Canute - Chronicles from the Heartland

[Book Review]: Buea, Capital of the Cameroons, Symbol of the Nation and of Reunification by Churchill Ewumbue Monono

By Canute Tangwa

Writing about your town or city is exacting and tricky; the writer is like Chinua Achebe’s lizard that jumped from the high iroko tree to the ground and said he would praise himself if no one else did or a boastful Ozymandias, the King of Kings, who had only ruins and decay to show for his grandeur.

It takes a scholar with feet solidly on the ground like Churchill Ewumbue Monono to realize such a feat since Buea these days is not “running splash of rust” as it then was between 1972 and 1982 but tucked smugly at the foot of the 4070 metre high active volcano, Mount Fako, aka the Chariot of the Gods, alias Mount Cameroon, the highest peak in West and Central Africa, host to rare flora and fauna that the author lists with panache.

According to the author, Buea under German colonial rule, English Mandate and Trusteeship and subsequent Southern Cameroons and West Cameroon administrations- Endeley, Foncha, Jua and Muna was a political hub and a development showcase. He reels off quite a good number of achievements of each administration at the political, social, health, economic, educational, diplomatic and military levels capped ostensibly by the imposing and majestic Schloss (Lodge).

Book Review: Collection of Poems Entitled "No Turning Back" (2007)

Reviewed by Canute Tangwa

Dibussi Tande. No Turning Back. Langaa Publishers, 2007

Reading through Dibussi Tande's collection of poems NO TURNING BACK (2007), I  could not but recall Wole Soyinka's one point five billion naira question: "How did creativity survive under such arbitrary exercise of power? How did Art survive in a climate of fear?"(2004 Reith Lecture).

Dibussi Tande wrote most of his poems in an atmosphere (the turbulent and fiery 1990s; clamor for political change in Cameroon and the coming to the fore of the so called Anglophone Cameroon self-determination) of fear, uncertainty and expectation.

At the time something apparently of import but that went without much notice happened; the manhandling and belittling of the much heralded and celebrated writer Mongo Beti in the streets of Yaounde by policemen as the prince was moving out of town. Thus, the line between ART as vision cum commitment and ART as emotion and spectacle was drawn.

NO TURNING BACK encapsulates the Christian eschatological trinity of Vision, Tribulation and Hope; all these subsumed into the quest for freedom and political space that the poet skilfully handles as if to the manner born.