The Novels of Linus T Asong

Emmanuel Doh

Description

This study is the first critical examination of the novels of Linus T. Asong, a sharp, compelling, and brutally insightful storyteller, sometimes comical yet with a knack for the distraught, disturbing, and macabre in his throbbing capture and portrayal of society as it functions or as it fails to function. Asong’s novels bring to the fore an unexpected enormous array of characters whose physical appearances and habits are depictions made concrete by potent imagistic words deployed not only to evoke vividness and plausibility, but more specifically to peek into the soul and mental uprightness of persons and society. Hence, they demonstrate the response of the oppressed, exploited, and abused in the face of dysfunctionality, social, and cultural violations and deviations. In this light, the novels are revealed to serve both as testimonies and critiques of the times in which Asong lived. This study, therefore, offers insights into one of the most prolific novelists of Southern Cameroons origins, as well as modern trends in African literature.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• African

Informations

• Publié par: Langaa RPCIG
• Date de parution: 30 septembre 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789956553785
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

T N HE OVELS OF Linus T Asong A Study in Crime, Punishment, and Dysfunctionality

Emmanuel Fru Doh

The Novels of Linus T Asong: A Study in Crime, Punishment, and Dysfunctionality by Emmanuel Fru Doh

Langaa Research & Publishing CIG Mankon, Bamenda

Publisher: LangaaRPCIG Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group P.O. Box 902 Mankon Bamenda North West Region Cameroon [e-mail] www.langaa-rpcig.net Distributed in and outside N. America by African Books Collective [e-mail] www.africanbookscollective.com

ISBN-10: 9956-553-41-7

ISBN-13: 978-9956-553-41-9 ©Emmanuel Fru Doh 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher

Table of Contents Preface .......................................................................................... v Biographical Introduction ............................................................ ix Chapter 1 The Forces of Crime and Punishment: Stranger in His Homeland , The Crown of Thorns , A Legend of the Dead .............................................................. 3 Chapter 2 Desperation and The Will to Survive: The Akroma File, and The Crabs of Bangui ...........................25 Chapter 3 A Journey into the Soul, the Mind, and the Person: No Way to Die , and Salvation Colony ...........79 Chapter 4 Culture and Conflict: Chopchair, Dr. Frederick Ngenito ...........................................115 Chapter 5 Dichotomizing History: Osagyefo: The Great Betrayal ....174.............................................. Chapter 6: Linus T. Asong and Beyond: A Portrait and Conclusion........................................................169 Notes............................................................................................. 177 Appendix ....................................................................................... 183 Works Cited .................................................................................. 197 Index ............................................................................................. 201

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Preface

Ours have been lives born and bred in struggles of almost all kinds, and so our pens, as we grew older, became our weapons, hoping not to shed blood while educating our populace by writing and conscientizing our leaders and the proletariat. We have succeeded, but not much as reading became a luxury due to our nation having been turned into a national penitentiary, without a fixed term to serve, for daring to unite otherwise that we may be truly independent. Our lives never really mattered to those who managed our international plight in the name of world peace, and so here we are today, fighting and dying in the hope that we may find a conscience somewhere worthy of honor, to help put things right. And so English-speaking writers of the former Southern Cameroons poured their souls out in virtually every literary genre they could care to use, until they started dropping one after the other without reaping any direct fruits from our struggles, just like with our national resources. The struggle continues though. Our literary soldiers are dying, but their voices must continue echoing, as they do, to succeeding generations until someday the luxury of art for art’s sake will be ours or theirs, with me gone too. Linus Tongwo Asong was one such soldier, his weapon: his pen. The man died still fighting, and I will not let his efforts go in vain; hence, the need for me to carry out a study of his literary endeavors, his novels in the main. Many English writers had pioneered the effort to provoke thought that we may understand our lot and know which way to go: Bernard N. Fonlon, Mbella Sonne Dipoko, Kenjo wan Jumbam, and many more of the first wave of literary avant-gardists, then a second wave, and subsequently there is another already, and many more generations of English-speaking writers will come to tell, I hope, a different, if not an altogether new and true story of our lot—after the burial of the gun, “whence” sprouts the shoot of true nationhood. Asong was among the second generation of English-speaking writers of the late eighties up to the nineties whose effort amounted to a noteworthy contribution to our literary diligence in the Cameroon union, as it targets matters of significant concern to the public, but primarily that of the English-speaking lot. Accordingly,

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one cannot talk of the English speaking novel in Cameroon without mentioning Asong’s most prolific contributions, yet because of the chokehold English-speaking writers have been under, it remains a challenge for their works to be thoroughly studied by critics as English-speaking scholars have been transformed, at large, into guerilla artists or outright exiles who can only write from beyond the hitherto so-called national boundaries and face the challenge of trying to get their works to reach their targeted audience: they can only play then from where it rarely matters, even though this scrutiny, if not censorship appears to be on the wane as virtually everything about this presently socio-politically abused nation is now nonsense. Accordingly, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Linus T. Asong, bearing in mind his prolificity as a novelist and his role as an academic and socio-cultural insurgent. Most of us had just returned to the union, Cameroon, having been exposed to so much outside, that we knew we could not rest until we had started imparting what we had learned to our oppressed and mostly ideologically landlocked compatriots. This was the situation, given that the radio had only one government controlled station positioned across the national territory; the television was yet to be introduced by as late as the eighties, and when it came, had only one station and a limited time on the air from: 3:00pm to about 10:00pm, along with ridiculously censored programs, not to mention the fact that everything was broadcast in a language we were being forced to learn – French. Yes, owning a passport was virtually impossible and reserved for the aristocracy, the so-called elite and their family members. So, the times were tough, but we were determined to succeed. And so Asong forged on with our dream-venture, Patron Publishing House, even at the risk of singlehandedly serving the company in almost all of the necessary managerial capacities as he hurried and struggled with the challenging task of raising the funds to equip the dream press and recruit staff while working hard to release books which included some of his, Cosmos Press, Limbe, having served as his first publishers in Cameroon. So, while another 2 late English-speaking literary great, Bate Besong, got printing houses to print his works even at the risk of not having ISBNs, or else he simply rushed to neighboring Nigeria to pay and have them published, Asong struggled at home to release his with a publishing venture that barely became functional. It was our brainchild, and a

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lot was needed at the time to concretize and facilitate the venture 3 taking off; Asong could not wait. It would seem Asong could hear his bells knelling, and so he worked with a certain urgency, earnestness, and seeming desperation as if he had concluded that his time on earth was not on his side, hence the flood of novels he rushed out. This notwithstanding, Asong’s works are well known and made their mark, especially in his native Cameroon. To talk then of Southern Cameroons Literature without mentioning Asong, will be a terribly misleading error. Until his death, he was the most prolific English-speaking novelist in the Cameroon union.

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Biographical Introduction Linus Tongwo Asong, of Southern Cameroons, was easily the most 4 prolific novelist in the Cameroon Union even long after his death. After about twenty-two years of endeavor, given that his first novel, The Crown of Thorns, was published in 1990, and the hour of his death 2012, Asong succeeded in writing ten novels alongside other works. Asong attended Basel Mission School, Buea Town, in the early fifties, left and went to Cameroon Commercial College (C.C.C.), Kumba, for a brief year, where he studied shorthand, typing, bookkeeping and other commercial subjects. Unfortunately, Asong’s parents could not afford the fees for his stay at C.C.C. and were about to withdraw him when they heard of an elite school called “Sasse College,” which had scholarship opportunities if a student performed well. In other words, if a child was academically promising, then he could study without paying fees. With such exciting news, Asong’s father encouraged him to give it a try, and so he took the entrance exam and passed. He went in and passed the scholarship exam, and so his life changed from a commercial background to a kind of “grammar character” as it is locally described. Asong remembered his days at St Joseph’s College, Sasse, Buea (1963-67) with fond memories as he talked of interesting personalities like Father Cunningham who compelled students to write book summaries every weekend from form one to form five. According to Asong, this exercise was so grilling that to keep the pace, students ended up fabricating books: they fabricated a title, faked a summary, and presented it to whomever was supposed to read these summaries. According to Asong, this is how the idea of fiction writing took hold in his mind. Asong also talked of an interesting master he served as a young man, Pa Daniel Awungnjia, in the years 1956, 57, and 58. During these years, there was this story telling program on Saturdays on Radio Nigeria, Enugu, that he listened to, and Pa Awungnjia would compel Asong and his companions to listen to the stories and then re-tell them in their own words after the program, and then invent their own stories. “In this manner, the creative instinct was created in us at home, an instinct which Sasse College honed to near perfection given our ages at the time,” Asong observed (personal interview). It must be remembered that at this time Southern Cameroons was being administered by ix