I Spit on their Graves: Testimony Relevant to the Democratization Struggle in Cameroon

Epilogue

199 Epilogue T hose who went through the experience will never forget the moment when, in the evening of Friday, June 18th 1993, they arrived at the Social Centre of the Christ the King Parish at Tsinga in Yaounde for the public launching of the first volume of Rotcod Gobata’s “No Trifling Matter” essays, published under the title The Past Tense of Shit, to discover that the venue, on holy ground, had been sealed by the political police on the orders of the Mfoundi Divisional Administration. In a letter addressed at the last minute to the author of the collected essays by the harassed, cowed and flustered Curate of the Parish, the latter explained that the permission which he granted for the use of facilities at the ceremony had had, painfully, to be withdrawn under intimidation and pressure from the police in whose opinion the occasion was bound to take a political character, “in view of the nature (sic) of the personalities who had been invited.” I had been invited to preside the ceremony a few weeks after the history making first All Anglophone Conference in Buea and still fewer weeks after my much noticed appearance on CRTV’s “Actualité Hebdo” on 23 May 1993. Suddenly, in the eyes and mind of an intolerant regime whose best form of participation in public debate remains its suppression, I had become one whose “nature” would render political anything and any event with which I was associated. Earlier on that same day, the police in Douala had unlawfully seized a consignment of over six hundred copies of the book in the course of transportation by their 200 Godfrey B. Tangwa (Rotcod Gobata) printer from Victoria to Yaounde, where they were expected to be used at the launching ceremony scheduled for that evening. More than a year later, as I write this Epilogue to the second volume of Rotcod Gobata’s collected essays, that consignment is still held by the Douala police without explanation, without charges being brought against anyone, and at great financial and moral loss to the author and publishers of the book.. It is, therefore, a laudable act of courage and determination that Gobata and his publishers should decide now to release the second volume of these “No Trifling Matter” essays which, between December 1993 and June 1994, appeared in the pages of that indomitable standardbearer of the people’s fight for meaningful change in the Cameroon of Mr. Paul Biya, the Cameroon Post. By this gesture they affirm their refusal to be intimidate by a passing regime upon whose demise the political, economic and social survival of the Cameroonian Nation depends and towards whose early demise, therefore, all patriotic Cameroonians ought, each in his or her own way, to make a much-needed contribution. The Anglophone reading public in particular, and the Cameroonian people in general are indebted to the author and publishers of this volume for their tenacity in the fight for truth, human freedom and social justice in our country today. The essays collected in this volume themselves are, by the depth of their analysis and the breath of their vision, indeed “No Trifling Matter.” They are a chronicle of the events in contemporary Cameroonian society, especially as concerns the conduct of public affairs therein. Over and above its relevance for our own time, this chronicle will, in the decades that lie ahead, serve as a rich source of information, opinion and comment which future generations, anxious to understand the making of an era whose impact, positive or negative, is destined to survive 201 I Spit on their Graves: Testimony Relevant to the Democratization Struggle long after the longest-living of its principal actors and actresses shall have disappeared from the face of the Earth, will find a great benefit. Rotcod Gobata has, through these essays, lit and placed on a pedestal, a candle whose flame shall never die and whose glow shall serve as a beacon to guide and to inspire generations yet unborn. Dr. Simon MUNZU Yaounde, 2 August 1994 ...