Bate Besong


Bate Besong was a Cameroonian playwright, poet and critic, who was described by Pierre Fandio as “one of the most representative and regular writers of what might be referred to as the second generation of the emergent Cameroonian literature in English". He died on March 8, 2007 in a car accident on the Douala-Yaounde highway.
On July 18, 2008, Niyi Osundare paid tribute to Besong with a speech given during the 2008 EduArt Awards for Cameroonian Literature in English.

Life and career

After obtaining his GCE A Level at St. Bedes Secondary School in Kom, Besong was admitted to the University of Calabar where he published his maiden collection of poems titled Polyphemous Detainee and Other Skulls in 1980 before he graduated. While at the university, Bate Besong and Ba'bila Mutia founded Oracle, a journal of poetry edited by students. Realising that his emerging reputation as a budding writer was giving him recognision as a Nigerian and compromising his Cameroonian identity, Besong returned to Cameroon after completing his MA. He was a lecturer at the University of Buea, where he taught from 1999 right up to his death in 2007.
In 1992, shortly after his play Beasts of No Nation was staged, Besong was kidnapped and tortured by state security agents who took him to an unknown location from where he was later released when news of his kidnapping became public. In 1992 he won the Association of Nigerian Authors' Prize for Requiem for the Last Kaiser. Besong later obtained a PhD in Literary Studies from Calabar.

Essays and articles