Education of the Deprived: Anglophone Cameroon Literary Drama

Introduction

xi It is a fact of history that since 1961, the year of the union between the former French and British Cameroons, English and French bilingualism became a national policy in the Republic of Cameroon. At the turn of the 21st century the Anglophone Cameroonians number at least 4 million out of a total population of 15 million Cameroonians, constituting thus a linguistic and cultural minority. Until recently national and international discussions of Cameroon literature have often limited themselves to Francophone Cameroonian authors, with only a token mention of those of English expression. (See Lyonga et al 1993:9) Yet, a cursory glance at any valid current bibliography of Anglophone Cameroonian literature will reveal that though it cannot match its Francophone counterpart, Cameroon Anglophone literature has been in existence since the late 1950s, about the same period when famous Francophone Cameroonian novelists like Mongo Beti and Ferdinand Oyono first published their major works. Thus, since the late fifties, Cameroon Anglophone literature has been growing steadily. In the words of Emmanuel F. Doh (1993:82) ‘Although still very young, Anglophone Cameroon Literature is forging on strong and the future is certainly promising.’ And literary historians would agree with the view that the last decade of the 20th century witnessed a dramatic upsurge of creative activity by Anglophone writers; for the period saw the publication of many novels, plays and poems. All but four of the thirteen plays discussed in this book were written in that decade; and, even then, these are only some of the dramas published then or before. This book is a slight revision and expansion of its original version when first produced in a monographic form in 1994. Since then it has been used by students, literary researchers, and scholars with interest in Cameroon literature of English expression, both within and without Cameroon. I have been made to understand that it is one of my most quoted unpublished works. Some academics have urged me to publish it, or, at least, provide a good cover for it. But, until now, I have been hesitant to do so. Introduction Shadrach A. Ambanasom xii The main criterion for selecting the thirteen Anglophone Cameroonian plays analysed here is their political content, or the high degree accorded the theme of authority or power in them. They include Victor Epie Ngome’s What God Has Put Asunder; Bole Butake’s Lake God, And Palm Wine Will Flow, Shoes and Four Men in arms, The Survivors, and Dance of the Vampires; Bate Besong’s The Most Cruel Death of the Talkative Zombie, Beasts of No Nation, Requiem for the Last Kaiser, Change Waka & His Man Sawa Boy, Once Upon Great Lepers and The Banquet; and N. John Nkengasong’s Black Caps and Red Feathers. These playwrights – Victor Epie Ngome, Bole Butake, Bate Besong and John Nkengasong – can be said to be ‘writers in politics’, to borrow a phrase from Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and in their politics they side with the people, the down-trodden and the left-out, subtly giving them a sense of direction. Herein lies the education of the deprived. Some of what goes on in their works is a reflection, in images and symbols, of the general drama unfolding within the Cameroonian society in particular and the African continent in general; a rough picture of the diverse fortunes known by the Cameroonian and African societies as they struggle to develop culturally, politically and economically, especially after political independence from colonizing European powers; and, above all, a mirror of the innermost recesses of the minds of our most sensitive artists as they, in their own attempt to contribute towards the harmony, stability, progress and prosperity of these societies, imaginatively and subtly propose means of achieving solutions to problems plaguing them. The dramatic works are ‘therefore an indicator of an essential aspect of our spiritual evolution; more, the principal channel through which the collective adventure of the new African [or Cameroonian] is being given expression’. (Irele 1981:35) All of this confirms a Marxist axiom: the social basis of literature; that literature is a product of the socio-historical conditions of the people producing it. And the second Marxist truism made apparent by the thirteen plays analysed is the view that no major work of literature is conceived in an ideological vacuum; or that every significant work of art issues from an ideological conception of the world. And the imaginative world of the playwrights is one consisting of two antagonistic aesthetics locked in a...