Palapala Magazine

Palapala # 6 - Windpipes and Tremulous Tunes

Editorial: A Year Later…

This issue of Palapala magazine marks our first anniversary in existence.

Tolu Ogunlesi, one of our most diligent supporters and a recent nominee of the CNN multichoice African journalist of the year award, attends a Marechera conference in Oxford, and talks to those who knew and were impacted by the writer.

Dibussi Tande, a Palapala magazine editorial team member, reminds us that birds can soar with clipped wings in his response to Patrice Nganang’s essay on Anglophone Cameroon literature published on his blog, Scribbles from the Den. The debate continues…

In this issue, we also pay tribute to Bate Besong, the Obasinjom Warrior.

Soaring with “Clipped Wings”: Anglophone Cameroon Literature on the Move

By Dibussi Tande

In a recent article on state sponsored “literature apartheid” in Cameroon, Patrice Nganang warned against what he perceived to be attempts by Anglophone writers to create a distinct minority “Anglophone Cameroon literature” separate from mainstream Cameroonian literature. He argued that this approach would confine Cameroon literature in English in an anonymous literary ghetto. He urged Anglophone Cameroon writers “to understand that their minority perspective restricts them into local hero Authors, not readable beyond Anglophone schools in our country and on CRTV”.

Bate Besong: Lyrical Insurgent

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.

Marechera for Beginners

Tolu Ogunlesi

I don’t hate being black. I’m just tired of saying it’s beautiful.

Such are the kinds of statements one would expect from Dambudzo Marechera – fresh, startling, utterly subversive. I do not recall when I first came across his name, but what I do know is this: that his life has fascinated me so much that I could probably reel off a quite comprehensive biography of him from memory.

So when I heard that there would be a Dambudzo Marechera celebration at Oxford University in the middle of May 2009, it didn’t take me long to make up my mind I was going to attend. 

Letter to the Editor[s] (A note for your writers)

Kangsen Feka Wakai

When you write about me, all you write about me is what you know about me, what you’ve been taught and what you believe is true of me.  Then you actually take the time, which by the way is very precious to you, to jot lines and paragraphs describing in graphic detail what you truly believe to be my reality.  You weave narrations, cite instances, decipher plots and write my story on my behalf.  And you always have facts and figures to back them. They never fail. Anyways what would they be without facts and figures?  Aren’t you a vibraphone and proponent of reason? 

Omar Bongo - The Grim Ripper Comes Calling

Interview: Emma Dawson

Emma Dawson recently edited an anthology of short fiction from English Speaking Cameroon, The Spirit Machine and other stories. She shares her experiences and motivations with Palapala magazine.

Why edit an anthology of short-fiction from English Speaking Cameroon?  What is it about the Cameroonian experience that interested you you?

The simple answer to this question is interest; personal interest but also the interest shown by the Anglophone Cameroonians to participate. On a personal level, one of the subjects of my first degree was French so I already had an interest in a country that was English and French speaking – in terms of the languages that I could understand that is – so I was curious what this would offer linguistically as well as culturally. Once the call for the short stories went out I realised that there was interest, serious interest. A year previous I had met John Nkengasong at The Oxford Conference in the UK, we had many conversations and often in the two languages, and we talked about Cameroon, its people and its literature; John was my inspiration to compile the anthology and the response from further Anglophone Cameroonians only supported my initial thoughts that it was an exciting project to be carrying out.

Interview: George Esunge Fominyen

George Esunge Fominyen is West and Central Africa correspondent for Humanitarian affairs for AlterNet and West and Central Africa coordinator of the Emergency Information Services of the Thomson Reuters Foundation. He formerly headed the Multimedia editorial unit of Panos Institute West Africa (PIWA).

At PIWA, his task was to strengthen the role of the institution in the training of journalists and other media personnel in media production, dissemination and exchange on selected priority issues in West Africa and across the continent. 

The Poetry of JKS Makokha

Anthem of Hunger

Whenever clocks in the lost lands strike midday,
the noons boil over into the heat of the work day,
then tremulous tunes across the land arise
from deep within many a potly belly.

The tunes start off distant and doleful
like thunders in diminuendo across grand canyons
then climax in a grand grumbling crescendo
like a thousand funerary drums under thundering thuds.

Then is when the multitudinous pair of parched lips
split into gaping yawns to sing without words
the one minute chorus in the anthem of hunger
composed inside the voicy bowels of various pot bellies.

(Poetry) They Die Too

Dante Besong

They say he committed suicide
Suicide, they say he committed
This has kept wagging tongues busy
Another demagogue gone down the drain
The filth of his own mess smeared him
The guilt of his malevolence haunted him
Now he lies in state, waiting for the box
Who can possibly forget the extravagant orgies he organized
When stooges appeared in fantasy regalia
His bestial avarice made him suck the economy dry
Now we limp, in agony we cry,
Why would tongues not wag?
Did he care about the peasants?
Or about how they toiled the soil where he fed?
Today they talk of state burial
What will it amount to?
Colossal expenses on the sate economy or
Inevitable budget swindling
Oh! Africa, when shall we have redemption?
When shall we be free from their grip?
Lord help us!

(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.