R. E. Ekosso's Blog

The Disillusioned African, by Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Francis B. Nyamnjoh. The Disillusioned African. Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa Publishers, 2007. 264 pages. Available on Amazon.com & Michigan State University Press

The relatively few people who read books published and/or written by Africans (when they can find them) might find that some of these works are famous for little other than their typesetting errors. I once got into trouble for telling a rather self-regarding young reporter that while I thought it was a good thing for a country to have a vibrant private press, its effect was somewhat marred by the fact that half the words in his newspaper were spelled backwards.

Needless to say, we did not part on friendly terms. However, the reason I mentioned this is that Langaa, which last year published the book I am attempting to review (it was first published in 1995 by Nooremac press) seems to have escaped this. It is true that a meal is much more that the plate on which it is served, but one does rather like clean plates in these matters.

Why can’t the English be more like the French?

An Englishwoman, Sarah Long, had an excerpt of a book published in the online version of the Sunday times, a British newspaper, in November last year. The excerpt from the book is hilarious in itself, and for personal reasons, I intend to buy the book.

But what has been even more revealing is the comments on the article which, at last count, had reached 247. The article is purportedly written by a French woman of some means who moves to England with her husband. It is less than flattering about the English. But the catch is that it is written by an Englishwoman (Sarah Long), not a Frenchwoman, as many of the commenters failed to realise. This means that, feeling themselves to be under fire from the French, a number of English people have abandoned their “traditional” tact and said some very rude things about French people.

It makes you wonder…

One of the kindest comments about British food I saw was this:

“ It doesn't have to look good to taste good.”

I don’t agree, actually, as I have had some very good British food, but as one of the comments says, it’s the cook, not the food.

Anyway, here’s a selection from the comments:

The angry ones:

“I would strongly suggest that the author packs her bags, heads back to Paris and hands her passport in to the French authorities with all possible haste!”

“…an obnoxious article from a woman from a country that is completely irrelevant in today's world.”

“I think we have declared war over less!”

“Yet the suicide rate in France is 2.5 times higher than the UK ((Source WHO International))”

“Well, we may all have huge bottoms but at least we use proper toilets here in England, unlike the French, who insist on going by the side of the road. Leave Paris and not ten miles out of the city you start to see country lanes strewn with toilet paper. Disgusting. I went to France once and never want to see the place again.”

“Dressing well has never been a big thing here in the UK. You'll get used to it…Pretentious, sanctimonious, arrogant, small-minded, boring, chauvinistic. Very French indeed.”

Here’s one of the(sad-but)-true ones from a Brit who thinks his country has gone to the dogs:

“…The country is increasingly anti elitist, ferociously aggressively and smugly working class and anti intellectual. There are little of the old glories remaining. The BBC, for whom I used to work, is imploding, The cost of housing!, the revolting health system…”

And here’s a balanced one:

“Hortense is an alter ego, a vehicle for Long to simultaneously expose the vanity and chauvinism of the French, and the slobbishness and insularity of the English.”

I find the whole thing, apart from being absolutely hilarious, also revealing in the extent to which tribal affiliations come to the fore, especially in the comfortable anonymity of the Internet. I remember thinking the same thing when the unspeakable Dr. Watson said black people are inferior. There were hundreds of comments saying, in essence: you know it’s true; I worked with a black person for a while and believe me, they’re ALL this or that or the other really bad thing.  We should stop being politically correct and call a spade a spade.

Yes, but it’s terribly hard when it’s your spade, eh? Especially when you know that it’s not a spade but a highly polished silver spoon.

One of the comments said:

“Hahaha this article is a blast. And the reaction by some English people is priceless! Hand out criticism but take none! So English!”

I think it is a bit of a generalisation. However, part of me is hoping that at least one of those people who insulted me and my kind in response to the Watson story was furious at being insulted by the generalisations of a “Frenchwoman” about the English.

Poetic justice, I call it.

Click here to read the article and the comments. I think it is a different way of looking at our "former" masters.

No Turning Back by Dibussi Tande

Published by Langaa, 2007, 59 pages.
Available at Michigan State University Press and on Amazon

This review will not deal with matters of style. I am concerned with the ideas that I perceive through this work, and their implications in a broader context. I am reminded, as I tap this out, that yesterday I saw press reports of alleged killings by the police in Bamenda, Cameroon.

These are the poems of a young man. However, they are not marred by the blind anger and naivete by which young men of literary bent draw attention to themselves, often to the embarrassment of their friends. The collection of poems is, considering the writer’s age when he wrote this, a candid and mature look at Cameroonian society with its head-in-the-sand approach to the politics of oppression.

The work is reminiscent of the liberation poetry that has sustained the soul of Latin America through decades of torture and human rights abuse. Such poetry, while not shying away from grief and pain, brings with it the freshness of hope for humanity in the face of the ancient and universal crime of not loving one’s neighbour as one loves oneself. It is the tenacity of this hope, I think, that will make this work resonate with victims the world over.

In using the word victim, I do not refer solely to those who have suffered the depredations of the brutal and unfair appendages of a system that has no regard for how its actions can shape the future, or to those whose lives have been lashed to shreds by the poisoned tentacles of its bureaucracy. I also refer to those who suffer but survive. For hope is life. A feature of that hope is the impulse, as expressed in these poems, to explore the full depth of emotion that our experience arouses. Those whose hope for the future is adulterated or destroyed by a combination of their action and failure to act, and who are incapable of introspection, are those who feel that this hope is directed against them.

But unlikely as it may seem to some, they too are victims. Consider the many quislings on the African continent.  As Dibussi puts it in False Prophet:

…another deceitful son
Aiming for a place in the sun

None of these quislings are anything but the lavatory down which common human decency is flushed by their Western masters. As such, I feel they deserve nothing but the pity and contempt I read in these lines.

What I have said so far might give the impression that this is a collection of hopeful jeremiads (if you’ll forgive the contradiction in terms). This is not so. Dibussi Tande is by turns impish (as in I Know why the Frog Croaks so Loud), stern as a judge (Boomerang), and even imperious (Freedom Now!!!).

I grappled (fairly unsuccessfully, it now seems to me) with French literature in my undergraduate years. We were taught for some time by a dreadful Frenchwoman who made us feel like dirt. But I have been surprised, in later years, to find that I remember something of what I read:

You! Hypocrite lecteur! Mon semblable! Mon frère!

That is Charles Baudelaire at his strident and posturing best. This line attracts our attention. It is designed to do so. But the reason it holds and keeps our attention is that it speaks to something in us. I would call it our shared humanity if I did not feel, on the strength of what I see on the news, that many human beings are really not terribly human at all. But it is the same feeling I get when I read Dibussi’s poems. For those who have the receptors for it, I think they will come as a jolt to the system. Perhaps it is our common memory that is triggered. I do not know.

But I think you should find out for yourselves what it is.

Now, just the briefest of words about other things. I have always found that rhyme can stunt an otherwise natural flow of poetry. I am not sure that one or two of these poems would have suffered from its absence.

A Squalid End to Empire: British Retreat from Africa

Colonial history, seen from the side of the colonists, can be summarised as follows:

I came, I saw, I conquered. Then I lied about it.

The BBC radio 4 website has a story called Rigging Nigeria. I have not actually listened to the documentary, but I was intrigued, as you might imagine, by the title. The website claims that the British rigged the elections in Nigeria in 1960 to counter the threat of communism. You will have heard the recent outcry about the Nigerian elections and how deeply flawed they allegedly were. I decided to do a bit of digging, and came up with a mother lode of corroboration of this tale of British duplicity in dealing with its colony. All things are revealed in the fullness of time, in spite of official secret acts, hundred-year gagging orders and that sort of thing.

I have been struck, in writing this, about just how little I really know about what went on in colonial times. I think this is dangerous ignorance on my part, and I have resolved to do something about it…starting with force-feeding you the results of my peregrinations in the ether.

LEFT TO TELL, by Immaculée Ilibagiza with Steve Erwin

Immaculée Ilibagiza. Left To Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust. California: Hay House. 2006. Also available as an Audio Book.

This is a story of the Rwandan genocide, told in simple, direct language. It is the story of the triumph of faith over unimaginable adversity.

Until quite recently, I worked for the tribunal the UN set up to try the perpetrators and organisers of the genocide. Even the peripheral contact I had with the events, ten years after they occurred, was highly traumatic. In the end, I needed counselling. One of the reviewers of the book says he cannot imagine how people who have undergone such adversity manage to live normal lives afterwards. I cannot imagine it myself.

REVIEW: THE ECONOMIST'S TALE

The Economist’s Tale, by Peter Griffiths

There’s a new trend among a few of the many economists who have worked on or in the developing world. They’re being nice. Well, not exactly nice, but at least more honest and objective than they have been before. There is marginally less of the signature arrogance of the I-have-come-to save-you-from-yourselves sort.

I first saw this when I read Confessions of an Economic Hit-man by John Perkins. But Perkins’s book seems like an expiation of his sins in a manner calculated to make him look nice. All that navel-gazing a conveniently long time after the fact, I thought to myself. But we must give him credit for telling the truth.

I liked Griffiths’ book more. It has that slight edge of cynicism tempered by honesty without which most narratives sound either self-absorbed or unbearably sentimental in the way perfected by current American evangelism. It is written in simple, clear language that is easily understood by an economics near-illiterate like me. He writes as if he were writing for his daughter, Jane, and actually begins the book with a letter to her.