Imhotep: The Collective African Blog

Meet Dinkenesh, the (not so) Hidden Treasure of Ethiopia

Kangsen Feka Wakai (Originally published in Mshale)

Dinkenesh’s living quarters on the second floor of the Houston Museum of Natural Science is part of a 9,000 square-foot abode befitting a guest of her stature.  Hers is a journey that began in antiquity in a site she might be unable to recognize or remember – a place we humans call Ethiopia.

These days, Dinkenesh – or Lucy, as some like to call the 3.2 million-year-old fossil, the oldest ever found – slumbers in a glass casing under the watchful stare of an armed city of Houston police officer.  Houstonians owe her presence here to the Ethiopian government, museum authorities, and the exhibition’s financial underwriters. 

Nollywood: Too Compelling a Story to Ignore

Kangsen Feka Wakai (Originally published in Mshale)

According to urban mythology, Nollywood, as the Nigerian film industry has been dubbed, owes its birth partly to an excess of blank videotapes that flooded the Lagos streets in 1992.  The source: a single businessman. The myth goes on to claim that these tapes, which were likely to be discarded, would become the manger in which the Nollywood was born. This narrative coincides with the release of “Living in Bondage,” Nollywood’s version of Hollywood’s “Birth of a Nation.”

A Random Rant (for Joe La Conscience and Lapiro de Mbanga)

Kangsen Feka Wakai

I relish the hypocrisy!  A man is sentenced in a hasty trial for having an opinion.  Songs of opinion!  They retaliate.  Songs of condemnation!  They retaliate!  Songs of protest!  They retaliate!  Songs of peace!  They retaliate! 

An eleven-year-old boy is shot point blank in front of his mother and siblings. His crime, his artist father almost trekked a few kilometers to express his opinion about an on-going political debate.  He didn’t actually make it all the way because he was stopped by military authorities.  For that he is prison today.   

Disco in E-Major (A Poem)

Kangsen Feka Wakai

Time and time again
We’ve been told
How much they love the Zimbabweans
Just as much as they loved the Rhodesians.
Time and time again
We’ve watched from the sidelines
As they’ve made monsters of heroes and heroes of monsters.
Songs sung with the same zeal
With which they defended Smith and Botha.

Rites of Passage (For the Cameroonian Youth)

Kangsen Feka Wakai

Daybreak…
So we substitute imminent adversity
With fantasies of bread loafs and sardines
Sixty pushups in twenty-seven seconds
Inhale Buddha’s breadth
Through the rusty tunnels
Of Babel’s abandoned underground towers
Exhale the fumes of yesterday’s infernos
So we can soar above today’s slums
And glimpse into the vast void of tomorrow.
Buzzing like bees

March 4th and Jim Crow in Houston

Kangsen Feka Wakai

Texas Southern University was born out of the struggle for equality in the realm of education within a larger society rife with racism and discrimination. 

It was initially named Texas State University for Negroes.  According to campus folklore, TSU came to being as a way of preventing a black student from enrolling at the University of Texas in Austin.  He had argued it was his constitutional right.

Of Monarchs and the Power Drunk in Cameroon

By Kangsen Feka Wakai (Originally published in Pambazuka News)

This is the problem with Cameroon: All power in the country rests in the hands of one man, the President - Paul Biya.

He is the commander-in-chief-of the armed forces, the Fon of Fons [Chief Monarch amongst all monarchs], the chief magistrate of the land, head treasurer and of course chief legislator.

Truth be told, most of those passing for legitimate legislators and representatives of the people, and they know it, owe their seats to his benevolence. To say the least, Cameroon is a one sophisticated scheme of a neo-colonial entity.

Shifting Nationalities and Fleeting Identities

Kangsen Feka Wakai

When my mother’s father, Big Papa, was born, the area now known as Cameroon was under German occupation and administration.  It was called Kamerun.

Having hosted the colonial buffet of 1884 in Berlin, Germany, like other European powers of that day had carved and designated the region where my forbearers resided as theirs to own and possess. 

It was to be a laboratory for their civilizing project. 

Post-Communal Urban Palava

Kangsen Feka Wakai

At nighttime, they cast diabolic spells along
The seedy concrete boulevards
That line Pothole Avenue.
They sleep to a soundtrack of their snores.
Theirs is a universe of forgotten cosmologies
Where they imbibe the fragments of discarded beliefs.
They desecrate the glyphs of disbanded nomads; instigate the profane
And turn neighbor against neighbor like untrained pit bull dogs.
Bloodied graffiti on the fragile walls in Kibera slums
Odinga sleeps to a soundtrack of Kibaki’s snore.

Book Review: "Stories from Abakwa" by Francis Nyamnjoh

Reviewed by Kangsen Wakai (Originally published in The Post)

Francis Nyamnjoh. Stories From Abakwa. Bamenda: Cameroon. Langaa Publishers. 2007.

When Cameroon sells itself in the realm of public opinion, at home and abroad, it is sold as a bilingual, highly literate, naturally endowed, ethnically diverse, democratic and peaceful country. That is not the whole truth. 

Cameroon is in fact a bilingual country endowed with natural resources; it is culturally diverse and boasts a highly literate, albeit unemployed and underemployed, adult population. However, the truth is that Cameroon is far from being as united, democratic and the haven of peace its leaders would want Cameroonians and the world to believe. Plainly speaking, it is not.

Juju Music!

By Kangsen Feka Wakai

We danced under a hail of confetti, witnesses to an overdue conception. We heard Zimbabwe scream her way out of Rhodesia’s putrid womb, Her Majesty’s tabooed concubine. We slit the chord, which bound child to mother and mother to child, wiped droplets of melanin and gooey mucus from the baby’s bosom with the ruffled flags of frontline states. We were infants and Namibia was still under occupation.

Lightning Strikes The Sinking Glass Tower

Kangsen Feka Wakai

The baboons and gorillas
Are licking fetid sores
Dripping with shame.
No green and white flags
To conceal the disgrace
Glaring from their bat-like faces.

A Letter to a Friend I Never Met (Simon Mol)

By Kangsen Wakai

Simon,
It is quite disheartening that our introduction, much anticipated on my part, should be by way of a letter.  By the way, I had often envisioned a much more idyllic and poetic setting for such an occasion.  But alas, circumstances have dictated otherwise, and here we are meeting one another in the most unusual of terms. 

My name is Kangsen Feka Wakai and like you I am a journalist and writer from the English speaking part of Cameroon.

Abakwa (An Ode to Bamenda)

By Kangsen Feka Wakai

Androgynous beauty of the tropical grass-fields: You emit subtle whiffs of wet eucalyptus leaves that titillate the palates of sweet-toothed charlatans. You are the defaced cradle of betrayed ancestors and abandoned tomb of disinherited monarchs. 

Your strength and valor has transformed you from the quaint colony of a jittery Kaiser to a Grande fort of resistance. 

Your undulating bosom bears the vestiges of primordial dramas that now assume the forms of hills and the personalities of lakes.

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Unleashing Nyamfuka

By Feka Wakai

Scouring a path 
Out of this labyrinth
Of answers and questions,
I began conceptualizing and crafting
Ideas and models to make sense
Of what wasn’t meant to make sense.
A realization:
I am that I am not!
Not the mango eating,
Palm-wine drinking,
Dancer to the toxic notes
Of an untrained drummer.
Your music gives me diarrhea.

Pa Ndzana’s Last Declaration On The Eve Of A WTO Meeting

By Feka Wakai

Your forbearers lied to you!
You did not attain this zenith
Of grandeur and opulence 
Solely by your sweat and toil.
Or have you forgotten
That we lifted you to the barstool
Of condescension on which you now sit?