Pro-independent Southern Cameroons in Africa

They were not so lucky these fellow countrymen of the African nation called Cameroon in central part of Africa. Of English-speaking expression, these were the cream of intelligentsia who chose to battle it out with a system that had been moribund from independence because of a culture of complacency fuelled by the active participation of political misfits who were as dull as their half-baked education could permit.

These unfortunate men studied the white man’s books, they virtually imbibed his language until they could write much better than most of them. The one was a poet. The other a dramatist, still the other no less an ‘iconosaur’ in his domain. They were three in all, modern Anglophone musketeers who taught in the universities, trying to inculcate in the younger ones the merits of acquiring a decent education and perhaps hope for a kind of future that they the lecturers, had not been privileged to have.

The poet-laureate, internationally acclaimed for his brilliant penmanship, often wrote in a sardonic and satiric style couched in a certain verbosity that displeased the hierarchy, for he unveiled to the world at large the toxin that was leisurely destroying the fabric of this nascent fatherland.

The man in the street never understood him. You may be surprised but it filtered down to me that the objects of this poet’s derision who happen to be the big guns in the corridors of power, couldn’t understand the essence of his poems. Yet they suspected he wrote about them, not to praise them but to disparage and expose their idiosyncrasies. So, they consulted with top-level foreign academics to interpret the coded texts!

BeeBee or Batey Besong whose names had a certain cadence that was in symphony with his profession, could not care less. He was quite eloquent on radio interviews. And when you met the man, you realized immediately that what he lacked in physical stature, he made up for in prose. Still, was he a simple natured, friendly man with a personality that defied ordinary description.

One Saturday morning some years ago, he was guest on this political fire brand radio talk-show in which I, as employee, was charged with its smooth airing. Our guest talked about the nation in a manner that evoked how much of a patriot he was. (Do you remember the Chinese philosophy which says a true patriot is he who is able to see the evil in his own country?).

Telephone callers to the talk-show praised him for being a self-declared mouth-piece for the silent majority. That must have been an eye-opener because until then, very few compatriots around this area who had heard of him before, appreciated his stance in so far as politics was concerned. He was no iconoclast. He walked without a frown but closer inspection of his visage revealed a deep-thinking nationalist whose venom only waited for the right moment to be spewed forth.

Some even said the greatest moment when he found himself in the forefront of a true cause was during the AAC 1 and AAC 2 – AAC being the All Anglophone Conference of Cameroon. This was a forum in the post-1990 global political upheaval where English speaking compatriots of this country complaining of marginalisation, came together to arrive at a harmonised position before the powers that be. Be that as it may, traitors or turn-coats who abound in the nation and whose right to fame rests with the crumbs that they pick from the master’s table, schemed and turned these memorable events into a fiasco.

But what have I been rambling about? Our idol died in a most horrendous and stupefying manner. Some hours earlier, he had just launched his latest publication – a collection of poetic dissertations which he titled ‘Disgrace…’ Guests came from far and near, a lot of publicity preceded the events and as if the prophet foresaw his demise, two months earlier he told a journalist friend that this publication was to be his last.

As often happens in tragi-comic circumstances, the second musketeer, a renowned dramatist whose numerous offerings often entertained the ululating masses on TV, was the one who presented the poet’s biography. It was as impressive as any graveside eulogy could be but at that moment, they were very much alive. There was backslapping and guffaws for the aficionados, but a strange apprehension for the musketeers. They had just released a WMD or words of mass destruction.

Thus, later that night, while the rest of the nation slumbered, they took off for Yaounde the capital city, in a bid to arrive at first light and obtain their get-away visas. Their fate was sealed nearly two-thirds of the distance to their destination. According to reports that we got, their motor vehicle rammed into a truck on the highway which was either stationary or mobile – details about this remain hazy. In any case, the ambulant contraption containing these laudable citizens disintegrated upon impact. Was it a flying machine? – the human cargo including the driver ended up in unrecognisable fragments as if pulverised by a suicide bomb blast in Baghdad.

These men are no more but their spirits live on! The last has not been told yet. It’s a wait and see game. Only the resilient will one day disembody the falsehood that envelopes our national psyche.

P.S. - This piece was penned way back in 2007 in memory of these three great men. The Cameropn nation has since 2016, been engulfed in a separatist struggle that has created more suffering unnecessary loss of lives and many internally displaced people that in my opinon, is far from the ideals these three scholars died for.