UB Crisis and Mbella Moki's Role

When people are killed in the present Camroonian autocracy headed by Emperor Biya, and families are in tears, it has become customarily for those who don't feel the pinch to exercise excessive freedom of speech in saying things that hurt. After all when you are saying over a bottle of beer or a cup of matutu that two students were shot, does it mean anything? It could as well have been two fowls smashed to death by some boys in search fun just like the trigger happy criminals in uniforms bought with tax-payers money.

The UB crisis received a flurry of newspaper reports, some factual, others with slanted facts to support some groups, party or regional opinion, some carefully tuned into fine sensational garbage to elicit the best sales and public attention. One of such had to do with the Mayor's role in the crisis. He was criticised: yes for everyone has a right to criticise either with the use of binoculars, concave or convex glasses. I read in the mayor's role from the press, someone who who didn't care for the dead of students in his municipality, or engineered and had the students taken out of the way so that a senior corpse should be brought in, and someone who dispassionately presented the bereaved families as desperate and beggarly. I was so enraged at Mbella when I read the purported statements he made.

Desperation is a state that can overcome anyone if your son, brother, cousin or friend is brought home lifeless with a deep bullet wound on the face filled with clotted blood, fresh and refusing to dry. Anyone who is not numb with grief at such a spectacle is in need of pathological and psychiatic help. It is at such moments that those who offer their shoulders to receive the tears that even refuse to fall and calm the spasms that rock your body are taken to heart. Such persons are never forgotten for they are friends indeed. But to present a shallow image of one who came to the families when others were seeking for pubic notice, who said the ashias so many times when many were drinking the events away in soya and roasted fish is unpardonable

But the question that remained was whether families had gone crying to Mbella for help or whether he had felt the need for the municipality to take responsibility somehow and act in accordance with what prudence and companion dictated at the moment?

I was initially disgusted when I read about the mayor's role in the crisis and immediately wrote home to my brother:

I read with consternation events leading to the burial
of Benneth as written in www.thepostnewsline.com.
Nothing matters now but for prayers that can be
offered for him. I talked about the happenings at home
with my immediate supervisor Prof, Brian Donovan, who
checked things out on the BBC and CFI and found very
little reported.

I talked to him about the mayor's role even after his
brutal murder and he told me that he's been thinking
about Bemidji State University coming up with a
resolution on the incident but feared for my safety
when I returned home. I've given him the go ahead. If he needs
more info on this, I'll let you know.

Apart from that, my colleague and I are thinking of
preparing a joint paper on A Rhetoric of
Disconnections: Affiliations of Universities in the
III World to the Western World as a Political Gimmick;
a case of Cameroon.

I know how this must be for you. A son he had been but
there is still hope that what he fought and died for
can be achieved. I want to do something for him.
Something towards justifying the unjustifiable which
is death so that I can actually say to myself that
he's has not been a lost course.

His reply to the above letter came on Tuesday December 12 and was very enlightening and deserves to be shared:
I'm gradually recovering from the trauma. We went up
to bury Bennett on Sunday December 10.

I cannot make sense about the Mayor's role you make
allusion to. In fact, if there is one person in all
this crisis I am invaluably indebted to, it is the
Mayor, Mbella Moki.

He is the one who after the child had been shot and
the others in panick having fled, took pains to search
his pockets, in blood and retrieve a small note book
with phone numbers and names. After having called many
numbers to no avail he decided to look for numbers
with the names Mrs; that is how he got in contact with
Canisia. He personally came and took from the farm in
Bokwai. As I say, for all this I am grateful to him in
person, I saw genuine compassion in that.

Secondly, in his capacity as Mayor, he paid for the
coffin we used and gave some financial assistance.

The root cause of all this is our subaltern position
as Anglophones here. The Mayor has nothing, absolutely
nothing to do with it. Apparently, this should be the
work of reporters or people who did not do thorough
investigation before writing. The facts are far from
that.

Does it occur to you that Yaounde, the mother of
Universitie, then the other state universities go on
strike and no one has ever been shot? So, why Buea;
two children killed in the strike year before last,
and now two others. The trouble is that when our
forces and the governors who give them the OKs to open
fire on children, cross the Mungo, they see themselves
in a territory where they have licence over our lives.
The trouble is that exams are written here and the
university marks, and proclaims results, but because
of our subaltern position the Essingan clan can inject
names on the list in the name of regional balancing.


Probably when my mind settles I will talk more on
this. As for now we only pray that his soul may find
eternal rest with the Almighty. As I said in the
Church up in the village, his name Kenyuyfo-on should
teach us to accept whatever God has given, the joyful
and the miserable, for he alone knows why and when he
chooses to give.

UB Crisis

On Tuesday, November 28 2006, I received the following mail from my small brother Benneth and before I could reply it, news came that he'd been murdered by the police in the line of duty for his country. Murdered during the strike to bring justice, meritocracy and academic integrity to the socalled Anglosaxon University of Buea where it's the students who better know, fight and die to uphold intellectual honesty! The following is the letter as he sent it:

hello Bren,
how are you , how is everything? hope its all
good. i ain`t vdoing any bad, coping.
right now school is in some kind of chaos. there is
a strike. you quite remember the presidential decree
of late instituting a medical school in vUB right,
well an entrance was made after which meritotious
candidates were selected. after this list had been
published anther list appeared [u know it is very
common in cameroon} comprising of francophones who did
not even sit the entrance. that is eactly the bone of
contention, the 26 names added. there is no shool 4
more than 24hours now..
how is work overthere and school. guess all should
be fine coz i know you for that. good luck and so
long.
bennett.

So long my boy till we meet again. Do you know what it means, how it feels to have a mail in your hands whose reply will never be read by the sender?

Kenyuyfoon
(for Benneth)

I hardly recovered from the chilly winter wind
that stung my face as I returned from BSU
Happy for one thing, that weekend had come
Happy that I was going to snatch moments of
rest listen to the summoning gongs of LSS
I'd hardly settled when the phone jolted me
and there went the voice from Seattle
lashing out the news of a boy with Norbert
shot fighting one of the lost Cameroonian courses!
What are you going to do now? I told you that
when you fight for anything in Cameroon,
when you waste your time and then your life
nothing is going to change but the hard fact:
You die; you and your family are the losers.

I thought of the dream I'd held unto for so long
the passion to do something, to get my butt off
and trigger something so loud that the world may
hear and even condemn the atrocities going on
I thought of the students that had died before Ben,
the students of last year who died fighting ...
fighting for a goal they believed in and stood for
I didn't even know their names. Hot tears streamed
telling me that was the difference between statistics
with no human face and the battle-ground
brought to one's backyard too close for comfort

One stark reality stared me in the face
no philosophizing was going to take that away
That Benneth had died and was gone forever
questioned everything I believed in and forced
a reconsideration of fighting strategies
Was all of this in vain? Had the truth been told
that heroes died before their time, plucked away
as if there were some leaves that had to fertilize
the nurseries where more heroes were being nurtured
for bigger fights that were yet to come as the sun set,
and the blood, the tears, the saliva, the steam dried off

Yours is not a lost battle that which God giveth*
You fought for a faculty of medicine that creates life
putting your faculty of the science of politics into use
surprising me, shocking me by being in the struggle
Knowing well that true freedom is not given but wrought
It was not for yourself then that you left Great Soppo
Paid 100frs and went down and down you went to rise no more
Well, God gave you to us and to this endless struggle
Your going makes it a duty that I steer the course
and bring home to you the Timothean crown when it's done
You are lucky that you've done your part and gone away
from this shit-ridden world of the Biyas and the Owonas
You must be happily resting and watching us act out our
little lives like grasshoppers in the hands of wanton boys
who chase us around only to snap-out our heads for fun.
Rest in peace boy, for at the end of a job cut short
for pressing duties at the master's table, death will
trouble you no more but will soon wage war on himself
when he must have killed and sent us all to Mbõlah


*Literal translation of Kenyuyfo-on from Nso to English