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