Emmanuel Konde
Mahop in Bassa is the plural of “talk” (singular: hop). I have known two men named Mahop. One was a Bassa of Limbe, a childhood friend; the other a Bassa of New Bell, an acquaintance, who eventually moved to Maryland and made home in Silver Springs the last two decades or so. It is about the latter Mahop, Soul Mahop Soul (AKA Soul Babimbi or Soul Bams) that I am concerned about.
The late Soul Bams (in red) on stage with Sam Fan Thomas (c) Jacob Nguni
Both Mahops shared some common characteristics. They were extroverted, gregarious, possessed an uncanny ability for showmanship, and were talkativeness.
The last of these is derived from the name itself. Upon reviewing the lives of these two Mahops, I came to the provisional conclusion that our parents had an inkling of what we would become and so named us accordingly. Well, my conclusion may be off the mark. But the character similarities in these two Mahops, both now departed, is eerie.
Thanks, Massa Yakob (Jacob Nguni) for the video you produced of Soul Bams in New Bell Bassa. In as much as it was intended as entertainment, it carried a very powerful and profound message of historical proportions that needs to be emphasized and re-emphasized repeatedly. On a backdrop of decadent and decaying New Bell Bassa, Soul acknowledges the place as “our” home and laments what has befallen it. The camera vividly tells the story in pictures of old houses, filthy streets, half-clad young people, still photos, and the frozen smiles of women in a forgotten, abandoned land. The still photo of a husband and wife speaks to stagnation. And Soul beckons the departed children of New Bell Bassa to return home and breathe new life in their run-down birthplace.
I spent much of my adolescent years holidaying with extended family members in New Bell Bassa. At the old College de Nations in the early 1970s I observed young Roger Milla, even then a sensation to behold on the field, play football barefooted. Some of my New Bell Bassa childhood acquaintances and friends are now big men and women: directors, pilots, lawyers, professors, doctors, etc., while others have moved abroad to Europe and America.
Perhaps one of the largest concentrations of the Cameroon Bassa Diaspora anywhere in the world is found in the Washington, DC-Silver Spring Circuit. The pioneer of this particular strand of Bassa Diaspora was none other than venerable Monsieur Samuel Mbinack, who returned home more than ten years ago.
Sam, as he is popularly known, was not only the acknowledged “founding father” of the Bassa Community in the Washington-Silver Spring area but was also responsible for honing the Bassa community together as well as organizing the first Cameroonian “ethnic convention” in the United States.
The Bassa Conventions met in the early 1990s. My The Bassa of Cameroon: An Indigenous African Democracy Confronts European Colonialism (1991, 1998) was an offshoot of these conventions. Commissioned by Sam, it was first hand- produced in 1991 as a pamphlet under the title “The Bassa of Cameroon: A Synoptic History,” and this was accordingly acknowledged in the Preface, which read:
This essay, “The Bassa of Cameroon”, is a synoptic history of one segment of the African peoples known as the “Bassa” who inhabit the coastal forestland area of Cameroon. It is prepared specifically for the Bassa Convention which will be held in the Washington, D.C. during the month of July 1991.
Soul Babimbi would the Bassa Diaspora community of Washington-Silver Spring sometime in the 1990s after having made lasting forays in Gabon and France. Where Sam left in terms of community organizing, Soul took over in terms of entertainment. But whereas Sam’s work was geared in large part to touch only the Bassa, Soul’s reached out beyond his immediate ethnic community to affect more than just the Bassa. And it is here that the video of Soul Bams in New Bell Bassa produced by our own Jacob Nguni comes to play.
Soul’s lamentations are spoken in Bassa, beckoning the children of abandoned New Bell to return home. But these lamentations are applicable almost everywhere in Cameroon, to the many villages and towns whose sons and daughters in the Diaspora have turned their backs on. Soul has returned home. It is hoped that his message will not only be heard but heeded as well.
NOTE: Soul Bams died on December 4, 2009 in Maryland, USA. He will be sorely missed.

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