By Bate Besong
Fela Kuti it was who once chimed: When trouble sleep, nyanga come wake am. Wetin i dey fine: Na palava i dey fine: Palava i go getti oh! Here was the time when an unknown quantity called Eseme Walters Ntube Franco or Walters Eseme Ntube Franco, provoked the ire of gadfly Bate Besong and got the telling off of his life. This beauty is culled from Postwatch Fact Files also see Cameroon Post of July 10-17, 1995
Mediocrity as lard of ethnocentric vision, lacquered, in the irreverence of an ostentatious ego; whose earth-bound sensibilities - as of now glutted; in Faustian over-indulgence, I abhor. Aimless projections. A mockery of intellectual exertion. Concealment. Dull. Vieux jeu. Etcetera.
The attempt at ascending the throne of one of the blest who have successfully used drama in planting trophies in the human mind like the heady wine lures the warped and megalomanic-proned psyche to Quixotian fantasies. Yet, the temptation to gratify the ego is always so strong. That is why my daughter laughed aloud when she saw the expression on my face after having read your garbles and wholly achoate apologia for an author who has so irremeably waxed; so studiously remained ignorant of human character, history and contemporary society. The relationship between drama and society is too complex and various to be reduced to such kindergarten generalizations. Lies. Concealment; sophistry, half-truths - a warped apologia for an author who buries himself in the crude congeries of traditionalia thereby exhibiting all the perfidy of “Festac” or calabash and raphia consciousness.
All these I explained last night to my ten-year old daughter, because here we are dealing with the Cimmerian product of a somnolent academia. June laughed. Trust my daughter!!! Yet, nothing is more impertinent than your pretensions: By your own admissions your favourite author is a fence-sitter. Well, well, what else can be said? In your glutted conceit, you have roped your General Babanguida of drama in! Casualties of war are fence-sitters as they die unmourned on the Luckacian “Third road” of art. Another posturing. I even suspect that you want me to shoot an anopheles insect with a bazooka, Ahon; you are a cruel agent provocateur! And, thick, very thick upstairs.
Of the title of your review you are quick to impugn: I draw an allusion from the very first version of Christopher Okigbo’s Lustra “when we shall be great guys of child.” And what is your monstrous construction? Bate Besong has “many names” one of which is “showboy” but Butake is a “gentleman.” I will not comment on your convoluted syntax, your moronic tone nor will I look at the linguistic whorls that parade every paragraph of your apologia.
Apparently, you have also read The Swamp Dwellers. Recall the Immortal and thus ineffaceable cry of that symbolism of all literature of commitment i.e. Igwezu’s verbal attack on society’s cormorants and porpoises. “Why are you so at Kadiye? (...) “Why are you so thick headed, Amuehe!” Now, pick up your pen and notebook:
My dear Nostradamus Ahon, literature is not the biblical Noah’s Ark sailing off to Ekindu under the manufactured delusion of some astral apocalypse in order for it to keep a date in the Lethean waters of some Tutuolana. On the contrary. As a medium that deals with a highly concentrate, more intense level with the confrontation of social existence, cotemporary Africa literature in its vibrancy and historical ambience attempts at identifying the proletariat and the oppressed as the contingent forces that will create the alternative.
In many ways therefore contemporary African literature in its efforts at periscoping a society that has goose-stepped back into the abyss of nature inevitably finds affirmation in the assertion of the French literary icon, Honore de Balzac who, in an earlier century had, singled out the supremacy of historical experiences to creative imagination, thus: “The French society was going to be the historian and I was going to be their amanuensis.”
Anglophone Cameroon theatre and drama serves a slice of reality as well as the source of comprehending the processes which determine the course of history. Recent Anglophone Cameroonians drama can therefore be said to be committed, visionary and in its socio-historical context, people-oriented. As a reflection then of the social reality the dramatist’s style has become the index of the social milieu of his generation, a question of endless possibilities, of endless permutations? Style is the committed Anglophone dramatist’s antennae to grave social and national pressure.
And, since the writer perceives drama as life depicted in action before a living audience, s the ideal genre which could be used to depict the reality of life, especially contemporary life as lived in society; drama becomes the referential quality to the condition of man in society i.e. thus develops as a response to the far=reaching evolution of current history. Victor Epie Ngome theatre/drama for instance manipulates the reality of the Cameroonian situation to suit his subjective perception. The success of his theatre will therefore depend upon how profound is his vision of man and how successfully it is communicated n a dramatic form.
Bole Butake’s work as the most fully authentic example of that medium with its cosmological perception of the world on one hand and its obsession with form in many ways underscores the fact that the glow of history and the life of the Cameroonian people would usually merge at the mainstream of the life of the nation. Butake’s theatre therefore demonstrates the two major trends in the Anglophone Cameroonian drama and theatre and thus a central newel.
From the immature days of The Rape of Michele through Lake God and The Survivors and now his caricaturistic scaffolding of the General and minions such as Sergeants in Shoes wherein greater attention has not only been paid to the thematic thymes, structural harmony and linguistic mechanics dramatic art seems to have finally achieved an autonomous whole especially in its insertion into the relevance of contemporary history.
Butake in Lake God and Will Flow has exploited the efficacy of juju, magic and fetish. This is part of the African reality and thus this dramatist largely relics on oral narratives as raw material for the actualization of his dramatic vision. Invocations, ritual and libations are matrixed around a syncretic world of guardian ancestors and divinities who exert tremendous force on the living. In Butake’s cyclic matrix of trinities the luminous chasms is often bridged through the haloed traditional prelate: Shey Ngong, Chief Priest of Nyombom stands sentry in And Palm Wine Will Flow just as Shey Tanto arch-magus of the Kwifon holds sway in God.
Without coming to terms with Butake’s syncretic imagination and how this influences his art, it would be impossible to apprehend the playwright’s whole ideological purview. By examining that body of work as the generative impulse of collective living experience; of the Cameroonian human condition - prominence would of course centre around a theoretical and critical frame work that not only emphasizes the ideals, aspirations, attitudes and events of the dramatic organization i.e. the ontological situs of each play.
Dear Ahon Nostradamus Ameuhe, what have you got against “protest” literature?
Wole Soyinka’s chronicles can be fully apprehended as a way of sign-posting his belief or ideology that Nigeria/Africa’s anomic environment can be cured by a form of writing that gives nightmares to those whose almanac of governance is a dismal catalogue of sclerosis, cannibalism, incompetence and dull schematism. Soyinka has been courageous in airing his views with unalloyed vehemence. And, like all great social critics, he has been obliged to rely on a deep sense of history to make his brilliant satires socially relevant and meaningful. (I have never claimed Leeds as my alma mater!)
His war chest Madmen and Specialists (1971) A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) but especially the last published armada in the quarter namely Seasons of Anomy (1973) so closely based on the events of the January 15th 1966 coup d’état evinced by the forceful caricaturing of the Western Nigerian Governor Batoki (Sir Ladoke Akintola) and his ally, the retrogressive Northern feudal ruler, Zaki Amuro (Sarduana), illustrates how literature can no longer be viewed merely as a search for new forms of expression beyond the constraints of conventional syntax. For, indeed, Soyinka’s entire quartet becomes vehicular synecdoche of shaping consciousness and of reflecting reality.
Recall. The period of our recent history of the Mohammetan Mameluke Toura I whom, some escapist truants within the literary “Opposition” based in Nyandong via Bangem, having weaned panyerical with their Leeds certificates in the past now recall that wholly satanic epoch in their ever-ready wares with nostalgia. Alexander Biyidi (a.k.a) Mongo Beti, a Fang-Ntumu stood alone, illuminating an epoch and a country unworthy of him.
Amuehe Frano Nostradamus, as a decisive proof of his supremacy and genius, the Akometan warrior, violated the popular (l’art pour l’art) by filling out the interstices of his fiery scrolls with the living images and thus becomes a Homeric bridge across the Mungo’s of time. Mediocrity, I abhor.
Drama and theatre as podium of societal refurbishments contain within themselves the diadems and the tiaras of their own social renovations. Dante, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Derek Walcott, each displays a restless active intelligence. And, in sourcing their works with the mythologies and the institutions of their environment they have through the quintessence of their art outlived the Cimmerian darkness and apocalyptic convolutions matrixed or connected with their growth and victory. In that way, these avatars of the drama of civilization’s icon have acted as bridges of gold over the ages having redeemed from decay the visitations of the divine effulgence by way of the vanishing sororities which haunt and lure the Shelleyan interlunations (See Shelly’s Defense of Poetry).
Michelangelo’s Buonaroti in order to arrive at a perfect, sublime aesthetic of the human anatomy stayed up most night studying corpses. In spite of his eccentricities his madness paid off. Remark the century’s genuflections to the Sistine Chapel.
Truth and splendour of imagery and an artistic vision which inspires perception through nebulous shadows which futurity casts upon the present become more penetrating as it were when the amplitude of the circumference of haloed imagination becomes coaxed and replenished with the inextinguishable thought i.e. hypsos (See Longinus On the Sublime).
Milton’s Lucifer as a moral being is far superiour to God in Paradise Lost. In the Vita Nuova but especially in Divina Commedia, Dante observes a most heretical caprice in the distribution of prices, rewards and punishments. Ecclesiastical moguls of the Papacy and supposed saints are confined to the Inferno while characters such as Riphaeus, an indefatigable and self- proclaimed pagan are installed and proclaimed in Paradiso. In fact, Dante’s lover Beatrice incarnates into Divine Providence! Now, dear reader: Judge for yourselves - in this rebellion against the norm was it better for Dante to act as awakener of mankind or to acquiesce to medieval retrogressiveness and stymied orthodoxy of the St Augustinian mould? In the above instances we are witnesses of how through the alchemy of the very loftiest powers of the creative imaginations, the aforementioned dramatists “protest” and thus violate the popular by helping us grasp reality, anew. (See Aristotle’s Poetics).
Ahon, dramatic literature we recall which often basis itself on a historical event of human rebellion against social structures must demonstrate a perspective of transcending that structure, for it requires extensive and various knowledge and greater comprehensiveness of mind.
And, since you are so thick, so cement headed, I will not raise the flag of imprecations otherwise I would have, as they say in Bayangi: Mfam antem nyu weh!
Up to June 1995 there is no evidence anywhere that I have made statements about The Survivors. But, perhaps, since you are Nostradamus Eseme NTUBS Franco, you have this kilned in your voyeuristic crystal ball at Nyandong. Dead Soul. Impertinent Dead Soul.
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