Searching for Bate Besong

written by Mbuh Tennu Mbuh

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.

Mbuh Tennu Mbuh

Mbuh Tennu Mbuh hails from Pinyin in the North West Region of Cameroon. He obtained his B.A., Maitrise, and Doctorat de Troisieme Cycle in English Literary Studies from the University of Yaoundé (I), and holds a PhD from the University of Nottingham. He is a two-time laureate of the Bernard Fonlon Society Literary Award, and a founding member of both the Yaoundé University Poetry Club (YUPOC) and of the Anglophone Cameroon Writers Association (ACWA). Having taught in America as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Resident, Mbuh presently lectures in the Department of English Studies, University of Yaoundé I.