Bate Besong

Bate Besong or the Therapeutics of Laughter

George D. Nyamndi (Originally published in Lisa e-journal)

Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo…It must have a social signification. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977,321

In his latest novel, A Man of the People, Chinua Achebe has delineated a typical representative of the emergent bourgeoisie. If you have read the novel, you will remember that Chief Honourable Nanga, M.P., is the corrupt uncultured Minister of Culture in a corrupt regime of a newly independent African state. In a country where the majority of peasants and workers live in shacks and can only afford pails as lavatories, the Minister lives in a princely seven-bathroomed mansion with seven gleaming silent action water closets. He arranges for the tarmacking of roads, but only when his buses are about to arrive. The ten luxurious buses have been supplied to him by the British Amalgamated on a never-never basis. Elections are a democratic farce in which bribery, thuggery, and brutal force are used, with the connivance and financial backing of British commercial interests, to enable Nanga and his henchmen to return to power unopposed.These, I am afraid, are the realities of the contemporary African scene. How have Aluko and Soyinka reacted to them? James Ngugi, “Satire in Nigeria” in Pieterse Cosmo and Donald Munro (eds.), Protest and Conflict in (...)

1This rather lengthy citation from Ngugi’s study of satire in Nigeria may strike some as irritating – and justifiably so – but it is important that the mood be set ab initio; important that is, that the ills be called by their names. Ngugi made his study in 1969, at a time when Nigerian society was experimenting with self-governance and discovering the ugly realities of corruption andpolitical deceit.

Literature in the Season of the Diaspora: Notes to the Anglophone Cameroonian Writer

Bate Besong

Published in Nalova Lyonga, Eckhard Breitinger, Bole Butake (eds). Anglophone Cameroon Writing. Bayreuth, Germany: Bayreuth African Studies 30/Weka No 1. 1993. 205 pages

Of Pariahs and Masons
Many of the leading cultural figures of their time, in all climates, have maintained the artist’s traditional responsibility in addressing the question of meaning in endeavouring of synthesize, in seeking to weld disparate fragments into a coherent reality. And, in times like these…

Welcome 2006! (To the Viewers of this Website)

From Bate Besong

My writing output as a whole(drama , poetry , theory)has  recieved  serious attention in book-length studies, journal articles ,research papers , seminar presentations and theses and dissertations.

Having been  "stereotyped" by literary scholars and critics as the "outspoken  dissident" and major author of the new literature of a democratic Cameroon, I would like to suggest that I have experimented with symbolic tableaux , dramatic illusion, mimicry and pageant elements to illuminate the theatrical drabness of the emergent Cameroon----- theatre since the turbulent nineties.

NEW ENGAGEMENTS IN CAMEROON LITERATURE: The Other Side Of The Bridge

By Bate Besong

Part I

Preface To Discourse
No full account of the rhizome density of our national literature is possible - as the editors of Patrimoine have so kindly guessed - without adequate and appropriate reference to the alternative writing that has given life to an essential, yet repressed and denied aspect of Cameroonian reality.

It is writing that is a reflection of the multifarious nature of Cameroonian reality and the readiness to decisively take a progressive and radical march towards it that distinguishes new Anglophone literature from the apologetic perspective and transcendental lore of bourgeois sylvan pretensions.

The Anglophone Cameroonian Writer Comes Of Age Under The Biya Sky (I)

BY BATE BESONG

When I … used to write plays and novels that were only critical of the racism in the colonial system, I was praised. I was awarded prizes and my novels were in the syllabus. But when … I started … questioning the very foundations of imperialism and of foreign domination of Kenyan economy and culture, I was sent to Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. Ngugi Wa Thingo’O (Barrel Of A Pen, 1985:65)

PLAYWRIGHTS WREST VICTORY FROM CHADS OF ANOMIE: Diminution of Babila Mutia’s Humanist Vision

BY BATE BESONG

Prolegomenon

I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible except getting off his back. Leo Tolstoy

Augusto Boal, the famous Brazilian theatre umpire had so presciently noted long ago (1979) that in the dialectical theatre of the German Marxist playwright, Bertolt Brecht, we are witnessing the death knell to the illusionistic or naturalist tradition. By unquestionably preaching the changeability of archaic institutions, Brecht’s commitment, which embraces both a political, social or economic vision of man, demystifies capitalist myths by attacking the perpetual peazantisation of the masses or lower classes. In turning official historiography and mythopoesy on their heads, the playwright’s artistic vision “clarifies concepts, reveals truths, exposes contradictions, and proposes transformations” (106).