Kangsen Feka Wakai
Bate Besong became a presence in my life very early on. He taught two of my older brothers in CPC Bali after he returned to Cameroon from university in Nigeria.
BB’s verbiage and antics would come home with them on holidays, along with their worn bodies and massive loads of musty laundry.
BB and my mother will eventually work, on at least one occasion, at the same GCE Center. He frequented the Ministry of Education in Yaounde when she worked there in the late eighties.
We were in Yaounde when he was arrested after staging his controversial play Beasts of No Nation. I read his then inscrutable dialectics and intellectual engagements in local newspapers and magazines. We knew he was being punished for his intransigence when he was transferred to the bleak barrenness of Northern Cameroon.
The memories are foggy, but the name Bate Besong continued to resonate, albeit intermittently, but prominently in our lives throughout my youth. In Bamenda, I had seen him a few times along Commercial Avenue, holding court.
The Cameroon Bate Besong inhabited was a hostile terrain for minds of his inclination.The political class despised him and he despised them too, and was unrestrained in his condemnation of them, and their progeny.
You are doomed, and you have brought this upon yourself
what you have done to others will be done to your children, and
grand-children to the third and fourth generation.
I last saw Bate Besong somewhere in Molyko a few months before my departure from Cameroon. He was a professor at the University of Buea. I had spent the night in a room in that clutter of student residences that dot the vicinity of the campus, and was waiting for a taxi to take me to GRA Buea when I saw someone being pursued by a small mob of giggling students.
It was gray and misty—a typical Buea morning, fighting a relentless headache, I had still to recover from the previous night’s revelry, but there he was, in the crack of dawn, animated, talking, preaching, feeding their brain cells breakfast, the words jutting out of his mouth like bullets. We did not speak.
Several years later, someone told me that the collection of thoughts I had put in verse could pass for poetry, so I consulted BB—an oracle of sorts—via email.
It was BB who would, also via email, initiate me, thus infusing me with the first dosage of confidence any amateur in this craft requires. It was a brief email, the contents too sacred to share. But, this email would begin a correspondence that would continue until his passing. It was that accessibility and willingness to both critique [which he did brilliantly with no fear or favor] and mentor that endeared BB to the critical mass.
It was BB who once wrote that:
Tadpole armies and their Brigadier Generals will
realize the self-appointed
Commanders-in-chief are nothing
more than the works of human hands
Everything made by racketeers of power
will decay and perish, along
with the thieves who made it.
It was this understanding of the power dynamics of the state of Cameroon, his artistic resolve to mock and lampoon its pretenses, and the sheer fearlessness with which he did it that made me, and I am sure there are others, believers in BB.
BB once declared that:
Quite frankly, the Cameroonian nation has not been founded.
BB’s poetic arsenal and acerbic theatrics encapsulated all that is right and wrong with the Cameroonian personality. His daring poetics were at once cryptic, confrontational, complex, mystical, provocative and at times difficult. And for over two decades, BB will engage in a sustained but low intensity war that would pit him against the government of Cameroon.
BBs first run-in with the uniformed apparatchik began in earnest after his review of George Ngwane’s The Mungo Bridge, a collection of essays exploring the state of the Cameroonian union. It would earn him at least twelve hours in detention.
In the context in which I find myself, the writer who must be free has no choice really but to run great risks.
But BB was no stranger to controversy and harassment. As playwright and critic, academic and humanist, but most of as a poet, BB will wage a one-man war against an unflinching tyranny, one of the most enigmatic and efficient to sprout out of our wasteland of imperial ambition.
Your history huts are made
of wild flower and sycamore…
He wrote of and for Cameroon. In his lifetime, BB dedicated significant stanzas to that benighted and corrupt reality. He was obsessed with the Cameroonian condition, its inadequacies and injuries and from experience understood the depth of its derangement.
We question those in authority. We know that under a dictatorship, a nation dies...
He even railed against the classical and neo-classical paradigms of the Bernard Fonlon school of thought, which according to BB, did not make ‘bold statements’ but succumbed to ‘enfeebled imitation’.
This kind of writing could not usher in any structural changes needed in the society because it often neglected the major issues of Cameroonian society, which are purely socio-economic.
In his 1993 book on BB, Ngwane will note that BB’s poetics never remained confined in classroom walls or the pages of books, but had found their way into our national tabernacles, bars.
The alternative literature that we write, with apologies to no one, is people-oriented literature, and this entails a dialectical approach of looking at society from the materialist angle, and unearthing the contradictions, which bring about discrimination, injustice, exploitation, and marginalisation.
Ngwane points out that there are series of pieces reserved specifically for that audience. In that way, BB wrote and spoke for the masses. He felt their heartbeat. He was one with their heartbeat.
When two students were brutally killed at the university of Buea during campus riots in 2005, it was BB who broke rank and sided with the students. Neither did he spare his colleagues the scorn of his ink when he exposed what he perceived to be their complicity in the ensuing tyranny.
Without a doubt, academics
have now obtained a well-deserved recognition
as ogres and mutants of terror
A plague gave this hatred an excuse
& the hatred gave fear of the plague a focus
BB admonishments of his colleagues in the academia were not limited to the university of Buea student uprisings, but illustrated a larger disdain for the politicization of the academia. His disgust for that predicament was skin deep. To an unnamed professor he writes:
Professor,
May your name, now,
Like a broken down fence, never
Be forgotten
So in 2005, when BB was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at North Carolina State University at Chapel Hill, but after having made the preliminary preparations at a great financial cost, the American embassy in Yaounde claimed the university had rescinded his fellowship. How that happened is unclear. BB sent me an email explaining his predicament. He was very disappointed but gave no hint or desire to ever compromise.
And he never compromised, for BB believed that:
Everything that the writer does is a product of his consciousness springing from the principles guiding social consciousness that produces specific interpretation of the social phenomena.
BB, the poet and playwright, mirrored the interplay of the writer’s consciousness and social phenomena. His ethics could not permit him to do otherwise. The state of Cameroon had let him down. The university in which he lectured, where rational and civility should reign supreme had also betrayed him. So, it came as no surprise that he named his last collection of poems Disgrace.
A week before that launching, we talked on the phone about his impending trip to the US, and he seemed really excited. But BB never made it because a few hours after launching Disgrace, he will die on his way to the US embassy in Yaounde.
I have lived in the American South and fallen in love with the South, at least the likable aspects of the South, the South that BB never got to see, and I am tempted to think that perhaps, had BB—the one we know— been born in the post-bellum American South I have read of, he might have been a blues man, an infectious one too.
But BB was born in Nigeria of Cameroonian parents. Yet, BB wrote the blues, a uniquely Cameroonian blues.
I too have
imprinted a century’s dark decade
(this, to the best of my ability)
hidden, in a curfewed song!
References
Ngwane, George. 1993. Bate Besong (or the symbol of Anglophone Hope). Limbe: Nooremac Press.
Fandio, Pierre. Anglophone Cameroon Literature at Crossroads: An Interview with Dr. Bate Besong. Retrieved from Bate Besong's Blog.
Comments