Palapala Magazine

(Poetry) Obasinjom Warrior (For Bate Besong)

 By Dzekashu MacViban

Votre sicèle, dit-on, était trop jeune pour te lire. (Alfred de Musset)

Two-legged brain, transcendental transcriber
Contiguous of earth, monsieur
In the lions’ den — the Tiger
Imposed its revelator-role, soared
And saw what lies beneath. You
Embraced the tiger, yielded substance—
Rooted in your dream,
Taproot in bedrock, fault line and all.
You spun gray webs for tomorrow’s seeds
Now you tread the earth of Okigbo

Riverain, cosmic-built, out of time…
Spiral sights of sage hood, mystery.
Presences unfathomable.

(Poetry) States as Headed

 Wirndzerem G. Barfee

I have opiated tribes
With a decadent patience,
I have ankylosized the machine
With a leaden inertia:
Everything is still.
I concoct the ferment of a windless night,
Everything is silent.
The painting of a sepulchered choir,
Everyone is quiet.
The waiting of a reign’s requiem,
Is it?

Fiction: Pieces of Silver (An Excerpt)

Dipita Kwa

CHAPTER TWO

            Usually Musango sat for hours on a bench behind the ticket counter at Gare Routier Bonaberi praying for one more passenger to come. At times he slept. After feeling sufficiently bored he joined the loaders to scream destinations at prospective travelers. Most often after the tickets sold out showed that his bus was full, and he could at last make a trip, he still had to comb the off-licenses to drag out those passengers already trapped in bottles of beer, apparently oblivious of their pending journey. And such passengers plucked off bottles are usually the real noisy ones who ceased the least chance to spring up a quarrel and insult anyone who hadn’t a sober mind. They would talk and shout and even threaten to trade blows all the way to their drop-off points. When these types decided they didn’t like the driver’s face, Musango turned to his CD player for help. He increased the volume to drown the noise. This, however, worked only when the trouble-monger was sitting far behind in his fumes of alcohol.

Palapala Magazine #5 - Kongossa! A New Word Order

LA MAISON DE L’ECRIVAIN

Patrice Nganang

L’écrivain essaie tout simplement de devenir humain. Peut-être a-t-il beaucoup plus que certains, la conscience que ce n’est pas si facile, encore moins dans notre monde d’aujourd’hui, et surtout sur ce continent dont il parle de préférence, l’Afrique, dont un à un les pays sombrent dans le chaos. Il essaie de devenir humain à travers le langage, parce que ce sont les mots qu’il a choisis comme ses instruments de prédilection. Il a choisi les mots et pas, par exemple les briques, car il serait alors un maçon. Et pourtant l’exemple du maçon est édifiant, parce que l’écrivain essaie de rendre le langage qu’il utilise le plus humain possible. Il le fait, un peu comme le maçon concasserait du gravier pour en faire du sable, malaxerait du sable pour en faire du béton, infiltrerait du béton entre des briques pour faire des murs, et monterait des murs pour faire surgir une maison.

To Memory

Kangsen Feka Wakai

Before I made the choice of becoming a writer, I was enthralled by oral expressions, by mind-bending riddles, by witty proverbs, by nursery rhymes, by idioms, by the treble of language, by fairy tales, by Roger Milla, kongosa, by folklore, by myths and legends, by history’s sardonic laughter, by rituals, by colonial and postcolonial literature, by the relentless hollers of street peddlers, by sanctified choral hymns, by Boney M, by the echoing timbre in political rallies, by Zebrudaya, by presidential decrees, by motions of support, by protest songs, by music, by Mandela, by impassioned Sunday sermons, by Achebe, by Beti, by Wa Thiongo, by Lapiro, by BB, by Petit pays et les sans visas, by Gobata, by Tutuola, by L.T. Asong, by Ako-Aya, by loitering ghosts, by the footwork of possessed masquerades and by the spectacle of everyday life, its tragedies, comedies, laughter, cries, quietude and noise.

My Encounter with Writing: Evolution and Philosophical Perspectives

Wirndzerem G. Barfee

Writing in Cameroon, especially Anglophone Cameroon, does not easily figure as one of the dream vocations or pastimes that youngsters espouse in their early reveries and visions of what they aspire to be or do in life. Our material and immaterial values framed within historical and contemporary practices and models explain much about this alienation from the culture of the written word and discourse. 

Composing and Desire

Joyce Ashuntantang, Ph.D.
 
When it hits me, my pupils dilate, my breathing doubles in speed, my heart races. I can't contain myself; I smile and sometimes notice the onset of perspiration. At this juncture, I must rush to the object of my desire. I get there with my left hand on my bosom trying to stop my heaving breasts from tearing through my blouse.

Then I grab it, pause for a minute to see what my opening action should be because what I do first, matters...no it's not what you think—this is what happens to me when an idea hits me and I have to write, especially poetry. It is like labor, the urge and pain, and the idea itches to come out. I become restless as I churn the lines in my head.

Book Review: The Spirit Machine and Other New Short Stories from Cameroon

Emma Dawson (ed). The Spirit Machine and Other New Short Stories from Cameroon. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press. (Publication date: June 1, 2009.

Excerpt from Intro by Emma Dawson:

Until recently the Cameroonian short story in English has often interested itself directly with postcolonial Cameroonian society. But things are changing, and as this anthology will hopefully demonstrate, many of the themes explored in the short stories are not directly linked to a sense of postcoloniality, but reach beyond that experience and into the lives of ordinary Cameroonians today. The stories do reveal the past that Cameroon has known, whether it is through the code-switching or the variety of language used or the themes that, when unravelled, lead back in some way to a legacy of colonisation...

A Ripple From Abakwa (An Excerpt)

Johnnie MacViban

CHAPTER SEVEN
THE HARDWAY

Garba Mallam Dogo whose profile curved at a certain angle, was at the helm of the ship of state. He was the Gaulists’ little Macaque who led a simulation of a government whose foundation was based on the super-structure of fear. Authenticity of all things was the national religion while the cult of mediocrity had become the median for national survival. Presidentialism, whatever the HEXAGONE uncles meant by it was a terminal illness that left political pundits searching for a vaccine.

Dante's Corner: Somali Pirates

Incidents at a Writers’ Conference*

Who
Anglophone Cameroon Writers Association (ACWA)
Motto: Creativity for Humanity

Where
 University of Yaounde I
 
When
 Saturday 4th April 2009

Quotable Nyamnjoh* - The Politics of Scholarship

The Politics of Scholarship
“…The person who has the power to define has that power not only to define the Self, but also to define Others. That means that Western scholarship tends to determine who is going to be included and who excluded, and that does not always have to do with the quality of scholarship being produced. A journal that is based in the UK, run by somebody who has assumptions about the world and North/South divisions, might take positions about which papers will be published. Those decisions have very little to do with science, but more with the politics of scholarly production.

Djobu Mask Society

Richard “Gbagbo” Curtis is a Chicago born visual artist, drummer and mask maker.  He is the founder of the Djobu Mask Society.   
 
   
1.What is the Djobu Mask Society?

Djobu Mask Society was created to remember  and represent the spirits of those Africans from Africa through the diaspora. We act as a bridge between the ancestors and the living.  The Djobu mask society is represented by 3 spirits. Djobu which represents a more contemporary face of the african spirits in the diaspora.

Selected Poems by Dzekashu Macviban Charles

Existence

We fought back, with light, the endless night
You imposed on our existence
As the day had left the day, never to return
It seemed—
Had it all ended there
In that primeval darkness of genesis?
You tailed us— through time and space, alas! —
Remember Alexandria, and the dung-heap of lies
Which, like crumbs, you left behind. 

Selected Poems by JKS Makokha

Poem Without Name

There is no cheery chirping of weaverbirds
when long silver rays a new day’s sky split
in the land of no life.
There is no sunlight.
No sunrise is there.
There is no sunshine.
No sun is there.

Palapala Magazine # 4 - Bards, Singers and Exile

The Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2009

Renowned worldwide for featuring some of the best and brightest new talent, Wasafiri is launching a New Writing Prize as part of its 25th birthday celebrations. In the words of acclaimed author Jackie Kay, ‘Wasafiri holds it all together, the past and the future. It is vigorous, searching and stimulating’. Since Wasafiri was first published in 1984, it has consistently aimed to shift the contours of established literary canons and remapped the borders of international contemporary writing, creating new imaginative spaces and publishing some of the most promising new literary voices.

Click here to print or download complete details about competition

Editorial - Bards, Singers and Exile

Kangsen Feka Wakai

The contemporary African poet is an artist living and working in conditions of constant siege– an abiding and haunting angst, a complex informed by the hydra-headed menace of creative alienation, uncertainties of means and the devastating ambience of indifference, silence and absence that his production fallows (or worse still, withers) in. These are terrifying conditions of the annihilation of memory and consciousness that beat even the most corrosive forms of coerced institutional censorship imaginable. Wirndzerem G. Barfee

In this issue, we talk to poet Wirndzerem G. Barfee, via email, author of the poetry collection, Bird of Oracular Verb.

A Journey Into Speech

 Joyce Ashuntantang, Ph.D.

I grew up speaking English. In fact, I was born into English and never considered it a foreign language. I was also born into Kenyang, the language of the Bayangis, and Pidgin English. I learnt all three languages at the same time and in the same house.  Actually, my love for literature in English is rooted in both African and British literature including Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Jane Eyre, Eze goes to School, The Drummer boy and Things Fall Apart.  Also, my parents studied in England in the nineteen sixties and as I grew up, I visited England through their stories, pictures, music, my mother’s kitchen utensils and my father’s bookshelf.

Indeed my childhood was immersed in English.
Buea, where I grew up, is situated at the foot of Mount Cameroon. It is a town built by Germans in the 19th century. What is remarkable about Buea is the cool weather, the German architectural relics and the English Language, a British legacy. Inhabitants of Buea are known in Cameroon as “I was” because they prefer speaking English amongst themselves instead of Pidgin English.

An Interview with Miriam Makeba

V. Muna Kangsen

Miriam Zenzile Makeba was born on March 4, 1932, in a segregated township in the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, the daughter of a sangoma, a traditional healer, and a coal miner father. Makeba began singing in a church choir in her youth, but gained national attention as a backup vocalist for the Manhattan Brothers, a popular South African group in the in the 1950’s and 1960’s still recording today. Although Makeba’s brief stay with the Manhattan brothers yielded memorable recordings like Lovely Lies, she left the group in 1959 to join the Skylarks, an all female group with which she earned some local and regional success in Southern Africa.

Interview - Write for the Future: Equations for Future Literatures

Kangsen Feka Wakai talks with poet Wirndzerem G. Barfee.

KFW: Francis Nyamnjoh, the Cameroonian writer, has addressed the issue of identity in both his scholarly and literary writings.  In a way, he has implied that the task of the writer is not restricted to story telling.  Part of the writer's task, he argues, especially in the 'postcolony' is to negotiate fleeting and hybrid identities.  Do you agree with him?

WGB: It is true obviously, for if we are telling stories, then, these stories must evidently betray or manifest a constitution. No story grows in a vacuum, even if the subject is “air”, “emptiness” or “vacuity” it must be tied down technically to a structure, to some substance; either by conformity, alignment, opposition or a total of all these factors put together in dynamic contradictory, conflicting complex that inherently identifies with the story it fictionalizes. In short, to every text there is a context.

Poetry - A Cameroonian Husband in the Diaspora

 by Viola Allo

There is a man in Cameroon
who wants to marry me.
He sends messages to California.
Says we can spend
lots of time together, and
he'd love to take me. To Kribi.

Poetry - We Will Set Forth at Midnight

For Us, who missed the party that set forth at Dawn…

Tolu Ogunlesi
 
“We are refugees fleeing from the excesses of our parents.” – Dambudzo Marechera
 
I
Shall we envy them who set forth at dawn?
Dawn, when cohabitation
 
was the biggest crime
good and evil could jointly muster.
 
They went to bed with yesterday's sun
that they might rise, well before today's,

Poetry - Sagehood: A Return

By Barfee Gideon Wirndzerem

You never went as you have come:
The salvo and the reverb that stole
The thunder’s loud axe and came back–
We will tell you what! – with a dove’s coo.

Yes, Dreaded son, First-in-Line-of-Iron-Forgers!
Whose skull crushed rock like pottery
Whose bone cracked bone like bamboo,
One in whose hands iron became dry wood!

We fearfully awaited your harvest of death
When we had awaited the god of iron,
Awaited the days of volcanicity and fire:

Book Review - “This is Bonamoussadi”: A Poetic Foray into the Valley of Despair

By Dibussi Tande

Oscar Chenyi Labang. This is Bonamoussadi. Lulu.com, 2008, 60 pages.

What is it that we did
Mother of the earth
That we have remained this cursed (56)

It is still not clear how Bonamoussadi, the popular student residential area on the outskirts of the University of Yaounde campus in Ngoa-Ekele came into being. When students returned in September 1987 for the beginning of a new academic year, they discovered that houses had sprung up ex nihilo on the vast wasteland between Regional Centre for Labor Administration (CRADAT), the University Restaurant no. 2 and the football field. It was rumored that university lecturers whose trade in dog-eared polycopies had become less profitable with the proliferation of photocopy machines on campus had decided to grab state-owned land on which they constructed mini cités (student housing) for rent. Before long, high ranking government officials, the military top brass, friends and relatives of the well connected, and other hangers-on joined in for a piece of the action.

Poetry - This is Bonamoussadi (An Excerpt)

By Oscar Chenyi Labang

This is Bonamoussadi
Flanked by Holy St Ann
And the Mighty Ngoa Ekelle
Whence we tap the raw stuff.
Arnold defines a real Professor
From Green Valley’s interior:
‘A Real Professor is one;
He talks in others sleep.
As we roll from end to end
Memories of a day with a Professor
Caress the mind.

Poetry - The Citadel

By Dibussi Tande

I
The Mobilization:
The fiery speeches
The protest marches
The huge rallies
The call to arms

The angry cries:
la conférence nationale
il y'aura !!
Fait quoi fait quoi
il y'aura !!
Ça gâte, ça gâte !!
Campus Mort!!!

Fiction - Wages of Plunder (Part II)

By Dipita Kwa

Ngody sat on the grass across the road and watched and asked himself what Edimo had in him that enabled him to manipulate people into carrying out his wishes or supporting him in his honourable crimes. When they were still in primary school, Edimo was the teachers’ favourite although he hardly passed any subjects other than Physical Education and Handwork. At 9, he was the oldest boy in Class 2 and a terror to two-thirds of the school population. Whenever a class was sent out to work in a teacher’s farm, which was usually on Wednesdays and Fridays from midday to 5 o’clock, Edimo was made the coordinator. With a crooked guava branch in his hand, he ensured that the farm was properly hoed or weeded by the younger pupils while he and Fosi combed the nearby farms for fruits to eat.

Dear Puppy Lover

Dear puppy lover,

First of all, permit me to introduce my humble self to your noble self; my name is Jonas Jonas Atukobo, a permanent resident of your country and a patriot/citizen of my country.  I am thirty-five years old and an ordained minister in the brotherhood of seers.  In other words, I get to wear a cassock every so often even though I hold an MBA in Strategic Futuristic Financial Development from a renowned institution in your neck of the woods with a focus on Mythical Prosperity Management and Advanced Electronic Banditry. 

From the Corps to the Campus: The Marching Bands of Historical Black Colleges and Universities

By Benna Sayyed

The black college marching band embodies a mix of excitement, creativity, soul and breathtaking rhythm. It is music.  There are the dance girls and majorettes gliding across the green, executing amazingly synchronized dance moves to accompany the musicianship of band members.

The selection might be contemporary, funk, classical, R&B and Hip-Hop. It is this showmanship in the arena that competitions such as the Honda Battle of the Bands have become extremely fierce showdowns for musical supremacy. 

So what initiated this unique style of entertainment that is produced on the campuses of America’s Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)?

Palapala Magazine #3: A Tribute to Hunger

A Tribute to Hunger: 4 Nigerian Cities Seen Through the Imagination of a Wandering Stomach

By Tolu Ogunlesi

[1]Orisa bi ofun ko si, ojojumo lo n gbebo lowo eni – Yoruba proverb
 
Not many people would know Wole Soyinka (Africa’s first – and Nigeria’s only – Nobel Laureate for Literature) for an essay, Salutation to the Gut, a paean to the culinary culture of the Yoruba people of Southwestern Nigeria. One reviewer called it “[a] tribute to hunger”; which I find a very striking description, especially considering the fact that I would have far more easily imagined a tribute to “food”, and not to its “absence.”

A tribute to hunger. Hunger, the unacknowledged god; the totalitarian regime of the lifeless (plate) over the restless (man).

Eyewitness Account: Fela Resurrected [On Stage]

By Mkuki Bgoya

It was supposed to be all about Fela.  It was all about Fela, his politics, poetry, rants, music, struggles, pain and legend.  The stage possesses the unmistakable potency of Fela’s shrine.
 
The story begins right before his departure from Nigeria for Medical school in London (where he studied music instead); his travels in the US and his eventual return to Nigeria; his political activism and countless clashes with the Nigerian Army, which eventually led to his mother’s murder by soldiers and how that affected him personally and musically. 

Chicken and Me

Kangsen Feka Wakai

It was during a conversation about diet with an acquaintance, a Houston native and self-professed Ifa priest, when the subject of chicken came up. He told me he’d been a vegetarian for over a year when he started having the dreams. Night after night he would see them  crowing, pecking and running.  He said the recurring dreams about chicken were causing him to lose his balance, new age parlance for emotional turbulence, and focus. That alone pestered him. So he did what any priest would do. He consulted the oracle. 

From My Parisian Diary (A Poem by Mbella Sonne Dipoko)

Thirty centimes is all the money I have left
But am full of hope without knowing why.
I laugh at the world and laugh at myself
Something of a child at thirty-five.
It has been a hard life since I ran out of cynicism
And stopped selling for a commission
Just any newspaper in the world
Deciding exclusively on pamphlets of the Left
By which I am now earning death by installment
On a starvation diet
And the rent is long overdue.
Surely this is not a way of earning a living
Peddling slogans of a better world
In the garrison of troops armed to defend these cruel days.
But the struggle must continue
And we must open new fronts even in our dreams.

Mbella Sonne Dipoko is the author of two novels A Few Nights and Days (Heinemann, 1966) and Because of Women (Heinemann, 1974), and a poetry collection, Black and White in Love (Heinemann 1972). He resides in Cameroon. 

Photo by Orock Eta

Fiction - Wages of Plunder (Part 1)

By Dipita Kwa

Edimo, the twenty-four-year-old president of Mukunda Vigilant Youth Group loved to dance after a heavy meal of roasted fresh sea fish accompanied by at least two cold bottles of castle beer in the company of a new girl. He couldn’t see himself staying in Mukunda this weekend while preparations for the Mt Cameroon Race of Hope were steaming out there in Buea. His only hindrance as usual was that he was broke. And whenever his pockets were dry of money, especially when a weekend like this one was around the corner and the strong memories of nightclub ambience in Tiko, Buea and Limbe were beckoning seductively at him, he must do something.

Presidential Election 3012

By Kangsen Feka Wakai

  Conservative presidential nominee Ian Gables recently gave a speech before the Council of Elders at the Ejagham Shrine in Downtown Washington D.C. According to the Gables campaign, the purpose of the meeting between their candidate and the powerful, pro-Africa lobby group was to reassure his African allies that a Gables administration will be committed to the unconditional support for the growing economic and military might of the ASU (African States United).

“A Gables presidency will continue in the tradition of previous administrations and stretch its hand beyond the dark shark infested Atlantic ocean that separate us.  Let me assure our tanned friends of the solar friendly tropics that if I am elected president they will continue to drink and eat from the banquet of our democratic generosity. 

Journey to a Farm on a Lake in Cameroon (A Poem by Viola Allo)

Heaven is a strange place,
I don't want to go there.
I do not think it is the place
Where my ancestors have gone.

When I die, I would like
My spirit, if worthy,
To wander silently
Back to the lighted City on the Lake.

A Belated Review of the Late Dilla’s Donuts

Damien Mickel

Before the completion of Donuts, the last album in his lifetime, James Yancey, otherwise know as J Dilla, had unquestionably become a legend amongst aficionados and chroniclers of hip-hop.  In fact, the construction of Dilla’s homage to the golden era of soul was underway as he engaged in a brutal battle with a rare blood disease that will claim him as a victim.   The completion of Donuts under such circumstances is a testament of his dedication to the craft especially in this age of diminishing sonic sensibility.