Bate Besong

Fallen Man of Letters (A Poem for Bate Besong)

By Sarah Anyang

BB Obasinjom[1] Warrior! Ekinni Achwimgbe[2]!

Bombomkiri, Kiribombom!

The famished road gulp you and your cohorts

On that fateful women’s Day 07

And you became Beast of No Nation.

Aieee Obasinjom warrior! Yet you Say “I conquer fear to die”?

Book Review - Their Champagne Party Will End! Poems in Honor of Bate Besong

Joyce Ashuntantang & Dibussi Tande (eds). Their Champagne Party Will End! Poems in Honor of Bate Besong. Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2008. 76 pages. Paperback. Available from African Books Collective (UK) £12.95 and amazon.com and affiliates (international) $19.95

The celebration in verse of the life and works of Bate Besong, Cameroon's most influential and controversial poet, playwright and scholar. Published by Langaa RPCIG.

With Contributions from 27 poets from Cameroon and Africa and a forward by Ba'bila Mutia

For Osagyefo Capitaine Thomas Sankara

By Bate Besong

Mongrelised Iscariots
Were in fact bred there.
A cruel ghommid-in-wellingtons
Wore
A canary pullover
Pulled on his putschist muffler
Dyed,
A brownish yellow

Butchered
Ceaselessly into the grey
Hours of the dawn

Shame on the last vestiges of the geriatic politics of the Cameroon National Assembly*

By Bate Besong

Genesis: as in dirge
Carnation placed on the coco-nut head of a Father of the Nation
without good judgement; is a gold ring affixed in a bush-pig's snout;
like a Foumban referendum lamp, flickering out in the charnel
power; of an incestuous lure. So

Why we laugh at politicians and give them names (to Chief Charles Achaleke Taku, UN Attorney)

By Bate Besong

In our ‘White Collar Delinquent’s Democracy’
Where the monopoly of power is
the birthright of those
who get it by crook
and the state apparatus is
and instrument of  personal vendetta;

The house on the anthill (for the Mwalimu George Ngwane)

By Bate Besong

The party makes aluminium crowns
and puts them on the
heads of
toad-eaters

The mouths of liars will be shut

(One year after my public disgrace and subsequent impeachment on the F- Affair)

By Bate Besong (Published in The Post, No 0787, Friday 4, 2006)

        To Her who Rejoiced          

                      I
Your prejudices will be held against you. Just
as the mountain straw is set on fire by sparks, so
you will be destroyed by your evil deeds, and no Presidential
decrees will be able to stop your destruction.

The Playwright & The Campus Giants

By Bate Besong (Published in The Post, No 0781, Friday, July 14, 2006)

The words of scholars are wise
and they are always fair.
Their toga of narration
is made of gold thread
& topaz.

They keep the cadences of
Archimedes in rhetoric of finest gold.
they never depart from invocations of eureka

The Professor

By Bate Besong (Published in The Post, July 6-7, 2006)

                   I
Of what use is a politically
partisan mameluke
in a professorial chair?

Of what use is an
Establishment mole
With an academic’s sceptre?

Homage to Bate Besong

By Nicha Jerome (Grandson, Switzerland)

The heavy tides of time never
Distort shades of truth, never!

             Bate Besong:

I honour you giant of the greats
Who said the stars were asleep?
Who said the master; our ancients are gone?
the Lion roared the other day ‘WOAW’
Zebras galloped, but I saw you stand!

Bate Besong:

I honour you great one of the old.
It was said the manacles of oppression
Dug into your flesh , exposing fresh wounds
To Zombie flies to feed on-
Your eyes never turned red,we heard.