I first encountered the literary genius, Bate Besong, through his 1991 drama “Requiem for the Last Kaiser” which I found in my sister’s trunk and read. My two sisters were language students, one in the University of Yaoundé I, and the other in the University of Buea. While I was in secondary school, I found their books more fascinating and consoling than the dry equations I was solving or balancing in mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
In 1992 BB won the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Prize for Requiem for the Last Kaiser, then later obtained a PhD in Literary Studies from Calabar (Nigeria).
When I subsequently entered the University of Buea, meeting Bate Besong in person was like meeting a god in the flesh. I had been raised to believe that all geniuses had to be foreigners, be it Newton, Einstein, Wole Soyinka, or Chinua Achebe. But here was one of them, breathing the same air like me.
We were in separate faculties: He was teaching in the faculty of Arts while I was studying in the Faculty of Health Sciences. Yet, my fascination for BB led me to read all his books I could find, and attend the staging of all his plays that were held on campus.
The last Bate Bisong play I watched was “Change Waka & His Man Sawa Boy”. Change Waka portrays Besong’s fictive universe in which he decries socio-political corruption through the central metaphor of the Sawa Cult of R.P. (Rig and Prosper).
In 2007, he launched his latest book, “Disgrace”, a collection of poems that unapologetically exposed and damned the filth and corruption in Cameroon’s high places. When he died in a ghastly motto accident on his way to Yaoundé after that book launch, many people did not hide their suspicions about the un-accidental nature of this accident.
Bate Besong was the Lapiro de Mbanga of the academic world. He remains a model of a genuine intellectual and a monument of citizen scholarship. As we celebrate him on this 8th of March, anniversary of his death in 2007, his memory is even stronger in the context of an academic society in which so-called intellectuals have reduced themselves to political buffoons.
That which the intellectuals of today have normalized will make Bernard Fonlon, author of The Genuine Intellectual, to rock in his grave like a scarecrow in the harmattan. Among the intellectuals of today are those that will sleep on mats for weeks in the courtyard of the ministry of higher education to clamor for a government matricule, drink poison when they don’t find their names on the recruitment list, spend considerable time chasing promotions in Yaoundé, hunt each other with juju at the workplace, use the same lecture notes for decades to propagate stale curricula, fabricate graduates that are not fit for purpose, serve as automatic campaign managers for the ruling party, and even vow to die if the Head of State does not run for another term.
Let me give you a clearer picture of the legacy of this remarkable man using this excerpt of a discourse by Tiku Takem (Ph.D.):
“Bate Besong is a widely – known intellectual and social critic whose creative corpus as well as his commentaries articulate his political and ideological anxieties towards the insensitivities of the postcolony. Consequently, he has crafted an aesthetics of liberation predicated on the impulse to map out an alternative vision for the suffering masses. Requiem for the Last Kaiser, one of Besong’s popular plays, is a typical example of his drama of liberation. Its relevance to the political and social affairs of contemporary Cameroon is located in its engagement with the profound contradictions of the neo-colonial state characterized by ineptitude and absolutism of political leadership…
In Requiem for the Last Kaiser one is immediately confronted with the unmistaken feeling the Bate Besong’s aesthetic mandate seems to inhere a clear mission to shock his audience into the scandalous reality of the blatant marginality of the common folk. Aimed at awakening them from a condition of subjugation to one of hope, this play becomes a motivation to collective action in order to reclaim the essence of collective destiny. The play constructs a revolutionary consciousness in order to overthrow a dictatorship in a neo-colonial African setting. It is obvious that Idoute, (which stands for Etoudi, the official residence of the Cameroonian President) where the play is set, reveals the unmistaken intent of the writer at launching a direct critique of the current dictatorship in Cameroon…” (Retrieved from https://www.batebesong.com/2007/10/dramatic-discou.html)
In a paper that he presented in 2005 during the commemoration of the 19th Anniversary Of The Passing Away Of Professor Bernard Nsokika Fonlon, Bate Besong uttered word the following words that now appear to have been prophecies of his own life:
“William Fulbright has argued that literary agitation, like practical political instigation, which edges on dissent or rebellion is “an act of faith”. Accordingly, and, as I have already shown elsewhere, although Professor Bernard Nsokika Fonlon (a man who was so exceptionally handsome), was, an intellectual pillar of fire; a Prometheus among his peers; indeed, something of a twentieth century Aristotle, the Greek philosopher and classical biologist, his neo-classical treatise on literary composition have, neither, received accolades nor endorsement from me. Professor Fonlon, however, using, his towering, super-human intellect, fulfilled, the noble revolutionary role of critical-activity in the identification and exposition of truth for the good of Cameroonian humanity. He agreed with …the American philosopher, Dr. W.E.B du Bois, and the French existentialist thinker, Jean Paul Sartre, that the primary task of the intellectual as an agitator and instigator was the rehumanization of a dehumanized polity capable of undercutting the material foundations of social injustice thereby facilitating the realization of socialist democracy. Chinua Achebe, in agreement with Paulo Freire, believes, that to speak or write a true word is to transform the world.”
Here are a few inspiring takeaways from the life of this Obassinjom Warrior.
• Bate Besong rose to prominence before he ever obtained a PhD. This should serve as a wakeup call to today’s generation that has become infested with “The Eternal Student Syndrome” by which by spend all their lives chasing “terminal degrees” for the principal aim of using them to find employment.
• Bate Besong had a clearly defined life mission around which he built his academic enterprise. May he inspire a paradigm shift among a generation that pursues schooling as if it were a career, without any sense of purpose in life.
• Bate Besong had a diagnosis of a pressing problem in his society and offered himself as a change agent. In a truly emerging economy, the value of knowledge is in its translation into solutions for human progress and enlightenment.
• Bate Besong fell like a warrior in the battlefield. Whether his death was a genuine accident or there was foul play involved, his spirit will be laughing among the ancestors as he reviews how his life ended like one of his plays, a dramatic exit after the suspense-filled climax of the launching of “Disgrace”. Leaving a legacy is the best way to leave the world.
When I reflect on the life of Bate Besong, the words of President Theodore Roosevelt come to mind – words that have become my anthem for life:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
© 2020, Godfrey Nji Esoh
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