Dibussi Tande: Scribbles from the Den

Jem Spectar Inaugurated as President of University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown

Cameroonian-born Jem Spectar was today inaugurated as President of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown in a grandiose ceremony which included congratulatory messages from former US President Bill Clinton, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Desmond Tutu, and Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Jem Spectar is the first Cameroonian (and probably the first African) to hold such a distinguished position in a major US university. Congratulations for keeping the dream alive!

"From one West African visionary and leader to another, I would like to extend my congratulations to you for your achievements in academia... As a person of African descent in the U.S., you have shown our continental compatriots here and abroad that hard work and dedication do pay off. Your passion and professional contributions to scholarly work focused on international human rights and the rule of law are indeed an asset to the entire University. The nation of Cameroon will undoubtedly boast of your achievements as a child of their soil."

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf - President of Liberia

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SIC Embezzlement Case: Roger Belinga Gets 35-year Jail Sentence

By Tansa Musa

"We hope this case serves as a deterrent to other people in whose hands state property has been entrusted to manage in the general interest, but who very often mistake them for their personal property." Presiding Judge Nnomo Zanga.

YAOUNDE, Sept 27 (Reuters) - A court in Cameroon jailed nine former state employees for between 15 and 35 years on Thursday for embezzlement in a second high-profile case against corrupt members of veteran President Paul Biya's ruling party.

A large group of senior state officials were arrested in February 2006 in a crackdown on graft that Biya ordered under pressure from international donors concerned by widespread corruption in the central African country.

Book Review: “No Turning Back” - Dibussi Tande’s Vision for a Better World

A Review by Joyce Ashutantang, Ph.D. (Department of English, University of Connecticut, Greater Hartford, USA). Published in Pambazuka news.

Dibussi Tande. No Turning Back: Poems of Freedom, 1990 – 1993. Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa Publishers. 2007. Available from amazon.com and Michigan State University Press.

Dibussi Tande is an Anglophone Cameroonian. At least this is the threshold on which he stands in this collection of poetry titled No turning back. Yet Dibussi forces us to turn back and look at the pivotal volcanic moments in Cameroon’s history between 1990- 1993. During this time the wind of change which brought down the Berlin Wall and fueled the Perestroika train reached Cameroon. The result was not only the launching of the Social Democratic front by Ni John Fru Ndi in 1990, an event which ushered in multi-party politics in Cameroon, but a renaissance of Anglophone Cameroon Nationalism or what became known as “the Anglophone Cameroon question”.

In His Own Words: Revisiting Nicholas Sarkozy's University of Dakar Speech

Excerpts from speech by Nicholas Sarkozy, given at the University of Dakar, Senegal on July 26, 2007.

The speech given by French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the University of Dakar on July 26, 2007 is arguably one of the most talked-about and most controversial speeches in recent times; one that has generated - and is still generating - tons of reactions from across the world, particularly from Africa. Although excerpts of the speech have appeared in many publications and websites, it has been quite difficult getting a full transcript of the speech in English. A good samaritan recently directed me to an unofficial version of the speech in English. Find below sections of the Dakar speech that generated most of the controversy. (Subtitles are mine).

The excerpts are followed by links to rebuttals by Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian Professor of History at the University of Witswatesrand in South Africa, which have also generated widespread debate in Africanist circles.

Book Review: "No Turning Back: Poems of Freedom" By Dibussi Tande

Dibussi Tande. No Turning Back: Poems of Freedom, 1990 – 1993. Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa Publishers. 2007. 72 pages. [$19.95 (US), £14.95 (UK), CDN$ 21.14 (Canada) and EUR 17,94 (France/Europe), JPY 4,023 (Japan) CNY 149.835 (China)

About the Book
No Turning Back relives the tumultuous beginnings of Africa’s democratization experiment in the early 1990s. The main theme of the collection is an investment in hope and in the resilience of Africans. The poems are loud and clear in their castigation of dictatorship and its miseries. They celebrate the mass resolve and thirst for democracy by Africans for whom there is ‘No turning back’!

Editorial Reviews
"A lucid and truly memorable collection of poems. Dibussi forces us to turn back and look at the pivotal volcanic moments in Cameroon’s history between 1990- 1993... As a student activist and budding journalist during this historic period, Dibussi captures cadences of this struggle eloquently… The poems are very accessible and despite Dibussi’s admiration for the prolific playwright and poet, Bate Besong’s “Soyinka style” of poetry, Dibussi instead fits into the poetic school of another prolific poet, Niyi Osundare."
Joyce Ashuntantang – Ph.D. Department of English University of Connecticut, Greater Hartford, USA.

An African Hero: Biko - The Forgotten Martyr

By Raymond Whitaker (Originally published in The Independent)

Thirty years after he was murdered in police custody, the African trade unionist remains a thorn in the side of the ANC and a stark reminder of a more radical approach to dealing with apartheid and its aftermath.

"History called upon Steve Biko at a time when the political pulse of our people had been rendered faint by banning, imprisonment, exile, murder and banishment... It is the dictate of history to bring to the fore the kind of leaders who seize the moment, who cohere the wishes and aspirations of the oppressed. Such was Steve Biko, a fitting product of his time; a proud representative of the re-awakening of a people." Nelson Mandela

I met Steve Biko once. His miserable death on the floor of a South African prison cell, 30 years ago today, still lay a few years in the future. So did his friendship with the white newspaper editor, Donald Woods, resulting in the book and film, Cry Freedom!, which made him an icon. But if the name of Biko became a thorn in the side of the white regime, today's commemorations will be equally uncomfortable for South Africa's black majority government.

JK Bannavti's Play "The Reapers" Now in Print

J K Bannavti. The Reapers & Freed Into Jail. New York, NY: iUniverse, August 2007. 100 pages (Paperback). ISBN: 0-595-44168-8 [Available on amazon.com]

On May 23, 1990, the Yaounde University Theatre treated a rapt audience to the maiden production of The Reapers at the university’s Amphi Theatre 700. Written by JK Bannavti, a young playwright, actor and university of Yaounde graduate student, the play was supervised by two legends of Cameroon drama; the late Prof Hansel Ndumbe Eyoh and Prof. Bole Butake.

Six years later this same play won the national theater award confirming if need be, that Bannavti was one of the most promising talents of his generation. However, in between, these two events, "JK" disappeared, unannounced, from the Cameroonian literary scene.

"Exile": A Poem By Mbella Sonne Dipoko

Originally published in Ronald Segal, ed., Modern Poetry from Africa. Penguin Books, 1968, p. 164

In silence
The overloaded canoe leaves our shores

But who are these soldiers in camouflage,
These clouds going to rain in foreign lands?

The night is losing its treasures
The future seems a myth
Warped on a loom worked by lazy hands.

But perhaps all is not without some good for us
As from the door of a shack a thousand miles away

The scaly hand of a child takes in greeting
The long and skinny fingers of the rain.

Cameroon Unification: Were Southern Cameroons Leaders Inexperienced and Illiterate?

Dibussi Tande

"While the UN and UK may be blamed to a certain extent for the bungled decolonization of Southern Cameroons, the bulk of that blame lies with the Southern Cameroons political class which allowed ethnicity, personality conflicts, and inter-party rivalry to interfere with the adoption of a truly pro-Southern Cameroonian agenda."

1961: Southern Cameroons Premier John Ngu Foncha returns from a trip to the United Nations

Cameroon's history is a history replete with half truths, myths, fallacies, and outright distortions. The Foumban Conference of July 1961, which sealed the fate of the British Southern Cameroons in its stormy marriage to French-speaking La Republique du Cameroun, is no exception to that rule.