Playwright Bole Butake contemplates home or exile, a not so unfamiliar dilemma in many an African writer’s reality. Achebe has written on the subject. He lives in the US. Butake lives in Cameroon. Herewith are excerpts of a lecture he gave on the subject in 2005 at European Conference of African Studies organized by AEGIS (Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies).
One of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s titles, Barrel of a Pen, is very edifying in its implication that the writer is a fighter. One could also mention his other titles Devil on the Cross, and Petals of Blood, Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests, Kongi’s Harvest and Season of Anomy, Bernard Nangah’s Les chauvessouris, Achebe’s A Man of the People, etc.
The themes of these titles call to mind some of the numerous problems that Africans are confronted with on a daily basis and which have actually worsened over the last three to five decades since the attainment of independence by African countries. While at that time South-East Asian states even had a comparable or even worse GNP, today due to creativity in the industrial area and forward looking good governance, they have made great strides in their economic achievements while Africa has retrogressed.
The committed writer does not only have a feeling of shock and embarrassment at this state of affairs but is also bitter and angry that people who yesterday were hailed as messiahs during the liberation struggle have today barricaded themselves in the house while the rest are abandoned in the rain, to use Chinua Achebe’s metaphor.
Why is a continent that is so rich in both natural and human resources saddled with so much poverty and corruption, disease and corruption, wars and corruption, coups and corruption, famine and corruption, indebtedness and corruption, rigged elections and corruption, corruption and corruption?
In the face of this stench can a writer with a conscience pretend to practice art for art’s sake? Can a writer who sees all the robbery and cheating by a handful of people around him and the endemic poverty in which the vast majority of the people are steeped, pretend that there is nothing wrong and write love stories and glorify nature whether that be the vast expanse of dense tropical forests of the Centre, South and East or the rolling stretches of the hills and mountains in the Bamenda grassfields? Can a writer who sees food rotting away in villages without roads while in some part of the same country government functionaries ride around in air-conditioned 4x4 luxury vehicles, appealing to the World Food Programme to bring relief to the starving people, go to sleep and dream up a story about a beautiful village belle?
While these might sound like rhetorical questions with which I agree, there are writers on the African continent, in Cameroon, who may not be singing love songs but who have flung the pen far into the forest and costumed themselves in the regalia of bureaucracy and the ruling political party. They are the type that Achebe has so aptly described in the metaphor already quoted above. For fear of persecution back in Cameroon, I elect not to mention their names in this paper. This is to say, then, that there are opportunistic people who deliberately write against certain government policies in order to call attention to themselves, and, as soon as they are proposed lucrative jobs in the same government they quickly oblige and abandon the Muse, never to return because they have said good-bye to poverty. Others, who will not stoop that low, but who cannot continue to live on the poverty line have taken the decision to leave and ask for asylum under other skies. Again, I desist from calling names because I may be accused of making libellous declarations.
Staying Home Against All Odds
I have made the decision to live and work in the country against all odds. I have so far succeeded because I do believe very strongly that the confrontational approach is not the best, especially when you are dealing with a regime that has bought the consciences of law enforcing organisations by awarding them higher salaries and other benefits.
Ngugi tried the confrontational strategy and ended up in detention and then exile. I do not want to evoke the memories of what befell he and his wife when they returned to Kenya after two decades in exile for the wound is still too fresh. When people who belong to certain corps are awarded salaries and benefits which place them far above medical officers and university professors, are we surprised that they will not hesitate to shoot at unarmed students when they are protesting against poor conditions in the universities? So Ngugi (1986:15) makes a lot of sense when he states in Writing Against Neocolonialism that the real power base of a neo-colonial regime is not in the people but rather in the police and the army.
"To maintain itself it shuts all venues of democratic expression.”
It is in the same line of argument that chief justices, after enumerating all the things that went wrong during an election, still declare the ruling party winner by a landslide majority. That is why university professors turned administrators will sign letters of support in favour of the ruling party because they fear to lose their jobs. It is really disgusting how people can abuse their consciences and allow themselves to be manipulated by Machiavellian political leaders because they want to be appointed to high administrative offices where they will be in control of budgets and so can serve themselves generously from the taxpayer’s sweat.
As for me, when I became a university teacher back in 1974 it was because I wanted to make my career in higher education and help in the training of young Cameroonians and others. I am glad that I have remained a principled person in spite of all the temptations to become rich by accepting an administrative appointment. And in spite of the fact that I have also received my share of harassment from the administrative gurus in our social set up. In March 1991, I directed Bate Besong’s Beasts of No Nation. The play was performed on the University [of Yaounde] campus and it was highly applauded by the more than one thousand spectators. A few days later a University official made a very damaging report about how subversive the play was to the Chancellor of the University who forwarded it to the Minister of Higher Education who in turn distributed it to the Ministers of Territorial Administration, Information and Culture, the Delegate General for National Security and CENER, the Secret Police. The playwright was arrested and detained for a day. Surprisingly, I was neither interrogated nor arrested. But the person who made the report is today holding a very high post in the Presidency of the Republic.
My troubles really began in 1992 when in early February I was appointed, without being consulted, as ‘chargé de mission’ for the ruling CPDM party during the first multi-party legislative elections to some part of the country. I wrote a damning disavowal that got published in practically all the private newspapers in Yaounde and Douala. A week later I was replaced. A year later I would begin living the consequences of my deed because the new Chancellor of the University banned all theatre performances on campus and unleashed a war of harassment against my person. I stood firm and began performing in hired spaces in the city. But the cost of hire was forbidding and spectators got scared. It was then that I decided to change tactics and moved into theatre for development.
Having found the effectiveness of drama and theatre as a communication medium especially for the disadvantaged grassroots people, I have been able to continue to influence the latter through the organisation of numerous theatre workshops in urban slums and villages on such diverse issues as women’s and children’s rights (including property ownership, widowhood, female genital mutilation, early marriages and pregnancies, etc.), human rights and democracy, minority rights, corruption in public life, environmental sustainability, good governance, conflict resolution, HIV/AIDS, etc. Thus, I have been able to continue with my teaching at the university while using theatre for development techniques through what I call People Theatre and People Cinema to influence and awaken grassroots people to problems with which they have to deal on a daily basis. The transformational process from drama through mainstream theatre to theatre for development began with my participation in an international workshop of theatre for integrated rural development that held in Kumba, South-West Province of Cameroon in December 1984. When my fifth play, Shoes and Four Men in Arms, was toured in 1995 in preparation of a tour of Germany, I was solicited by Helvetas Cameroon, the Swiss Association for International Co-operation, to carry out a workshop for the Women’s Information and Co-ordination Office in Bamenda on women’s rights especially in the area of property rights, widowhood and early pregnancies and marriages. The astounding success with the women participants at the workshop, as evidenced by the discovery that they could actually create a play on their own problems, cast, rehearse and perform it to an audience of two thousand people in a total of three days, proved to me beyond reasonable doubt, that the participatory methodology was a very effective tool of informal education at any level. Ever since, I have either been asked by some non-governmental organisations to submit projects on given themes or I have written projects and submitted them for possible funding. Sometimes, of course, these projects have been rejected; but the tendency is for my collaborators and I to do one or two projects per year.
The shift from People Theatre to People Cinema arose out of the need to reach a still wider audience thereby extending the experiences of people on various issues from a few hundred or thousands to tens of thousands especially in the urban centres which are fortunate enough to have electricity and so can capture television signals from the Cameroon Radio and Television (CRTV). In People Cinema we follow the same process as in People Theatre, the only difference being that we have to write a scenario for the story that has been created through the participatory method, rehearse for camera and on location, and then proceed with the shooting and later by editing and mixing in the studio followed by screening. We are also able to package the final product either as videocassettes or as video compact discs which can be distributed to any one interested. From producing shorts which were used to illustrate discussion points on the programme Women and Development on national television, we evolved to semi documentaries and even full length feature films such as L’Exciseuse de Pouss, Alien in My Land, Kam no Go, L’instituteur d’Eyala, Mantrobo, Nyang, Gomen na We, Hard Road to School, Death for All in the New Millenium, etc.
By avoiding the confrontational road thereby steering clear of the wrath of politicians in the governing party, we have thus managed to endear ourselves to people at the grassroots who are thus able to act their problems on national television and so serve as examples to other grassroots people who, by virtue of the fact that they have similar problems, can benefit from the rob-on effect of the lessons learned in the film. Through this means, the people have given value to their own cultures: their songs and dances, their home languages, their stories that were untold. In short, they have found a voice where before there was only deep silence.
It is in this way that I have avoided the road into exile and at the same time managed to bring some influence to bear on people at the grassroots while obliging government functionaries, especially journalist working for both the public and private press to seek my opinions on certain national issues from time to time. The audience that I was desperately seeking in my early adventures with poetry and prose has at last been achieved through People Cinema. The satisfaction I have is that of being able to reach several thousands of television viewers and perhaps to affect their lives positively by giving them voice on issues that concern them directly. At the same time I can live a little more comfortably with the extra income from the projects without having to sell my conscience. In addition, I am living at home enjoying the company of friends and perhaps also pricking the consciences of the embezzlers and those who rape and violate the human and natural resources of Cameroon, of Africa. But things are not all that rosy because CRTV is a government monopoly with all the implications of such monopolies. In addition, although the media landscape is fairly dynamic following the recent granting of temporary authorisations, the fate of these private broadcasters is uncertain because they do not yet have licences to operate and so cannot be very daring in their appraisal of issues.
The writers who have opted for exile are enjoying the higher incomes of the host countries in which they find themselves; but I am not very sure that they are not longing to go back to the homeland and hug their friends and relatives as well as contribute their own bit of mortar towards this effort of nation building that vampires, in the guise of rulers, have transformed into a nightmare of anguish, poverty and despair for the great masses at the grassroots.
Bole Butake is a Professor of Performing Arts and African Literature at the University of Yaounde I, Cameroon.
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