Till Death do Us French!: On Bate Besong, Cameroon, and Matters of the Marrow

In addition to essays on Cameroonian and other African literatures published in academic journals, Besong has left books of poetry and drama, including Polyphemus Detainee and Other Skulls (Poems, 1980), The Most Cruel Death of the Talkative Zombie (A Faery Play in three parts, 1987), Obasinjom Warrior with Poems after Detention (1991), Requiem for the Last Kaiser (A Drama of Conscientization and Revolution), 1991, The Banquet (A pageant), The Grain of Bobe Ngom Jua (1997), Just Above Cameroon (Selected Poems, 1980 – 1994), Change Waka and His Man Sowaboy (2003), Three Plays (The Achwiimgbe Trilogy), 2003. Much of the work of this poet-playwright has remained rooted in the radical aesthetics of his earlier 1980s Nigerian intellectual experience. They seem dated to that time just before the challenges and uncertainties of postmodernism and recent cultural theory seized the imagination and the codes of discourse in the Nigerian academy. For a literary oeuvre inspired by and dedicated to the streets, markets and barrooms of his Cameroonian experience this aesthetic privileging of political commitment over the ambiguities of theoretical perspectives actually worked to advantage. Besong’s work spoke with the ‘still engaged’ alternative voice of African Literature, more recently represented by the cosmopolitan complexities, exilic anxieties and uncertainties of its diasporic and expatriate writers.

It may be that in the end, though he was taken in the prime of his life, death did not really cheat Bate Besong. Bate Besong cheated death. He has left behind these many publications. Then there are the many children his wife bore him. And even more ‘children’ out there, his literary children, those whom his teaching, intellectual and political interventions have inspired and informed, especially in Anglophone Cameroonian writing. His legacy lives. Death did not conclude him. And, about that interview with African Writing on Cameroonian literary and political tensions, we even found a way of cheating death by interviewing his friend George Ngwane instead, and Mwalimu Ngwane was just as forthright in his responses as Besong might have been. I was interested in the Cameroonian situation as an African thinker, especially as a Nigerian writer, as one from a country with so many rooted divisions and parochialisms it is sometimes impossible to raise the eyes, look beyond, and imagine a unified Nigerian or African perspective or position able to contest as one the resource and power spaces of the world.

Regarding the tensions in his homeland, I will leave the final words here to George Ngwane, and to all conscious Africans the sorrow of his damning verdict. So we conclude this memorial with a lamentation, but the tears are not for the one who has gone. The agony is for the living in an Africa castrated by its many conflicts. I had asked Ngwane whether these parochial, often sectarian, linguistic, ethnic and racial tensions that inform our African experiences and seek to influence our creative choices affect him significantly as a Cameroonian writer and thinker. His response:

Absolutely. Even when one considers oneself as having gone above the foreign  cultural binary of Anglophone and Francophone, the [political] leadership’s inability to address the fundamental state of the union and implement development policies that reflect the [principle] of derivation still places one within this parochial language niche. And here the issue [or solution] is not about appointing Anglophones to positions of status [but not real power]… It is about respecting the spirit of the Foumban brotherhood and forging for all of us a common citizenry [which] does not necessarily erase the separate linguistic identities that laid a solid foundation [at independence] in 1961...I was extremely scandalized to note that no Francophone writer attended the burial of the celebrated Anglophone writer Bate Besong (who died on 8th March 2007 in the company of two other Anglophone literary luminaries), even though he was one of the few Anglophone writers to have attended the burial of the celebrated Francophone writer Mongo Beti a few years ago. More so, not a single Francophone newspaper (except the Franco-bilingual Cameroon Tribune newspaper) carried elaborate front-page coverage on the tragic death of Bate Besong.

<••< back to Invisible Contexts