take a degree in English and Literary studies, the same course BB was reading.

It happened this way.

Memory Lane: Change Waka and His Man Sawa Boy (Book Review)

Review by Chris Dunton, National University of Lesotho (African Book Publishing Record, Vol. XXVIII NO. 2, 2002 PP. 123 -124)

Change Waka and His Man Sawa Boy. Yaounde: Editions CLE, 2001. 65 pp. price not reported pap. ISBN 1723501434

Bate Besong is a Cameroonian poet and dramatist, an out-spoken critic of his country's regime and especially of its handling of the status of western ("anglophone") Cameroon (witness Besong's recent journalistic comments on the death of the veteran politician, S.T. Muna, one of the enablers of Cameroon's unification). Earlier plays, such as The Most Cruel Death of the Talkative Zombie and Requiem for the Last Kaiser, are scathing satires on the Cameroon polity and on its use of a formidable repressive apparatus. Change Waka continues in the same vein, but here the specific focus is on election rigging, the most significant stage prop for the play being a (fatuously) transparent ballot box.