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Cher Philemon:

I am putting you at the head of the Government in spite of the numerous stinking social reports I have of you and your brother Francis Fai. I have decided to take this momentous decision in view of the stakes ahead. So, you must take these assignments scrupulously and effect them in a timely and discrete manner.

First, Philemon, you are the first of those who had come out of ENAM (our French Secret Agent School) to be appointed in this position of Prime Minister. You have the doctrine of the Champs D’Élysées and so you are well Frenchified to carry out a task we will be facing in a few weeks’ time … that of crushing any uprisings in the Bamenda, Kumbo, Nkambe, Mutengene, Kumba, Mamfe areas. You must be aware of the fact that the African Summit of AU has not accorded the awaited independence the SCNC/SCAPO people were envisaging and expecting. I am well informed that there are two squads ready to strike on very strategic targets. I trust you and will want you to seek them out and crush their filaments and satellites ruthlessly “a la Oku”!

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Words were hurled like grenades toward the fort protecting the source of our collective misery, the oracle of our destiny. Power to the people! We shall overcome! Suffer Don Finish! But, the suffering had just begun, so after the political circus of those years we found ourselves making frequent trips to the latrine to rid ourselves of nauseating slogans.

By Kangsen Wakai
Original Publication: African Writing Online, No. 6

He had caught grenades with his bare hands and turned them into inconsequential specks of dust. He carried with him a staff that had deflected a torrent of bullets. He had converted would-be assassins to his flock on the spot, singling them out from a crowd of thousands. They all swore they had seen this with their eyes.

He could appear and disappear. Just like that; one minute he was there and the next he was gone. They said he had been ‘cooked’ with the most potent juju; he had spent six days and six nights in the forbidden forests of Oku. Justice was on his side they insisted, but most of all, the medicine people, from the Aghem thunder-makers to the Batibo spirit-catchers, were on his side. He was untouchable. The uniformed goons couldn’t touch him. He was divine. He was truth. They couldn’t lay their accursed hands on him for he was the honey-tongue genie of elusive dreams with the power to conjure the apocalypse.

So, he was a messiah, our own latter-day saint.

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By Kangsen Feka Wakai

No Turning Back: Poems of Freedom 1990-1993 by Dibussi Tande

To suggest that Cameroon embodies the tragedy that befell African peoples when European colonialism imposed itself on the continent is quite an understatement.

Today, Cameroon, like a host of its African neighbors has become a landscape on which real and imagined identities are contested. This struggle within Cameroon, albeit critical in its evolution as a geo-political entity, occurs against a backdrop of political misrule, economic stagnation, social tensions, and systematic graft.

Modern Cameroon occupies an area that was ‘discovered’ by the Portuguese, claimed by the Germans, colonized by the English and French and is now the personal playground of an avaricious cult. It stands amongst one of the last colonial frontiers on the African continent.

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