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63 9 Fale Wache, Lament of a Mother1 I n this poem, Wache, taking refuge behind a woman whose son, Ndikochong, has gone overseas and refused to return, lays bare the festering wounds of our contemporary socio-politicaleconomic situation and stops short only of rubbing caustic acid on them. Wache describes, diagnoses, with razor sharpness but refrains from prescribing. The poem is in the form of enthymemic or truncated arguments whose missing components are not far to fetch if one wanted to proceed by the method of uncompromising Aristotelian syllogisms. The missing links can be supplied variously from Soyinka, Armah, Cabral, Fanon, etc. The whole poem is an outpouring of long repressed or suppressed sentiments. Of course, Ndikochong is not overseas, or rather, the overseas where he is, is right here in Cameroon! Ndikochong is that Cameroonian with a foothold within the ruling class, who is not actually in power but nonetheless, has the power of being close to power; he is in the corridors of power. Ndikochong is that Cameroonian who has sold his own people for the price of continuing to enjoy the crumbs failing from his masters’ table. When he completes that betrayal, he might even be called up to feed from the table. He will do this by whispering to his masters that he knows all trouble-makers in his village and their diabolical plans and schemes. He would be most convincing when he “reveals” that his own mother is not only one of them but their ring-leader. Soon, a “security- report” originating from Ndikochong himself would allege that the people of his village are amassing arms from some neighbouring country to destabilise the state. Whereupon, an entire company of the National Army would descend on the tiny village, at 3.000 a.m., breaking doors, beating up sleepers, looting and raping, and ordering everyone, in their loincloths, ‘dentité’ in hand, to assemble and sit on the bare ground in the central village square. Nothing, of course, would be found except farming implements, a few dane guns and blunt machetes. The soldiers would withdraw after twenty-four hours, without apologies, without even an 64 Road Companion to Democracy and Meritocracy explanation for this brutal rape of an innocent village. But Ndikochong would pluck his plums. His loyalty to the regime would now be considered beyond a shred of doubt. He would be rewarded with a Pajero to enable him visit his “constituency” regularly in spite of the impossible condition of the roads and keep an eye on the traditional stool on which he now intends to sit, once the recalcitrant illiterate now occupying it is “taken care of: .” This time around, Ndikochong’s name would surely be on the long list of those accompanying the big man himself on his next regular “private visit” abroad. It is while popping Pom Perignons there that his mother would die from the effect of the severe beating she received the night the soldiers came and Ndikochong would return to receive the terse message: THE WOMAN DIED. For the hard-of-hearing, we might even say it is plainer language. The colonial masters with all their dominus vobiscums, pater nosters, mea culpas and kyrie eleisons did us little harm, really. Under their regime did we not enjoy fairly good roads and market our cash crops fairly profitably? Now that they are gone, their thrones are not empty but occupied by our own ‘shons’ of the ‘shoil,’ black white men who have proved to be not only better exploiters and oppressors but also inconscient looters of the National Treasury and public property. The line is between oppressors and oppressed, rapers and raped, robbers and robbed, wrong doers and the wronged. Note 1. Written on the occasion of the launching of Francis Wache’s book, a long poem entitled Lament of a Mother, in 1991. ...

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