The “anglophone problem” in postcolonial anglophone cameroonian drama : Bole Butake’s and Bate Besong’s plays

Abstract

Anglophone-Francophone differences in postcolonial Cameroon pose nation-building problems. Cameroonians are divided around identities constructed on the basis of the two former colonial master’s languages. The questions of nation building and representation that constitute central points of the “Anglophone Problem” is the major concern of this research based on Bole Butake’s and Bate Besong’s selected plays. This study sets out to examine how the post-reunification Cameroon nation is represented in the playwrights’ possibilities of dramatic art form. In the Cameroonian context, national identity is based on official language affiliation rather than on traditional ethnic belongings. Yet, Cameroon has been independent for more than half a century. This prevailing form of domination of the colonial over the pre-colonial legacies implies a form of neo-imperialism. I argue that post-colonial identities are stronger than or as strong as pre-colonial ones in the context of contemporary Cameroon and that the “Anglophone Problem” has affected the aesthetic expression of the post-colonial Anglophone Cameroonian playwrights. Even if Anglophone Cameroon literature is not seemingly widely known outside the national boundaries, the selected plays function as theatre that calls for the collective re-examination of the question of Cameroonians’ identity. This qualitative library based study brings contribution to the understanding of the post-reunification Cameroonian nation building crisis within the “Anglophone Problem” agenda as dramatised in the selected plays. I have employed content analysis as a qualitative research methodology and mode of analysis. Also this thesis has analysed the plays, using other postcolonial theories and within Benedict Anderson’s definition of a nation as an “imagined political community”, Augusto Boal’s “Forum Theatre”, Bertolt Brecht’s notion of Verfremdung, translated as ‘the alienation effect’ or ‘the distancing effect’ and Richards David about “Framing Identities”. This study therefore evolves on the premise that, in the plays under study, in imagining a post-reunification Cameroonian nation the playwrights adopt a number of techniques that enable a stylistic development from the aesthetics of resistance and confrontation to the poetics of reconciliation to engage with identity politics occasioned by the “Anglophone Problem”. This study stresses on the tensions and anxieties between Anglophone and Francophone Cameroonians and considers them as an expression of the continuing western imperial domination embedded in the former colonial masters’ languages. What emerges from this study is that the “Anglophone Problem” is central in the plays under study. While Butake grapples with it by employing the poetics of reconciliation for a collective reconstruction of a Cameroon nation, Besong constructs an “Anglophone Cameroon nation” from a revolutionary dramatic aesthetics. Since the “Anglophone Problem” is basically a problem of marginalisation and representation of the Anglophone Cameroonians in the largely post-reunification Francophone-dominated nation-state, drama can be an effective tool to mediate the divided nation. In doing so, the two playwrights link drama to history in an attempt to raise to the ground the reunification epistemologies and also connect them with the Cameroonian institutions.