Perspectives on Written Cameroon Literature in English

18. Alobwed’Epie, The Death Certificate, Yaoundé: Editions CLE, 2004

293 18 Alobwed’Epie, T The Death Certificate, Yaoundé: Editions CLE, 2004 Alobwed’Epie’s The Death Certificate (2004), is a national allegory of great resonance which, like Bole Butake’s dramatic parable, And Palm Wine Will Flow (1999), is set in a fictional African country called Ewawa. The text’s anti-hero is Mongo Meka who, dead or alive, remains the subject of interest for most of the narrative, and this because of his pivotal, if unpatriotic, function in the novel. A native of the First Province and doubling as Treasurer General and Acting Director General of the Central Bank, Mongo Meka is the keeper of the keys to these financial institutions. He therefore enjoys unlimited access to cash at any time. Being an unconscionable individual, however, he embezzles the whopping sum of 550 billion francs, most of which he stashes away in a Parisian bank under the name of his French wife, and then fakes death in a road accident in a neigbouring country, in a bid to forestall a possible prosecution for denuding the national treasury. His death is mourned, and he is duly buried, with a certificate of death established in his name. Taking Meka’s death in earnest, his widow, Yvonne Antoinette, remarries, this time, a Frenchman, Roger Girard, a development that threatens Meka’s machinations, forcing him to come back from the land of the dead to embarrass the living, with his ghostly reappearance. He initiates costly lawsuits against the French couple with the intention of putting them asunder. However, Meka is hoisted with his own petard, as his stratagem becomes a boomerang. His death certificate being genuine, Meka is legally considered dead, and the man now going by that name, 294 an impostor! To compound Meka’s discomfiture, his alienated wife dies in a storm at sea in Australia, leaving her French husband the inheritor of Meka’s 350 billion francs in her account, legally putting the money far beyond Meka’s reach, a dramatic turn of events that impels the now impoverished and fugitive Meka to commit suicide in France. This plot synopsis emerges less from a monologic narrative than one of multiple perspective. For, from the point of view of focalization, the author has deployed an ingenious narrative technique wherein the story is told by a crew of narrators with their own techniques; that is, different perspectives are adopted to comment on the same or related event, a kind of polyphonic narrative in which no narrator alone owns the complete truth, although the sum total of their various accounts constitutes the whole truth: knowledge about Mongo Meka, his kins-men and the state of the national economy of Ewawa. Though to some extent isolated by the very uniqueness of their narrative vantage positions, the various narrators, each assuming a chapter or more of the text, are united in this, that they are drawn into the vortex of a common maelstrom called Mongo Meka and his misadventures. The central theme, the judgmental statement, emerging from the text must be situated at the level of the behaviour of Meka and his consorts of the First Province in relation to financial management. For, if you cut any highly placed citizen of Ewawa who is in a position to manage finances, he will bleed embezzlement. To have a rough idea of the administrative set-up of Ewawa, it is instructive to mathematically conceptualize it in terms of ten concentric circles, each representing a province, thus making a total of ten concentric provinces. The province in the centre, the seat of political power and economic influence, is known as The First Province. The closer one is to the centre of power and influence, the more satisfied, or less censorious, one is with regard to the system; and the reverse is 295 true, discontent emanating from the periphery. Criticism is thus proportional to the distance from the centre, and the prerogative of the marginalized. No wonder, then, that the greatest critics of the government come from the marginal 9th and 10th Provinces. However, distance here is a kind of cultural-ideological entity, measurable not necessarily in spatial but in ideological terms. There is the hegemony of citizens of the First Province in all spheres of influence. They head key ministries, major lucrative companies and organizations, key financial institutions, the army, gendarmerie, and the police, etc. Their identifying terms are ‘sons and daughters of the soil...