Palapala Magazine

Palapala Magazine # 4 - Bards, Singers and Exile

The Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2009

Renowned worldwide for featuring some of the best and brightest new talent, Wasafiri is launching a New Writing Prize as part of its 25th birthday celebrations. In the words of acclaimed author Jackie Kay, ‘Wasafiri holds it all together, the past and the future. It is vigorous, searching and stimulating’. Since Wasafiri was first published in 1984, it has consistently aimed to shift the contours of established literary canons and remapped the borders of international contemporary writing, creating new imaginative spaces and publishing some of the most promising new literary voices.

Click here to print or download complete details about competition

Editorial - Bards, Singers and Exile

Kangsen Feka Wakai

The contemporary African poet is an artist living and working in conditions of constant siege– an abiding and haunting angst, a complex informed by the hydra-headed menace of creative alienation, uncertainties of means and the devastating ambience of indifference, silence and absence that his production fallows (or worse still, withers) in. These are terrifying conditions of the annihilation of memory and consciousness that beat even the most corrosive forms of coerced institutional censorship imaginable. Wirndzerem G. Barfee

In this issue, we talk to poet Wirndzerem G. Barfee, via email, author of the poetry collection, Bird of Oracular Verb.

A Journey Into Speech

 Joyce Ashuntantang, Ph.D.

I grew up speaking English. In fact, I was born into English and never considered it a foreign language. I was also born into Kenyang, the language of the Bayangis, and Pidgin English. I learnt all three languages at the same time and in the same house.  Actually, my love for literature in English is rooted in both African and British literature including Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Jane Eyre, Eze goes to School, The Drummer boy and Things Fall Apart.  Also, my parents studied in England in the nineteen sixties and as I grew up, I visited England through their stories, pictures, music, my mother’s kitchen utensils and my father’s bookshelf.

Indeed my childhood was immersed in English.
Buea, where I grew up, is situated at the foot of Mount Cameroon. It is a town built by Germans in the 19th century. What is remarkable about Buea is the cool weather, the German architectural relics and the English Language, a British legacy. Inhabitants of Buea are known in Cameroon as “I was” because they prefer speaking English amongst themselves instead of Pidgin English.

An Interview with Miriam Makeba

V. Muna Kangsen

Miriam Zenzile Makeba was born on March 4, 1932, in a segregated township in the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, the daughter of a sangoma, a traditional healer, and a coal miner father. Makeba began singing in a church choir in her youth, but gained national attention as a backup vocalist for the Manhattan Brothers, a popular South African group in the in the 1950’s and 1960’s still recording today. Although Makeba’s brief stay with the Manhattan brothers yielded memorable recordings like Lovely Lies, she left the group in 1959 to join the Skylarks, an all female group with which she earned some local and regional success in Southern Africa.

Interview - Write for the Future: Equations for Future Literatures

Kangsen Feka Wakai talks with poet Wirndzerem G. Barfee.

KFW: Francis Nyamnjoh, the Cameroonian writer, has addressed the issue of identity in both his scholarly and literary writings.  In a way, he has implied that the task of the writer is not restricted to story telling.  Part of the writer's task, he argues, especially in the 'postcolony' is to negotiate fleeting and hybrid identities.  Do you agree with him?

WGB: It is true obviously, for if we are telling stories, then, these stories must evidently betray or manifest a constitution. No story grows in a vacuum, even if the subject is “air”, “emptiness” or “vacuity” it must be tied down technically to a structure, to some substance; either by conformity, alignment, opposition or a total of all these factors put together in dynamic contradictory, conflicting complex that inherently identifies with the story it fictionalizes. In short, to every text there is a context.

Poetry - A Cameroonian Husband in the Diaspora

 by Viola Allo

There is a man in Cameroon
who wants to marry me.
He sends messages to California.
Says we can spend
lots of time together, and
he'd love to take me. To Kribi.

Poetry - We Will Set Forth at Midnight

For Us, who missed the party that set forth at Dawn…

Tolu Ogunlesi
 
“We are refugees fleeing from the excesses of our parents.” – Dambudzo Marechera
 
I
Shall we envy them who set forth at dawn?
Dawn, when cohabitation
 
was the biggest crime
good and evil could jointly muster.
 
They went to bed with yesterday's sun
that they might rise, well before today's,

Poetry - Sagehood: A Return

By Barfee Gideon Wirndzerem

You never went as you have come:
The salvo and the reverb that stole
The thunder’s loud axe and came back–
We will tell you what! – with a dove’s coo.

Yes, Dreaded son, First-in-Line-of-Iron-Forgers!
Whose skull crushed rock like pottery
Whose bone cracked bone like bamboo,
One in whose hands iron became dry wood!

We fearfully awaited your harvest of death
When we had awaited the god of iron,
Awaited the days of volcanicity and fire:

Book Review - “This is Bonamoussadi”: A Poetic Foray into the Valley of Despair

By Dibussi Tande

Oscar Chenyi Labang. This is Bonamoussadi. Lulu.com, 2008, 60 pages.

What is it that we did
Mother of the earth
That we have remained this cursed (56)

It is still not clear how Bonamoussadi, the popular student residential area on the outskirts of the University of Yaounde campus in Ngoa-Ekele came into being. When students returned in September 1987 for the beginning of a new academic year, they discovered that houses had sprung up ex nihilo on the vast wasteland between Regional Centre for Labor Administration (CRADAT), the University Restaurant no. 2 and the football field. It was rumored that university lecturers whose trade in dog-eared polycopies had become less profitable with the proliferation of photocopy machines on campus had decided to grab state-owned land on which they constructed mini cités (student housing) for rent. Before long, high ranking government officials, the military top brass, friends and relatives of the well connected, and other hangers-on joined in for a piece of the action.

Poetry - This is Bonamoussadi (An Excerpt)

By Oscar Chenyi Labang

This is Bonamoussadi
Flanked by Holy St Ann
And the Mighty Ngoa Ekelle
Whence we tap the raw stuff.
Arnold defines a real Professor
From Green Valley’s interior:
‘A Real Professor is one;
He talks in others sleep.
As we roll from end to end
Memories of a day with a Professor
Caress the mind.

Poetry - The Citadel

By Dibussi Tande

I
The Mobilization:
The fiery speeches
The protest marches
The huge rallies
The call to arms

The angry cries:
la conférence nationale
il y'aura !!
Fait quoi fait quoi
il y'aura !!
Ça gâte, ça gâte !!
Campus Mort!!!

Fiction - Wages of Plunder (Part II)

By Dipita Kwa

Ngody sat on the grass across the road and watched and asked himself what Edimo had in him that enabled him to manipulate people into carrying out his wishes or supporting him in his honourable crimes. When they were still in primary school, Edimo was the teachers’ favourite although he hardly passed any subjects other than Physical Education and Handwork. At 9, he was the oldest boy in Class 2 and a terror to two-thirds of the school population. Whenever a class was sent out to work in a teacher’s farm, which was usually on Wednesdays and Fridays from midday to 5 o’clock, Edimo was made the coordinator. With a crooked guava branch in his hand, he ensured that the farm was properly hoed or weeded by the younger pupils while he and Fosi combed the nearby farms for fruits to eat.

Dear Puppy Lover

Dear puppy lover,

First of all, permit me to introduce my humble self to your noble self; my name is Jonas Jonas Atukobo, a permanent resident of your country and a patriot/citizen of my country.  I am thirty-five years old and an ordained minister in the brotherhood of seers.  In other words, I get to wear a cassock every so often even though I hold an MBA in Strategic Futuristic Financial Development from a renowned institution in your neck of the woods with a focus on Mythical Prosperity Management and Advanced Electronic Banditry. 

From the Corps to the Campus: The Marching Bands of Historical Black Colleges and Universities

By Benna Sayyed

The black college marching band embodies a mix of excitement, creativity, soul and breathtaking rhythm. It is music.  There are the dance girls and majorettes gliding across the green, executing amazingly synchronized dance moves to accompany the musicianship of band members.

The selection might be contemporary, funk, classical, R&B and Hip-Hop. It is this showmanship in the arena that competitions such as the Honda Battle of the Bands have become extremely fierce showdowns for musical supremacy. 

So what initiated this unique style of entertainment that is produced on the campuses of America’s Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)?