Forti Ebenezah
Dawson, Emma. 2009. (ed.). The spirit machine and other new short stories from Cameroon. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press. 142 pages.
The Spirit Machine and other new short stories from Cameroon is an anthology of nine attention-grabbing short stories. These short stories highlight contemporary issues like graft, marginalization and moral decadence as well as explore the culture, the customs and ways of life of some people in Cameroon.
Babila Mutia’s The Spirit Machine, the title story of the anthology falls in the last category. It is about a young boy, Gabuma, son of Kebila of Mbelu village. When the story begins, Gabuma has just turned thirteen, and it is time for him to be initiated into adulthood as demanded by the customs of his people. Unlike in the past when initiation into manhood was done through the rite of circumcision, as was the case with his grandfather, Gabuma’s own passage into adulthood entails being left alone with a corpse the entire night until dawn. This ceremony is called the gaze.
Kebila, Gabuma’s father has undergone this ritual, but he is worried because his son dreads seeing corpses. While this matter haunts Kebila, an earth-moving machine or the spirit machine (as referred to by Ivo, the caterpillar driver) arrives at the village at the request of the villagers who want the caterpillar to dig their road and a site for their market.
In the course of his work, Ivo gets involved in an accident with his own caterpillar that causes his death. The protagonist, Gabuma, interprets the accident is result of the spirits trapped in the machine. Gabumo who hitherto has befriended Ivo is very sad about it and does not want to part with the dying man. The death of Ivo is very significant in the life of Gabuma. It permits him to undergo the gaze that is supposed to make him a man. By watching Ivo’s dead body and wearing his charm on his neck, Gabuma is transformed and becomes ready for the initiation ceremony.
There are parallels between Gabuma in The Spirit Machine and Waiyaki in Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s The River Between. Even though the former is a short story and the latter a novel, both stories handle the theme of transition or passage from one stage of life into another. Gabuma needs to undergo the gaze to become a man. Similarly, Waiyaki needs to undergo the rite of circumcision in order to be accepted into the society of full men. However, while Gabuma’s transition is an event that nurtures his personal growth, Waiyaki’s passage into manhood is more than the event in the life of an individual. The hopes of his people depend on his initiation because they look up to him to unite the divided ridges through which the river passes in The River Between.
Oscar Chenyi Labang’s The Visit fits into the realm of stories that dwell on culture, like Babila’s The Spirit Machine. The Visit is the story of a young man, Kungwe who is about to marry a wife. Kungwe is the son of Tih Kungwe of Mbaghang village situated in Ngokentunjia, below the Sabga hills. The Visit evokes the communal spirit of the African world in which people come together to help their kinsmen in time of need. Young and old men gather in Pa Kungwe’s compound on Weigang, the market day, to help make the marriage a success. Among those present is a noble old man, Pa Ngeh. Through him, Labang inserts a story within the main story another story about two brothers, Beye and Kebra. Beye fails in his marriage because he cannot discipline his wife while Kebra asserts his authority over his wife from the first day of his marriage and succeeds. While the main story focuses on marriage customs of the Mbaghang people, and preparations to take home Kungwe’s wife, the other story, (Pa Ngeh’s story) serves as a tutoring session not only to the soon-to-be-married Kungwe but also to the other unmarried young men present. Pa Ngeh’s story instructs young men how to conduct themselves with their wives, and exert authority in the household. Labang, through Kungwe’s nuptials, unveils a male-dominated society, where manhood is measured by how much authority the man exerts at home.
Job Fongho Tende’s The Lost Art presents Yaoundé- the capital city of Cameroon 121 years into the future. The story covers a period of three years beginning with the note ‘Yaoundé 2150 AD’ and ending with a similar note ‘Yaoundé 2153 AD’, as though it was a diary of personal records. The city of Yaoundé, Tende paints in the The Lost Art is not that of slums and stench-filled gutters but a city adorned with skyscrapers and its streets illuminated with street bulbs. It is a society where tourism is a major income earner due to the influx of tourists. The transformation Yaoundé has undergone creates excitement in today’s reader whose fervent wish is to see not only the capital city but also the entire country develop. It has been the outcry of Cameroonians that the level of development their country is witnessing is not commensurate to its human, financial and natural resources. The Lost Art is therefore an opportunity, if only virtual, for readers to witness a developed capital city.
Yet behind this exciting presentation of Yaoundé hides the real concerns Tende addresses in the story-the place of the artist in society, the artist faced with various societal challenges. The artist in the The Lost Art is 67-year-old Meko, who lives in one of the peripheral neighborhoods of the city. Meko, a sculptor, the main character in the story, is a descendant of a long lineage of Bantu craftsmen who make a living out of carving. Meko finds himself in trouble with the military government, now ruling the country, because he is a Catholic and a carver of statuettes for saintly figures. It is necessary to state that the military government of the day has banned all religious activities and exercising one’s faith or doing anything that promotes christian worship is a crime punishable by death. Interrogated by the military governor of the central province, Meko defends himself, stating that he is not a Christian. But, in so doing, he incurs the wrath of his Christian brethren who accuse him of blasphemy. They judge him, find him guilty and excommunicate him from their midst. Things get even worse for him when the boy, Ngembe, his apprentice, whom he intends to make his heir betrays him to the administration. While at the governor’s to respond to a summons, Meko discovers that his personal replica that was missing from his workshop is in the governor’s office.
The military governor causes Ngembe to make trumped-up accusations against his master. He finishes by having Meko’s hands cut-off. Meko is thus abandoned by his fellow Christians, an endangered lot, and betrayed by his own apprentice. His solitude and misery increase given that his wife and only son had died earlier on in an accident in Limbe.
The use of real names like Mvan, Mvog-Ada, Njongolo and Etoudi, all neighborhoods of Yaoundé, give the story a sense of reality. The lost art has dual significance in this story. It is Meko’s replica stolen by the governor. Figuratively it symbolizes lost liberty, freedom and creativity at the expense of material progress. In other words, Tende imagines a Yaounde that has lost its essence embodied in the lost art. Yaoundé, or rather Cameroon has traded freedom for progress. Tende also seems to be saying in The Lost Art that the artist is often misunderstood; he is perpetually at odds with society. He is permanently a victim. The artist’s job therefore is a very difficult one.
Apart from culture, corruption is the other recurrent theme in this anthology. It is issue raised by Florence Ndiyah in My First Million. Ndiyah evokes the rot, corruption, and inefficiency that characterize the public service through a 50-year-old, debt-ridden, miserable civil servant, Mr. Sama Max. Due to the frustrations Max witnesses in the public service, he becomes bitter and promises to change the country if given the opportunity. He eventually gets this opportunity when he is appointed Minister of State in charge of Football Affairs by a presidential decree during the 1 p.m. newscast.
As minister, he fails to make good on his aspirations to curb corruption. Instead, he enriches himself through shady contracts given to cronies and the creation of phony companies. He also builds mansions for himself, registering some under the names of his sons. When another presidential decree boots him off the ministerial portfolio, his only regret is that of missing power and not that of failing to fight corruption. He consoles himself after all with the fact that he will have enough time to multiply his millions now that he is no longer minister. Mr. Sama Max in My First Million does not only get his first million. He gets hundreds of millions more because the first million causes appetite for more.
Florence Ndiyah in My First Million portrays the enigma that the social phenomena, which is corruption. Individuals (Mr. Sama Max) curse it when it causes them pain but once they are comfortable or favored by the social situation society confers on them, it is no longer necessary to fight against it. Corruption is therefore like a whirlpool, it pulls everyone who does not have moral strength into it.
Wirdzerem G. Barfee’s Jury of the Corrupt like Florence Ndiyah’s My First Million also takes a strike at institutionalized corruption in the public service. Like Diyah’s main character in My First Million, Dongo in Jury of the Corrupt is a civil servant. Both are frustrated and bitter with the system. However, their attempts to improve their lives by biting into the cake called corruption end differently. While Sama Max ends up pocketing millions, Dongo pays with his life through his naïveté.
Jury of the Corrupt therefore is a story of a 49-year-old state functionary who has spent 20 years working in the administration. Of the 20 years, he has spent 10 of them without promotion, watching younger people appointed to boss him. Overwhelmed with frustration and bitterness, Dongo blames everybody and everything for his plight.
The story begins when sweat-drenched Dongo is trying to catch a cab to the Mendong neighbourhood, proposing a meagerly 300 frs to cab drivers. In this exercise under the scorching sun, his former schoolmate at the School of Public Service, Manga cruises up to him in a latest model, silver Prado VX. Unlike Dongo dressed-up in threadbare clothes, Manga is sophisticatedly dressed in a super 100 suit, adorned by a vermillion-Italian-knot tie. Manga offers Dongo a ride in his air-conditioned vehicle. During their ride, it ensues that Dongo and Manga have lived in the poor neighborhood of Yaounde, Mokolo-Elobi, from whence they moved to the School of Public Service. It is also understood that Manga got himself in to the School of Public Service through the connection power of his prostitute-aunt, and that he earned his passage through the school, and his present powerful and juicy position of Director of General Affairs in the ministry thanks to this same shady connections. As he himself tells Dongo, it is whom you know and not what you know that it takes to survive in the system. This is very unlike Dongo who earned his entry into the school by merit. Manga in apparent solidarity with Dongo makes him a proposal that may lift him out of poverty and misery. He tells him to pay a million francs against a position in the anti-corruption unit in his ministry. Dongo, unaware that Manga is pulling a fast one at him gets the money and actually earns a place in the anti-corruption unit of his ministry. But after working for 5 months, no opportunity comes his way to scoop out the money he has invested. Eventually he is appointed President of the jury of a national arts competition to award prizes to the best poems against corruption. Faced with mounting bills and debts, he finds a way of biting into the five million francs meant for prizes allotted to winners. He scribbles a poem that he submits through a proxy poet to the jury, mostly composed of university dons. Unfortunately for him, the jury rejects his poem. He however forces through the poem and gets the prize money through his proxy poet, an anarchist, student leader, Ekanga at a ceremony at the Hilton Hotel. At the moment Dongo believes that he has at last succeeded in having a bite of state money, the world begins to crumble on him. Not only have the protests raised by other members of the jury caused the minister to order a commission of enquiry into the issue but also Ekanga, his friend-in-crime has vamoosed with the prize money. In this tight corner and unable to pay his debts, Dongo takes his life. He drives into and drowns himself in the Municipal Lake in his rickety Lada.
The title “Jury of the Corrupt” comes from the corrupt jury that Dongo heads. Barfee’s Jury of the Corrupt is a lampoon, a loud laugh at the fickle attempts by authorities to fight corruption. In the story, the corrupt are recycled to fight corruption and the naive are easy victims. The anti-corruption units in the ministries are fertile nurseries for the growth of corruption. Like in Ndiyah’s My First Million, corruption is so strong and deeply entrenched in the system that it defeats even the most principled and disciplined people like Dongo.
Sammy Oke Akombi like Ndiyah and Barfee equally makes a soft but incisive take on corruption in Sour Juice. On a Saturday, Jacobo, a civil servant, takes his family to harvest oranges from his five-hectare-orange farm. After the harvest, his wife Rosana selects seven oranges, peels them but when they taste the oranges, they realize they are sour. Every other orange they taste after the first ones are still sour. Jacobo is disappointed. He cannot fathom why an entire orange farm would yield sour oranges. He consults the Divisional Chief of Agricultural Services but gets no meaningful explanation for the sour taste of the fruits. Jacobo then decides to talk the matter over with the oldest and wisest man in his village, a couple of kilometers from town. After examining various factors that would have caused the fruits to be sour, the old man finally asks Jacobo the source of the money he used in establishing his farm. The ensuing conversation reveals that Jacobo illicitly obtained the money he used in establishing his farm. He did not deserve the money. Therefore, because the money he used to invest in his farm is bad, so too are the fruits bad. Sour money begets sour fruits. Evil begets evil. Sour Juice reminds the reader of the saying ‘What goes round comes around.’ In a moralizing statement, the old man teaches Jacobo honesty: ‘My Son, dirty money may profit in the short term but never in the long term.’ Akombi’s Sour Juice is very much like a parable. It sermonizes and moralizes. The story finds its relevance in today’s society where the quest for cheap and fast money is rife. Sour Juice could not have come at a better time.
Apart from corruption, the short story writers in The Spirit Machine and other new short stories from Cameroon also decry the bad governance or the lack of it in state institutions. In The Betrayal, Mbuh Mbuh Tennu narrates the story of a university lecturer, Dr. Alexander Timbong who gets frustrated due to the shabby treatment meted on him by his francophone counterparts. Timbong’s frustrations stem from the following: the office, a cubicle, in which he works is sparsely equipped, his French-speaking counterparts show him utter scorn and disrespect, and most of all his own language of expression, the English language is deliberately and totally relegated in a university where both the French and English languages have equal status. Timbong finds himself at odds with an official policy of integration that discriminates against people of English language expression. Perhaps his frustration is heightened by the death of his wife, Lilian in a car accident on the Bamenda-Yaoundé highway. Timbong’s frustration radiates to his office companion, Mimmie who will soon turn 35. Mimmie is Dr. Timbong’s secretary who has had her fair share of shabby treatment from preying males. The men she has known care for nothing but gratifying their sexual pleasures with her. The story is set on a rainy day, the same day Timbong has an interview at the American Embassy. The bad weather blends with the gloom that engulfs the environment on the one hand, and the sad state of mind of Dr. Timbong and Mimmie on the other. The university don resolves that he is fed up with the system and must leave. As the story ends, Timbong brings to fruition his resolve to leave the suffocating university environment. He goes on self-exile. In the image of the hawk that rises gently on full-stretched wings and flies westwards, Timbong leaves for (America) the west in order to rejuvenate after his torturous and frustrating experience at the university.
A Lie has a Short Life continues on the same theme of bad governance at the university, but unlike The Betrayal, A lie has a Short Life focuses on student unionism. Eunice Ngong Kum talks about a student strike organized by the students of the University of Vembe in the United Republic of Nahzagha. The students are striking against the precarious learning conditions on campus. When the story begins, the strike has already lasted one week and three students, Gangwe, Tembenn and Efaka, have been arrested and apprehended at the Dangigi Prison. It is in this atmosphere that Baamoh Itiabi, the student union leader and a History major, prepares to lead his peers to the governor (prince of the region) to table their grievances, given that the university authorities have shown bad faith in the management of the crisis.
In a ploy to crush the students’ efforts, the authorities term the students secessionists and take this as an opportunity to ferry in red berets from the neighbouring Fedala. Despite the presence of troops in town, and a request for Baamoh to refrain from the strike action by his mother, he and the students are not frightened into submission. Their resolve is strong. The next day, a beautiful September morning, Baamoh galvanizes an excited student population that is ready to swing into action like one man. When he finishes addressing his fellow students, the students instead of marching to the prince’s office start booing and jeering the gendarmes. Then tragedy occurs. Gunshots tear the morning sky killing among others Baamoh, the students’ leader. Ngong Kum’s A Lie has Short Life is reminiscent of the rampant students’ strikes at state universities in Cameroon, where the amateurish handling of the crisis by the university authorities often resulted in the loss of human life. Ngong Kum veils the actors and the place where the story takes place. Otherwise, a keen reader may easily link the story to incidents at the University of Buea.
In John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Kakamba, it is the story of Kakamba, a young, brilliant journalist with The Independent Voice who finds himself in trouble due to philandering. Excited by the 20.000 dollar-prize he has won for the article he has written, and weighed down by a fever he has had for a couple of days, Kakamba decides to consult a doctor at the Yaoundé University Teaching Hospital on a chilly Tuesday morning. When he meets the doctor, she suggests he takes an HIV test. It dawns on him at that moment that he had had unprotected sex with a not-so-familiar girl after a Christmas party. When the nurse takes his weight, he realizes he has lost considerable weight. After doing the test, he his asked to come back on Friday for the lab results. The three days separating the day he takes the test and the Friday he goes to take his lab results are trying moments for Kakamba. An HIV positive result would mean a doomed life and that he would not be able to attend the prize award ceremony in West Africa. On Friday, he finally gets his lab results and he is declared HIV Negative. He is relieved, happy and excited. He then remembers the saying his mother always told him: “if a snake bites you then flee next time even at the sight of a millipede.” The saying is like be wise, do not be the victim. It is like an advice to adventurous people who engage into a life of debauchery. How relevant this story can be to the Cameroonian society especially at the time when the prevalence rate of the HIV-AIDS virus is very high.
The stories in this anthology are woven in a refreshingly captivating manner, laying bare the multilingual nature of the society on which and in which they write; exposing the inefficacies of the judicial system, the frustrations of the English –speaking lecturer in a supposedly bilingual university, among other issues. Through local imagery and suspense, the storytellers in the anthology explore themes such as transition, religion, corruption, morality, and many others. The Spirit Machine and other new short stories from Cameroon assuredly does not only make refreshing reading but also serves as a reminder to cynics that Anglophone Cameroon Writing is alive and the best of this literature is yet to come, whether in the domain of the short story or other literary genres.
IT is with great delight that I ve gone thru Forti's exhaustive review, and i heave relieving an "at last!" to his generous review effort - one that has been long in coming, and one in which takes us on jolly synoptic ride thru the anthology making us swill its savoury contents at one good gulp...like great palmwine! But as i toast by kudos to the review, i would also have loved to read some critical takes on the aesthetic weaknesses inherent in this collection of stories...But then, someone else can still help stretch the road in that critical direction.
Posted by: Wirndzerem | May 21, 2010 at 07:38 AM