BREAKING THE SILENCE: BEFORE MY DEAD BODY IS FOUND UNDER THE RIVER SANAGA

Courage, the willingness to die in service of the truth, 
is indeed the writer’s strongpoint,   Gerald Jumbam

Of all the tools used to stay long in power by  born-to-rule State political Mafias in Africa, political assassination has been the most effective for the elimination of their enemies.

And therefore just next door to us some years ago, Dele Giwa, a distinguished Nigerian journalist was murdered in a bomb parcel blast in his residence allegedly coming from President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. His last words were ‘this must be from Mr. President’, and as he opened the parcel he was blown up with the gift. In a country like Cameroon that one man has stubbornly remained in power for 35 years, high profile political killings would happen with masterly accuracy.

Perhaps the assassination apparatus on those religious leaders who stick their heads out would be most flourishing in such a nation state.

An example couldn’t be more auspicious for Cameroon as the assassination of Yves Plumey the emeritus archbishop of Garoua by unknown people in Garoua and the threat of slaughtering Mgr Wouking in Yaoundé. The out-and-out butchery of Fr Anthony Fontegh and Fr Engelbert Mveng would come as another atrocious augury of what can be expected in a nation so accustomed to anarchy and chaos. Little did we know that in 2017 an even most shocking killing would visit the Cameroon Catholic clergy in the conspiratorial beastly assassination of that humble and candor-loving Jean Benoit Balla, bishop of Bafia.

All this points to a consistent conspiracy against genuine Men of God in the Catholic Church in Cameroon. And the question to ask is who is behind these assassinations? Is it the Cameroonian clergy that is at war with itself or is it an attack by the State on Churchmen who refuse to toe the Government line? Or is it a collusion between evil men in the Church and evil men in the State? Nobody can ever provide adequate answers to these questions for the simple fact that a person who tries to pry into the secret workings of the Church and the State in Cameroon is most likely to end where the other dead clergy ended: that is, under the River Sanaga!

Plaudits for an Open Letter that almost broke my Back

I must say that the positive feedback I have received for my recent write-ups have surprised my highest hopes.

The glory can only be given to God. When writing especially the Open Letter to the President of the National Episcopal Conference of Cameroon, I had no intention whatsoever of seeking for any notoriety or fame. 

It came out from frustrating circumstances about my life and the life of millions of Southern Cameroonians who have lost their loved ones, whose brothers and sisters have been forced to exile and whose brothers and sisters are languishing in appalling situations in prison cells in Yaoundé and elsewhere as a result of the crisis bedeviling us these days. I have had threats from church hierarchy in Cameroon and from agents of the State as a result. Seeing that a man of conscience should not die with his mouth closed, because that would be tantamount to hiding from future prelates and clergy where the dangers of their vocation lie, I have boldly decided to break the silence and to defy those authorities who have connived with evil by trying to frighten people with death, forgetting that death is the end of all human beings. 

I wrote the Open Letter from the platform of a priest of Kumbo - one of the dioceses of the Ecclesiastical Province that Archbishop Kleda had been snared by the Yaoundé political cabal to undertake so unpopular a trip.

That is why I addressed the letter from the secretariat of the diocese I am married to as an ordained priest of the Roman Catholic Church.

It was a serious letter I could only address from a posture on bed with my spouse (the local church of the diocese of Kumbo). I addressed it from that platform because I am proud of my matrimony with that diocese.  

To some people who out of their blind obedience to anything Church (and which I have no problem with such obedience from such faithful) take my open letter amiss and therefore hold that I disrespected the office of an Archbishop, I like to say they have completely misfired. My intention was superior to just disrespecting an office. There are many influences that brought me to the writing of the letter which still strengthen my conviction that that letter was the right thing to do in a time of such great moral crisis. The influence of the psychological trauma and emotional anguish I encountered in 1997-1998 when I was in high school when my father went on self-exile because of this very plight of the Southern Cameroons we are suffering today. My family and I suffered terribly at that young age of my life. I was deprived of a father at that delicate age and up till today the emotional effects of that deprivation are still felt.  Then again, another trauma came when news came to me overseas that my father was forcefully taken from the church premises of his locality to the military concentration camp far away at Bamenda and there were slim hopes of him coming back to us in the family. This disturbed my whole studies that last year. Lately, my family has gone through a self-exile ordeal during some months of these few months of our people’s crisis. These painful situations - among other grave influences below - provoked the letter I wrote to the Archbishop. 

Moreover, who can explain to me that after university students are brutally beaten, some raped and others carted away to detention camps, and hundreds of other citizens in other major towns of our Church province abducted to Yaoundé for flimsy reasons, the President of the National Episcopal Conference (a Bishop for that matter) would not address such an issue with the Government first.

He would rather travel to the victimized people to attempt to verbally force the parents of the children to call off the peaceful protest of stopping schools and civil disobedience that the people have put on to put pressure on this Government to release their abused and abducted sons and daughters from despicable prison centers. I felt that the Archbishop was completely insensitive to the plight of the suffering people of my Church Province. He needed a response from the bitterness that welled up in me as a result of my frustrations about what my father and other victims went through in such prison cells last year.  I raised a vociferous alarm with my pen for the thousands victimized in Southern Cameroons and I decided to shout it out so the world can hear my sufferings and the misery of our people.
I should say that I wrote what I wrote out of no bad will for anybody but in defense of the suffering Church of the Southern Cameroons and in resistance to the oppression defenseless civilians were (and are still) undergoing as a result of the malevolence of military bastards and political  sycophants sent by the Yaoundé  political cabal to my homeland. 

Another influence is that I could not (and still cannot) understand – as I expressed in the Open Letter - that French Cameroon bishops (which the Archbishop is among them) could maintain such blameworthy silence without any public declaration decrying the whole act, after whole bishops (their brothers of the British Cameroons) are taken to civil courts. On this, I am still not sure by writing to him the letter, I was crying more than the bereaved on this matter. 

I also wrote the Open Letter when I keenly reminded myself of the disaster that will befall a country when real men prefer to look the way and keep quiet in times of overwhelming ethical crisis. I considered a beautiful and chaste portrayal of the German World War II calamity painted as follows in writing by one man of wisdom: "The story is usually told of how Years after the devastation of Germany in WW2 ... There was a meeting of German eggheads ... And the question was how did it come to pass that a nation that produced Great Thinkers like Friederich Nietzsche. Karl Max ...Albert Einstein....Bruno Bauer. Friederich Engels... Etc ..etc...get seized and goaded into ultimate destruction by a looney like Hitler... Who was not even originally German but Austrian!!!! The thinkers came up with the conclusion that complacency and indifference until it became too late ... Was the main cause!" Consequently, the real misfortune of German history at that point in time was not the ruthless sycophancy of an Heinrich Himmler or the gullibility of the German populace.

The real problem was that only very few German Churchmen, philosophers, artists, theologians and scientists identified Adolf Hitler as the personification of wickedness. The penalty paid for such grand failure to call a spade a spade was the loss of 20 million lives and a huge demolition of property worth billions of dollars. Evil triumphs in communities when good and thinking men do nothing. I was driven by this famed idea to write the Archbishop. 

More often than not other people tend to see the world only through their own eyes and thereby limit the truth only to what they know. These people are suffering from what psychologists call projection. So it is not surprising that some bigguns have accused me of dishonesty in my writings whereas what is in fact happening is that they are projecting their own dishonesty into the world; for as Jesus Christ himself said, “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh”. That is, an evil man speaks only evil words and a good man speaks only good words. I will therefore not be surprised if dishonest people see dishonesty in me; for is it not dishonest that good men like Fr Anthony Fontegh and Bishop Jean Marie Benoit Balla should be assassinated while those who accuse me of dishonesty keep guilty silence? Is such culpable silence not tantamount to flagrant dishonesty? I know that in all societies, writers are unwanted people. But what did people like Jean Marie Benoit Balla write before they were assassinated? Writing is my passion, a passion given to me only by God. Therefore no despot whether in Church or State can take away that passion from me. 

In challenging times I have sought wisdom from the Holy Writ, and also from my ancestors in African Traditional wisdom. Our indigenous people say that ‘every community has enough firewood in its own forests for all the cooking it needs to do’. I have been ‘community’ as a result of my independent spirit, a ‘community’ of my own uniqueness. Haven given myself to celibacy, this has been good for me. With no wife, no child, I have been ready for anything. Maximally alert of any threats to my life. I knew the government was searching for me. I knew the Catholic Church of Cameroon was dismally expecting me to come back so I could be taken to the Inquisition of interrogation, suspension or stressful concentration camp of an appointment to cry my ass out there, or as it has sometimes happened, even sell me out to the Cameroonian forces of lawlessness and disorder. I have made no mistakes. Actions premeditated. Words measured. Appearances theatrical. I have survived. 

Let me be clear. My verses for my Catholic Church came not from maddened contours of jaded thoughts. 

It is a Church I love with my whole heart and even if I were to be punished by the Church Hierarchy for my iconoclastic writing, there is an aboriginal Catholicism within me that no hand on earth can erase. My reaction to the recent hunt after my life as a result has been vigilance. I suffered in Rome alone. Interrogations filled the air. Threats, espionage, and surveillance, and sometimes from unexpected quarters.  And someone has been playing the drum in the bush and they are dancing in the middle of the road. In this internal anguish, my strength has rested on one man’s shoulder – God; He who spoke truth into my conscience to speak truth to Episcopal power has been omnipotent enough to shelter me from the wolf. 

 

Ink in my Blood: The Problem of Living by the Pen

"Every day I leave my house...my family knows...for the past twenty years...when I leave my house I know I will not come back home. Every play I write, Any poem I write,  I write as if it is my last poem, as if it is my last book".   Bate Besong, the Obasinjom Warrior

Courage, the willingness to die in service of the truth, is indeed the writer’s strongpoint.

Cowards who have no heart want to compare themselves with writers. There is nothing in common between writers and cowards, whether those cowards be in Church or in State. In all ages writers are always a species under threat from tyrants and dictators. And this is understandable; because those who have skeletons in their cupboards will be frightened when the wind of writing starts blowing. After fifty years of paroxysm – not only the 1972 referendum coup d’état but also foundational socio-political uprisings – the British Southern Cameroons’ writing is healthier, livelier, and blooming than it has ever been.

But Bate Besong and Bole Butake carry the eagle feathers of the ink in blood, for they had prophesied  to us about this seismic political pandemonium we of the Southern Cameroons are witnessing. Listen to the Obasinjom Warrior’s (Bate Besong) prophetic effusions to the British Southern Cameroonian writer right back in 1993:

We are in the season of harrowing self-analysis. We are the products of an age of profound discontent. We are an embattled people under the cancerous embrace of national integration”, fighting against titanic odds … And yet, there was a time when people had faith, implicit faith  - in this Union – without making any investigations. But I ask you, where is that faith now? It has vanished. So utterly! The bonds have snapped. We carry the scars of  “brotherhood” in a country so unaccustomed to candour. The literature of a people is the mirror of that community… Fellow writers… the literature of an embattled people must be the mirror of that society.[1]

With this piquant 1993 utterance, Bate Besong orchestrated the writers’ wind of change in the British Southern Cameroons. 

To a cultured mind, writing is as inevitable as breathing. A writer is to preserve culture, to symbolize God in His truth, to keep it clear and keen - ready for action on any emergency or peril. And therefore to train himself for plain sincere discourse, he must be a person able to give opinion. He enlivens lives with new ideas and shapes public discourse; so that the old truths his forefathers championed can return with full freshness. The poet, the playwright, the pamphleteer, the journalist, the novelist, the preacher, the orator. The writer stands tall. He fires up phrases, weaves revitalizing words, lets them become feelings and domestic expressions of the national fabric. 

Interpreters of our people’s destiny, prophets of their populace, the Bate Besong-like writer holds the Southern Cameroon’s flag high up to our peoples' gaze. 

Christ said you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. The BBs, Bate and Bole tasted the bitter cup of this truth in a regime so unaccustomed to morality. They suffered, they suffered – they are resurrected with Christ. 

And therefore when Jesus wanted to prove that his enemies were wrong he often said “It is written…”, meaning that Christ himself knew the power and value of writing. If Christ knew the weight and worth of writing, why should somebody in Christ’s Church today stand up and say he is against writing? 

It is almost the mission of the writer to govern and rule the country. Because they supply potent words to prevailing freedom fighters, they  wage a moral war of conscience and debate, and make sure truth triumphs. 

Undoubtedly, a writer of the Southern Cameroons in times like these must agree on the sacredness of certain things about his country: One, that the territorial boundaries of his country, carved and promulgated by the UNO and UK, are sacred and inviolable. Two, that the forthcoming government is infallible in matters regarding that enclave; Three, that up with mount Buea for that is inalienably what we know as capital; four, that our allegiance shall be unbending to her. 

Literature and destiny have between them woven three-quarters of the somber story of the Southern Cameroons.

The literature of a nation is knit out of its soul. If you must know our people’s heart and mind, you must enter the school of its poems and tales. They came to being to delight no one but us, the British Southern Cameroons. Our literature is us talking to ourselves. 

To write therefore, is to chronicle your own story, to tell your own tale. Who but me can throw light onto arrogant and self-interested opinions that have been said to blackmail my name? Who but me can tell my own story and not allow people to submit prejudiced and half-truths about me? Who but me can tell those who purport to rule over my life more than the Maker who created me? Allow it, they will tell your story and tell it unfairly. And the African adage is true: until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter. I shall write my story, I shall - like the lion - not allow the paragraphs of my life be written by hungry hunters. I am certain of nothing but the presence of the now and the truth of today. Let those people come who can lay me bare without stripping off me from my today. You have all it takes to steer the course you choose. So take your destiny into your hands and act now. Life is now. Tomorrow is for weaklings. Let that light shine, let it shine in writing. 

The word clergy originally meant a scholar. If the original meaning of the word clergy means a scholar then you are not ashamed to be seen as a scholar in the Church. It is only those others who have abandoned their role as a scholarly light in the Church and the world, who should be ashamed of their position in scholarly darkness.

For there are some people today who do not know that the word clergy originally meant a learned one. One of the reasons behind priestly celibacy is that the priest should have enough time to read, meditate and write. But how do most African priests use the time at their disposal? Certainly not. If not, the wrong things going on in Africa would not be happening. Writing is not incompatible with priesthood but it essentially finds itself in the essence of this vocation.

I have made the brave choice, the choice of writing: tackling issues with the pen, without fear, without worry, mindless of panic, but with the full preparing to take the penalty of writing in a dictatorship that smells of a stinking toilet like that of Cameroon. Writing is a gift. God gave me that gift and if somebody is not happy, he should go right to God and express the dissatisfaction to God. When it was written on Christ’s Cross 'King of the Jews' and the Jews themselves protested to Pontius Pilate saying he should have written that 'he said he was King of Jews', Pontius Pilate made a classical statement: 'What I have written I have written'. In times like these, it would be most appropriate for me to say as well that ‘what I have written I have written’! 

Death, where is your Sting?

The Nso have a philosophical statement in one of their indigenous names Wiyfengla, which means no one will escape death. Death is everyone’s lot. When ‘leading Churchmen’ and State tyrants who spew death threats upon writers and clergymen begin to behave as if they will never undergo the transition which all living things must undergo, one begins to wonder what kind of formation they received. Any priest or bishop, be it in the Sanaga or somewhere in Iraq, should feel concerned at the butchery of any priest or bishop anywhere in the world. As our brothers’ keepers, we all must rise to the challenge. To unravel the mystery of Fr Anthony Fontegh, Fr. Engelbert Nveng, and Bishop Balla’s assassination, is one of the ways of paying part of the debt to their living memory.

I began this essay with the name of Dele Giwa - one of the most celebrated Nigerian journalists and a man who paid the price of moral courage in writing, by being assassinated by his president.

My motto of life in writing is some sterling words Dele Giwa left behind for any serious writer: “I have said at every available opportunity that NOBODY tells me what to write in my column. It is my property, and I guard it jealously, for it is my freedom to think and write as I see. Nobody higher than me in the Concord Group has ever demanded my column for editing before publication. Any reaction to any of my columns has come after publication.” As long as some of us are still around, the spirit of Dele Giwa lives on. 

I am a Cameroonian priest of the Kumbo diocese, at present a Phd student in Rome. And from the intrigues that surround my person here, I can see the evil hand of the Cameroon Church and State in it. But let these forces of darkness know that my conscience comes first before any authority. Pusillanimous threats and covert underhand tricks can never replace the courage to speak out the truth as I have done in the past and in the present write-up. Just as Socrates said in the supreme court of Athens before his exit from this evil world, 'you can never harm a good man whether in this life or in the life after this.' Your intrigues cannot harm me. So let us all wait for the day of reckoning with a clean heart and a clean conscience. For no man however strong can ever escape the karmic consequences of his own character. And so you will not. 

The Church whether she likes it or not must share the fate of the country under which she lives. I think this is what Cardinal Christian Tumi was trying to say in his books The Political Regimes of Amadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya, and My Faith: a Cameroon to be Renewed. Cameroon will never be the same again after the great example Cardinal Tumi has shown to us. By confronting the State machineries of evil, this Prince of the Catholic Church saved the lives of so many people in Yagoua, Garoua and Douala. He was an exceptionally good shepherd who knew the value of courage and bravery and was always ready to lay down his life for the flock. 

Now, rather than take up the good work Cardinal Tumi started, national Church hierarchy these days has repeatedly been trying to shy away from the big social and political issues in Cameroon and therefore deserve to be interrogated by society. And if that episcopate does not read the handwriting that is boldly becoming very visible on the wall, and join the people of Cameroon in their struggle for liberty, social justice and good governance, it would become anachronistic and will increasingly be pushed into the dustbin of history. 

In the upcoming struggle, dear bishops,

the future will surely be our witness, even as we now bury our priests assassinated by the State!!!

Fr. Gerald Jumbam

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[1] BATE BESONG, Literature in the Season of the Diaspora: Notes to the Anglophone Cameroonian Writer, http://www.batebesong.com/2006/03/literature_in_t.html, 1993.