Afam Akeh

bbesong2001@yahoo.com. This email address has remained on a literary blog he tended with the same sense of care a life of ordering words imposes on a writer. The suddenness of his departure… There had been discussions with African Writing, of which I am the Editor. He was to do an interview for our pilot issue, something pungent on Cameroonian Literature. We wanted to hear about the tensions in Cameroonian Literature, especially in Anglophone Cameroonian writing, ensconced as it were as a “hidden space” in a context so overwhelmingly Francophone. He would also provide us with some of his poetry. For me, he was more the playwright than the poet. But in another time, in another place, it was his poetry and my poetry that had brought us together as fledgling writers – a coming together much in mind two decades later as I traveled cyberspace seeking the man for our interview. And we thought we already had him in our pages – alive, provocative, as he can be, angry even, we dared to hope. But death was also plotting. It took the man. It took our interview.

It was then with a sense of being cheated still wanting one’s own piece or part of what had been taken, that the eyes paraded his blog pages wanting to reclaim him. And mail him. And hear him again. And have that promised discussion on Cameroonian literature. And we did want to find out whether he would reject a provocative re-classification of his work to include it in diasporic Nigerian Literature, since so much of his training, influences and interests were Nigerian. But bbesong2001@yahoo.com, that email address, no longer functions. It is now one of the symbolic remnants of a life mostly lived in print; as an address it now only leads to Besong, the memory. The man is long gone. A curious thing is death. One moment one is, and the next one is not. The agony is in death’s customary stripping of our certainties, even the possibility of closure. It takes, breaks, but does not conclude. Memory is installed into the space the dead leave behind – and memory is a living thing.

When Bate Besong died on 8 March 2007, from car crash injuries, a radical and industrious Cameroonian life of letters was rather hastily taken from us. His friend, the writer and public intellectual, George Ngwane, remembers the formative Nigerian years of Besong, a time of political instability, literary ferment, and radical commitment to Africanist ideas and Afrocentric ideals, all of which would influence the creative and political choices of his literary career. Ngwane speaks familiarly of his departed friend in his work, Bate Besong (Or the Symbol of Anglophone Hope), (Nooremac Press, Limbe, 1993):

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