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This volume is a blend of language and literature papers highlighting linguistic functionality and topicality in poetry, novels, translation and education. It sheds light on the fictionalised reality of a strained official linguistic cohabitation in Cameroon as instantiated in present-day colonial legacy claims. It deals with issues of translation as a stylistic exercise whereby the translator has some creativity licence when rendering the source text into the target language, thus embracing Skopos theory’s view of translation as a purposeful activity determined by the target text and audience. This book also looks at an educational conception of translation as opposed to a professional tr...
In a nuanced consideration of the Cameroonian experience, Yearning for (Dis) Connections makes critical interventions into debates about coexistence, citizenship, identity formation and performance, democracy and modernity in Cameroon. The essays in the book ranges across Francophone and Anglophone Cameroons to provide a challenging assessment of the common ways of writing and thinking for and of and about the Cameroonian world. The book criticises the blinders of Cameroon's Francophonecentred leadership, analysing its failure to heed Anglophone Cameroon's ontological and epistemological critiques of Cameroon's ongoing exclusions masked by pretences of a Francophone universalism. Yosimbom us...
Besides searching book reviews, an interview with the writer Tijan M. Sallah, a full report on the 6th Ethiopian International Film Festival, and a stimulating selection of creative writing (including a showcase of recent South African poetry), this issue of Matatu offers general essays on African women’s poetry, anglophone Cameroonian literature, and Zimbabwean fiction of the Gukurahundi period, along with studies of J.M. Coetzee, Kalpana Lalji, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Aminata Sow Fall, Wole Soyinka, and Yvonne Vera. The bulk of this issue, however, is given over to coverage of cultural and sociological topics from North Africa to the Cape, ranging from cultural identity in contemporary Nort...
The Odour of Death is the story of a journey in an old truck from Menda to Aghem. An arrogant, stubborn, moribund AIDS patient uses supernatural powers to make the drive unbearable. He had never believed in the pandemic but when he got it, he spread it far and wide. He finally dies of it. Yet his torture continues for his power does not die with him. After he was buried, his ghost had to be chased away from the community for there to be peace. The narrator points out many other types of AIDS, different from HIV, which are killing people in similar manner and destroying the nation. From the hospitals to the courts, the motor parks to government offices, farmland to the cattle grazing land, gendarme-rie brigades to police offices, the towns to the countryside, the rich to the poor, the young to the old, AIDS is taking its toll indiscriminately on the people. Whither shall citizens go to be protected and saved when everybody and everything is immersed in a pool of AIDS viruses of various types, churning in stinking filth in a pool of brackish water? The narrator is a keen observer and is troubled by the present and the future, especially as influenced by the past.
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This book compromises 26 well-researched essays in honour of Professor Verkijika G. Fanso, who retired in 2011 after over 36 years of distinguished service at universities in Cameroon. Contributors include colleagues, former students and close collaborators in Cameroon and beyond. Contributions cover a wide range of issues related to the contested histories, politics and practices of boundaries and frontiers in Africa. These are themes on which Fanso has researched, published and taught extensively, and earned international recognition as a leading scholar. The book explores, inter alia, indigenous and endogenous practices of boundary making in Africa; as well as colonial and contemporary traditions, practices and conflicts on and around frontiers. In particular focus, are disputed colonial boundaries between Cameroon and its neighbours. Issues of intra- and inter-disciplinary frontiers, politics and cultures are also addressed. The volume is crowned by a farewell valedictory lecture by Fanso. Like Fanso and his rich repertoire of publications, this bumper harvest of essays is without doubt, truly immortalising.
There has been a long standing belief and misconception that ‘relevant’ history is shelved and can only be retrieved from written documentation. This conviction systematically diminished in importance with the emergence and approach of Africanist scholarship in the 1960s which increasingly exposed the pitfalls of religiously relying on paper- inscribed or engraved historical sources. This twist away from recorded history gave premium to a craving for the exploration and exploitation of material and immaterial heritage sources to understand and communicate connections between heritage and history in Africa. This compendium of interlacing themes on Cameroon threads the multiple but complex...
The Postcolonial Subject in Transit presents in-depth analyses of the complex transitional migratory identities evident in emerging African diasporic writings. It provides insights into the hybridity of the migrant experience, where the migrant struggles to negotiate new cultural spaces. It shows that while some migrants successfully adapt and integrate into new Western locales, others exist at the margins unable to fully negotiate cultural difference. The diaspora becomes a space for opportunities and economic mobility, as well as alienation and uncertainties. This illuminates the heterogeneity of the African diasporic narrative; expanding the dialogue of the diaspora, from one of simply loss and melancholia to self-realization and empowerment.
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