Cameroon�s Contemporary Culture and Politics: Prospects and Problems

In Memoriam

161 In Memoriam Thomas Melone Three deaths within ten weeks in 1995 claimed pioneers among Cameroon’s formidable generation of men of letters, arts, and human sciences born between the wars. Father Engelbert Mveng was savagely murdered in April, in circumstances governments unlike Paul Biya’s would have judicially probed but his has not. Thomas Melone and Prince Dika Akwa passed more “peacefully” at mid-year. Like their works however, their travails in exile and prison link them with Mveng, and turn this appreciation of Melone not just to his accomplishments but also to the sad truths which turn visionaries who should be honored in the Africa they served so well into discards, and worse, at the hands of their own country’s rulers, who so lack their victims’ virtue(s). Melone in many ways defined the buoyant culture of Cameroon’s first independent decade, as scholar, teacher, and one of African literature’s foremost tribunes anywhere. A prototypical African student-nationalist in Présence Africaine and La Fédération des Etudiants d’Afrique Noire en France circles during the 1950s, the common enough distinction of expulsion from France in 1961 was no bar to his appointment as the first Cameroonian on the faculty of the new national university. Its indigenization process provided chances Melone seized, mastering the terrain where his own talents and state patronage converged. The talent showed in a variety of publications leading to books on Mongo Beti, Chinua Achebe, and Camara Laye in the years (1972-74) before his eclipse. As for the patronage, how can one top the story Ambroise Kom recounted (in “Une autre victime de l’ogre,” a 3 July 1995 Le Messager tribute using what Kom believed to be Melone’s last scholarly interview, 1991) of Melone hosting an occasion with Léopold Senghor as speaker and Ahmadu Ahidjo as guest in the university’s Amphi 300? Surely Melone’s finest achievement, however, was to turn that talent and patronage to the advantage of African literatures in a 162 Yaounde setting where its creators, scholars, teachers, and students flourished, perhaps as nowhere else in Africa. As head of a Department of African Literature framed to all genres and to comparative study, he encouraged, edited, introduced, and saw to press a wealth of other peoples’ works alongside his own. Mélanges Africaines (1973) best displayed the venture’s promise and flair. Based on a Yaounde colloquium introduced by Senghor, dedicated to the Senghor-Ahidjo friendship, praising the latter for the cultural policy underpinning his own efforts, this product of Melone’s passion used a mask-music-motion ensemble in vibrant colors on the front cover and the indigenous script by Cameroon’s Sultan Njoya on the back. Nearly 400 pages of text covered oral narratives, offered critical perspectives on twentieth-century writers ranging from Africa’s giants (Senghor, Kane, Soyinka) to its newer voices (Grace Ogot, most strikingly), and engaged the diaspora as well (Hughes, Ellison, Césaire, a Washington-DuBois retrospective). The last pages reproduced in Senghor’s own hand the manuscript of his elegy for Martin Luther King, Jr. Mélanges visually and verbally celebrated, in words Melone’s preface used to state his own cultural bearings, “L’originalité criarde de l’apport négro-africaine a la civilisation de l’Universel” ‘the clamorous originality of the Negro-African contribution to the Civilization of the Universal.’ His orientation was challenged, as Marcien Towa and others opposed both Melone’s negritude scholarship and his proximity to Ahidjo state- craft while autocracy grew. But Melone was a critic as well. A 1966 essay in Abbia, Cameroon’s ranking journal of culture, about “les dangers du fonctionnarisme” in the university anticipated more broadly the aid and deference intellectuals gave the regimes which so deformed Cameroon’s public life in the next three decades. There were sharper episodes--Richard Bjornson cited a protest about university pay to the French surpassing what Cameroonians received for the same work. In any event, the program he built faltered and Melone’s career collapsed after 1974, leading to unhappy French exile while Ahidjo still ruled, and then village solitude as a fish-pond farmer during his later years. Melone sat in the National Assembly for 163 Biya’s party from 1988, then (a last defiance?) as a UPC deputy from 1992. But both he and this party of his youth had lost vigor, and his sporadic...