His academic ambition propelled him to the land of literature – Nigeria – where he obtained his “A” Levels at Waddell Institute, Calabar, then got a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literary Studies from the University of Calabar, before crowning his academic pursuit with a Masters Degree (emphasis on African Poetry and Drama) from the University of Ibadan… Nigeria at that time was at the cauldron of military dictatorship and Bate Besong did not sit watching idly. He contributed to literary journals like Opon Ifa, Okike, Anthology of Oracle Poets, West Africa magazine, Quest magazine, Drumbeats and the African Concord. He also acted as a ghost writer to …Mamman Vatsa, edited some of the fine poems of Niyi Osundare and published his first book, Polyphemus Detainee andOther Skills, launched in April 1980 by… Chinua Achebe… Yet he chose for mentor, Wole Soyinka…And so Bate Besong had unconsciously become…[part]… of the Nigerian condition, caught in her political complexities and with her social mores: he was all Nigerian but for his origins, for he fused so intimately with the society and its authors that the temptations of homecoming [to Cameroon] were kept for a distant future.Besong did return to Cameroon in 1982, at a time of significant political change. Ngwane paints the following picture of this excitable Cameroonian period, and the role Besong was suddenly thrust into:
the bells of patriotism were jingling, calling him to serve this country as a visionary, urging him to raise this nation from the abyss of despair to the pinnacle of hope. He came back, armed like an Obasinjom Warrior, not with the brawns of a soldier but the brains of an intellectual, not with the gun of a fighter but with the guts of a writer. His only missile was his pen. It was in 1982 at the dawn of a New Deal that Bate Besong came to Cameroon, at a time when Cameroonians were slowly recovering from the deep dictatorial amnesia that Ahmadou Ahidjo [a former President of Cameroon] plunged all of us into for twenty-five years, at a time when Paul Biya had suddenly become our President…
Initially Besong would be one of the cheerleaders of this moment of national expectations. But the political leadership dashed any hopes of progress, and Besong’s radical writings soon began to displease the state and its security enforcers. He was arrested, accused of stirring revolts through his writings and drama presentations. But Besong also had an engaging life outside politics. He took various teaching appointments, worked in media editorial positions, traveled abroad, got married to his wife, Christina, and had children. All this time he continued to write and perform his poems and plays. Stability and senior professional positions would come when he joined the University teaching service at Buea, a place regarded by Cameroonian Anglophones as an ancestral capital and refuge center in their continuing difficulties as a minority in a largely Francophone country. His play, Requiem for the Last Kaiser, a satire influenced by Wole Soyinka’s A Play of Giants, would later win the Association of Nigerian Authors Drama Prize in 1992, emphasizing again Besong’s close connections with his other life in that next-door land to Cameroon. Indeed, his work is featured in Nigerian Theatre in English: A Critical Bibliography (Chris Dunton: Hans Zell, 1999).