Imaginaries of a Post-Colonial Cameroon Nation in Bole Butake’s Family Saga and Bate Besong’s Beasts of no Nation

Abstract

Contemporary Anglophone Cameroon drama mostly deals with a peculiar postcolonial political situation in which two peoples of opposing colonial experiences were brought   together to form a nation. Drawing from the tenets of Postcolonial theories, this paper examines how Bole Butake and Bate Besong’s dramaturgies imagine and represent a Cameroonian nation within the possibilities offered by dramatic art form. The post-colonial Cameroonian nation can be well understood if it is placed into the discourses around the “Anglophone Problem” and the different experiences of the Anglophone Cameroonians as a distinct category of people in the new nation. This paper also looks at how the playwrights indict colonization of Cameroon (a country with more than 250 ethnicities and languages) by three different European powers, to have further engendered cultural and linguistic differences. The communities that are artistically imagined by the playwrights often invoke a shared past or a cultural essence. The playwrights’ projects seek to re-imagine a Cameroonian nation and re-write the Cameroonian history from below. In doing so, they recover the experiences of those who have been hitherto hidden from their history. This paper analyses the plays, among other postcolonial tenets, within Benedict Anderson’s definition of a nation as an “imagined political community” and Richards David’s idea about “Framing Identities”. This study therefore evolves on the premises that, in the plays under study, in imagining a post-reunification Cameroonian nation Bole Butake and Bate Besong adopt different approaches that respectively range from the poetics of reconciliation to the aesthetics of resistance and confrontation to engage with identity politics.