Searching for Bate Besong

Tennu Mbuh

Description

The future of the country in Searching for Bate Besong is compromised by irresponsible leadership, falsehoods, blind tyranny, waste, and lawlessness. Visionaries like Dockinta (a literary incarnation of Bate Besong, one of Cameroon�s most fiery and revolutionary authors) who try to question or expose the status-quo are incarcerated and tortured by the brute forces of dictatorship. It however only needs the strong will and audacity, the messianic self-sacrifice and determination (which are the values Dockinta incarnates), to expose, ridicule and destroy power drunkenness. This play is sine qua non to searching for the collective memory of a community marginalized and subjugated by successive regimes of exploitation and repression. It promises the rediscovery of the dignity and destiny of an active volcano wrongfully rendered docile. The Search will liberate a people who agonized from the whips by the Germans, the hypocrisy of the British, the outright exploitation of the French and the eternal domination of La Republique du Cameroun. The search will culminate in liberating not only Cameroonians, but Africa from corruption, nepotism, tribalism, organized crime, wars and the abuse of basic human rights and freedoms.

Sujets

• Drama

Informations

• Publié par: Langaa RPCIG
• Date de parution: 12 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9789956792610
• Langue: English

Extrait

S 

BAT E B E S ONG

Mbuh Tennu Mbuh

S  BATEBESONG Mbuh Tennu Mbuh

Searching For Bate Besong APlay Mbuh Tennu Mbuh 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.africanbookcollective.com

ISBN: 9956-791-71-7 ©Mbuh Tennu Mbuh 2014

DISCLAIMER All views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Langaa RPCIG.

Author’s Preface This play has been in the drawer for a long time – more than a decade – and it has followed me to places, both physically and in my mind; and all this while, rehearsing itself out in various formats. At the start of this formal compilation, I realized that there were about two and a half pages of the typed MS and I then searched in vain for the rest. Then some two years ago, I decided to dig into two of the cartoons in which I still have lots of junk, and behold the original MS was there in four Ngoaekele examination booklets with lots of editing. In the same cartoon I found a draft of what was obviously an article, entitled ‘BB in Bonamoussadi’, with a second tentative title, ‘The Writer as Critic’. The first, which was about two pages of the broullion was re-captioned at the start of the two pages as ‘BB in Bonamoussadi … in Search of a New Muse?’ Although the causality between this draft (which was later modified in editing to read ‘BB in Bonamoussadi: Artistic Constituencies, Political Strongholds and the Anglophone Cameroon Writer’) and Searching for Bate Besong is so significant, if only because it properly historicises the consciousness from which the play developed, I have decided not to include it in this preface because it mainly addresses BB’s poetic imagination. For the second article draft, seven and half pages of hand-written analysis, there was a single line slanting across each page, a characteristic marker of material which I have already typed. But because I don’t have this document in my files, I can only suppose that it disappeared either with a hard drive crash or was damaged in my many floppy disks that were so

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