In the Shadow of my Country

Tennu Mbuh

Description

Growing up almost simultaneously with the independent Cameroon nation, it takes Tipoung'he a long time together with challenging experiences to realise that he has all along been living in the shadow of his country. His epic story is representative of the many whose untold stories are caught in the schematic confusion of independence, in which self-knowledge must rally back finally from the lethargic ideals of the Nation and the Patriot in a redeeming instance of identity. The story mirrors the growth of the hero as he gets used to his ever shifting environment. The complexity of experience, the burden of knowledge, and how to express these, confront Tipoung'he with prescriptive arrogance, and the more he gets entangled in the authoritative and patriotic mesh, the more he becomes aware of the need to withdraw from their osmotic consciousness. The moment of withdrawal, which coincides with self-knowledge, is a personal and symbolic rebirth.

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Langaa RPCIG
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 5
• EAN13: 9789956715800
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 10 Mo

Extrait

L C P B N C

In the Shadow of my Country

Mbuh Tennu Mbuh

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Milton Krieger Cameroon’s Social Democratic Front: Its History and Prospects as an Opposition Political Party, 1990-2011

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Mbuh Tennu Mbuh In the Shadow of my Country

In the Shadow of my Country

Mbuh Tennu Mbuh

Langaa Research & Publishing CIG Mankon,Bamenda

Publisher: Langaa RPCIG Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group P.O. Box 902 Mankon Bamenda North West Region Cameroon [e-mail] www.langaa-rpcig.net

Distributed outside N. America by African Books Collective [e-mail] www.africanbookscollective.com

Distributed in N. America by Michigan State University Press [e-mail] www.msupress.msu.edu

ISBN: 9956-558-22-2

© Mbuh Tennu Mbuh 2009

DISCLAIMER The names, characters, places and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Accordingly, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely one of incredible coincidence.

In the Shadow of my Country

Contents

Chapter One Ndamnyeh, Once Upon a Time .................................................. 1

Chapter Two The Shoot from Aghem ............................................................ 31

Chapter Three Where the Light Shone .............................................................. 45

Chapter Four Ache Head Sons of Mulafako .................................................. 99

Chapter Five Bitter Seeds of Faith ............................................................... 119

Chapter Six The Strike ................................................................................... 129

Chapter Seven Farewell, Matajem .................................................................... 159

Chapter Eight Vanity Fair .................................................................................. 171

Chapter Nine Zakia’s Transmutation ............................................................. 179

Chapter Ten City of Seven Hills ................................................................... 189

Chapter Eleven Saints and Ghosts of a Palmed Grove .................................. 197

Chapter Twelve Feuding Pedagogues ................................................................. 205

Chapter Thirteen Eclipse Beyond the Grove ..................................................... 213

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Mbuh Tennu Mbuh

Chapter Fourteen Tiny Beads of Inspiration ....................................................... 225

Chapter Fifteen Acolytes and Misinterpreters ................................................. 247

Chapter Sixteen Voices of the Inquisition ........................................................ 271

Chapter Seventeen The Bait and a Noose .............................................................. 289

Chapter Eighteen To Migrate or not to Migrate .................................................. 305

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In the Shadow of my Country

For Ngwi and the Kids & To the Loving Memory of The Master, KWM.

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In the Shadow of my Country

Chapter One

Ndamnyeh, Once Upon a Time

he Ndamnyeh stood before him like an erect God, huge in T despondent silence. Jutting peak of dread in the greying day, squatting on stout limbs of which sensuous tongues for folk lineages had recalled at sleep-time, and was he to be audience and custodian? Passageways of the umbilical cord, his recent trough, ferried from Aghem, thunderland of Nkoh mysteries, in the twilight of time and across the rolling hills and furious rivers in mammy wagon, to the base of the Ndamnyeh, stringed distances and he at both ends, peeping. Who was there to tell him, apart from his mother, how nostalgia was planted in every heart as the plague and yeast of memory and that every journey goes both ways? Grey turfs atop the Ndamnyeh like wild hair, fringing the sky from where one can touch heaven without even jumping, and that God will open the door when you knock. His sister had asked their mother, after squinting into the distance, whether they could see the garden from there and she said yes, but that they had to grow up first.  He, fourth child in a family that was still to understand the modern talk of family planning, was awed by the towering giant glowing golden in the sunset light, and closed his eyes for a moment to absorb ancestral mysteries, at the end and outset of a journey. His mother led his five green years by the hand, little tendrils that offered hope, she prayed, although he did not know this, at the twilight of his epic, away from the place and people he knew faraway, to those he had heard about and fancied without especial commitment. The narrow, overgrown paths with little things darting all over alarmed his folktale glories of nostalgic narratives that bore the burdens of time on the tip of the tongue. She urged him on, but his reluctant steps crawled to a stop on the crest of the homestead slope, poor trembling shoots, she thought, and wondered again why this mad decision of Alioum’s? Was it just to encounter their

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