Dibussi Tande: Scribbles from the Den

Chicago 2016 Olympics Bid: Going Up Against Pele in Abuja, Nigeria

By Makuna Tande

A confrontation of epic proportions took place recently during the annual meeting of the Presidents of the Associations National Olympic Committees of Africa (ANOCA) which held in Abuja, Nigeria, from July 5 to July 8, 2009. 54 of the most powerful men and women in sports were meeting to chart the course of sports on the continent. 


Makuna Tande, Pele and 1968 US Olympic Gold Medalist Ron Freeman.

This year’s meeting was extra significant because it was an election year and there was a rare challenge to the incumbent president.  More significant was the fact that 2009 is the 2016 Olympic Games host city selection year, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had designated the Abuja meeting as an official Candidate City presentation event.

Literature Apartheid in Cameroon

Patrice Nganang (Translated from French by Emmanuel Ndeh Avwontom) 

“Anglophone writers appear to me akin to the Albatross in Baudelaire’s poetry. The English language that they acquired from their colonial past arms them with broad wings, but the Anglophone issue clips them in their impeding flight.”

An intellectual crime is being committed in our country: that of segregation against Anglophone Cameroon Literature. The crime is unfolding before the very eyes of our national Intellectuals, with our consent as stakeholders and, often spurred by our most respected, yet conniving francophone Intellectuals. Salient in mind are Achille Mbembe’s fumble in an article he published on the Anglophone issue.  The fact, therefore, that a francophone student can complete education, beginning at Nursery school right up to a University degree – twenty years in all – without so much as touching a poetry collection, a work of prose or a drama piece published by an Anglophone writer is illustrative of the magnitude of the literary apartheid which has been used by our educational system to brainwash us.

The Writer as a Citizen, a Rejoinder

By Rogers Tabe Egbe Orock (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Helsinki)

Now, I just have a few observations and additional reflections to make on the public role of the intellectual as seen by Soyinka, with special reference to Cameroon.

First, it is good that most Nigerian intellectuals understand that the intellectual is only valid in his connection to the people and place of his time. Indeed Claude Ake (1994)in his reflections on the erosion of academic freedom in Africa incisively pointed out that oft we take too much of a state-centrist approach, wherein we criticise the state for all the troubles within the university institution, ignoring the self-selling which African intellectuals wantonly subject themselves to. For Ake (ibid.)

The Language Question in Cameroon – A Rejoinder

By Peter W. Vakunta, Department of French and Italian, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Cameroonian Pidgin English, like most creoles the world over, is a language on its own. It is not an appendage of so-called Standard English. I taught Standard English on Cameroon radio for years before moving to the USA, so I know how to draw a line between English and Pidgin. In the Caribbean, there is CREOLE, in Canada there is JOUAL, etc. These pidgins carry not only social identities but also world views and have to be allowed to thrive.