I Spit on Their Graves (Book Two of The Past Tense...): Testimony Relevant to the Democratization Struggle in Cameroon, and: Wading the Tide: Poems (review)

Rotcod Gobata, the nom de plumeof a faculty member at the University of Yaoundé, Cameroon, has a taste for vituperation and a knack for arresting titles (his previous collection of essays, to which this is the sequel, was called The Past Tense of Shit). The 50 essays in this collection were originally published between December 1992 and January 1994 under the column “No Trifling Matter” in the Cameroon Post, an English language newspaper allied with the political interests of the main opposition political party in Cameroon, the Social Democratic Front (SDF), headed by John Fru Ndi, who wrote a forward to this edition. These publication dates coincide with the most crucial political events in Cameroon in this decade, and thus the essays serve as witness, from an extremely partisan point of view to be sure, of the turmoil following the presidential election of October 11, 1992. For the reader unfamiliar with this period, I will provide a brief outline, without which the “Son of Gobata”‘s caveats and recriminations might be a bit obscure.

Although democratic reforms were undertaken in Cameroon in 1990, political power remained in the hands of the President, Paul Biya, and a small circle of advisers drawn primarily from his own ethnic group (Beti) and the former single party, the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM). By 1992, the date of Cameroon’s first multiparty elections since single party rule had been declared in 1966, Biya had been in power for 10 years and appeared headed toward almost certain defeat. Biya’s principal opponents were John Fru Ndi, a bookseller from Bamenda in the English speaking part of the country, and Mäigari Bello Boúba’s National Union for Democracy and Progress (UNDP), with support mostly in northern Cameroon. The government refused to convene a national conference to devise rules for the upcoming local and national elections. The opposition responded by calling in June 1991 for a series of general strikes, dubbed Opération Villes Mortes(Operation Ghost Town), designed to shut the country down. The economy was already in tatters (per capita income had fallen by nearly half since 1985), and many observers predicted that Fru Ndi would be elected. According to official results, however, Biya was reelected with 40% of the vote.

Biya won the election through widespread fraud, according to international observers. He was assisted by the military, which zealously harassed the government’s opponents. Cameroon’s foreign patron, France, played a malign role, as well. Distrustful of “Anglo-Saxon” influence in its former colonies, France assisted Biya’s cause by retiring part of Cameroon’s debt and twice during 1991 paying the back salaries of civil servants. The fragmentation of the opposition did not help the cause of change; an alliance between Fru Ndi (whose “official” total was 36% of the vote) and Bello Boúba (19%) would have been virtually impossible to beat, but Bello Boúba had refused to step aside for the more popular Fru Ndi, insisting that Cameroon was not ready to be ruled by an Anglophone. Many Cameroonians believed that John Fru Ndi had been fraudulently defeated. Rioting erupted, especially in Bamenda. Martial law was declared, and many beatings, arrests and killings followed. Police tried to arrest Fru Ndi but were prevented by human shields of thousands of civilians.

Rotcod Gobata’s acrimonious essays are a mirror of these events and speak to the frustration felt by the opposition SDF, whose every move had been trumped by the wily Paul Biya and his domestic and foreign supporters. Their republication is not without risk to their writer, whose first collection, The Past Tense. . ., was confiscated by the police at its Yaoundé launching. Journalists...