"Bate Besong Trode In Soyinka's Footprints" (Reminisces of a Former Classmate)

By Vahid Enow Ashu

The name Bate Besong first confronted me in the pages of The Nigerian Chronicle, that Cross River State Government-owned paper.

This was in 1978 and his poems featured regularly in the literary column.
I was to meet him in the flesh a few months later in October of that year when I went to the University of Calabar to take a degree in English and Literary studies, the same course BB was reading.

It happened this way.At the time, I was writing short stories. So, this lecturer- Sister Eileen Sweeney - got us together. I was a freshman and BB was in the third year.
He wrote poetry while prose was my forte. So we had this discussion all day with me trying to knock down his art which I considered obscurantist and irrelevant to the people.

I held up the works of Pablo Neruda as the model he should strive for. Neruda was a people's poet while Besong was a pretentious poet, a copy cat inebriated by his grandiloquent bluff. He, in turn, praised my literary compositions but urged me to take them further and higher or risk degenerating into a writer of potboilers (he taught me that expression).

Over the next year, until 1980, we freely and closely fraternised and I even contributed a poem in the Oracle, a poetry magazine he was producing single handedly.In 1980, when the grandfather of African Literature - Chinua Achebe - visited University of Calabar, BB was launching his first book - a slim volume of poetry he called Polyphemus Detainee and other Skulls ( Polyphemus is a character In Soyinka's The Man Died).

Achebe launched that book for him. BB was wild with joy.BB was simply overawed by Soyinka, so much so that, when the older writer sent him a personal letter that same year congratulating him and sharing fraternal wishes with him, BB's day was made.

He shared the letter with all who cared to read it and I noticed that, from that moment, the word fraternal always managed to slip into every one of BB's writings, especially personal correspondences and even into some of the poems he wrote and placed on the notice boards.

At this time, I had a firm conviction that BB would go places. I realised it would yield dividends to keep a diary of our interactions. Who knows, maybe do a book on the man one day.

You see, BB had a presence around him, an aura of greatness, if you will. He was generous, ebullient, had a great sense of humour and there was nothing petty about him. True, he smoked and drank heavily but it was in vogue then. We believed writers had to be eccentric, different from other mere mortals around them and how best to display this eccentricity but to draw inspiration from a glut of alcohol and tobacco?

When I visited Bate Besong in his office at the University of Buea in 2002, I was glad when he disclosed to me that he no longer smoked or drank.

As we chatted and shared reminiscences, he told me he regretted leaving Nigeria.
"When [General Mamman] Vatsa was executed, I knew I was finished in Nigeria", he told me. Vatsa was BB's personal friend, poet and officer in the Nigerian army who influenced BB's posting for the National Youth Service corps programme to Kaduna.

Vatsa had wanted BB to join the Nigerian army. He allegedly plotted a coup d'etat to unseat Babangida and was caught and executed between 1986 and 1989.As we sat in his office, I read this quotation BB had copied out from the Bible and displayed prominently: When I am weak then I am strong. It was Paul writing in 1st Corinthians and my soul was lifted up.

BB was not leaving out the Bible in his voracious readings, I decided.
In style and theme, BB trode in Soyinka's footprints.