Book Review: Souls Forgotten by Francis B. Nyamnjoh.
By Alice Macdonald (Originally published in Pambazuka News)
Langaa Publishers. Bamenda, Cameroon. 2008. [ISBN: 9789956558124, 360 pages, Price: £14.95]
The prolific Cameroonian writer and academic Francis Nyamnjoh continues to delight his readers with the publication of his latest novel Souls Forgotten. Souls Forgotten is a bitter indictment of the political and social situation of many African countries. The novel is set in the fictional land of ‘Mimboland’, a linguistically divided nation presided over by none other than President Longstay and suffering from endemic corruption, failing public services and wild nepotism whose similarities with the author’s native Cameroon are hard to miss.
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battles opposed a mobilised and determined Anglophone civil society against numerous machinations by successive Francophone-dominated governments to destroy their much prided educational system in the name of 'national integration'. When Southern Cameroonians re-united with La République du Cameroun in 1961, they claimed that they were bringing into the union 'a fine education system' from which their Francophone compatriots could borrow. Instead, they found themselves battling for decades to save their way of life. Central to their concerns and survival as a community is an urgent need for cultural recognition and representation, of which an educational system free of corruption and trivialisation through politicisation is a key component.
It is 15th July 2006 at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Issa G. Shivji, at 60, is giving his valedictory lecture. Titled “Lawyers in Neoliberalism: Authority’s Professional Supplicants or Society’s Amateurish Conscience”, the lecture marks the end of a rich and distinguished 36 year career of selfless service that started as a tutorial assistant in May 1970 and was crowned with full professorship in July 1986. The lecture is on a theme that has been at the centre of Shivji’s humanity and scholarship since his student days in East Africa and the United Kingdom.
The relatively few people who read books published and/or written by Africans (when they can find them) might find that some of these works are famous for little other than their typesetting errors. I once got into trouble for telling a rather self-regarding young reporter that while I thought it was a good thing for a country to have a vibrant private press, its effect was somewhat marred by the fact that half the words in his newspaper were spelled backwards.
One day, Mama Ngonsu told her son: "Normally, a child grew up and stayed around to help his parents. The world has changed, and things are no longer as they used to be. Things must not be normal all the time, otherwise life would not be life." When Emmanuel Kwanga gets a University scholarship, he travels from the lake and hills of Abehema to the Great City. Everyone in the village has invested in him their hopes for the good life. When the life they've imagined is cut short by the University guillotine, Emmanuel Kwanga must struggle to make sense of what the good life means - for himself and for Abehema - in a world where things are no longer as they used to be. 
Some time ago, in 1993, a forum of anglophone Cameroon writers held under the auspices of the Goethe Institute of Yaounde produced, among many excellent articles, a reflection by Tatah H. Mbuy on “The Moral Responsibility of the Writer in a Pluralist Society”. Every such writer, says Mbuy, is to see himself as a spokesman for his society. He must seek the truth, propagate it and defend it. He is to be the prophet and soothsayer of his society, pricking the consciences of all and trying to correct faults where these are to be found. Elsewhere in this forum other participants described present-day anglophone writing as concerned with “deconstructing victimhood”, through a discourse revolving around shared values or reference points. 
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. 
This play tackles the theatrically attractive but ethically complex issue of Christian fundamentalism. Nyamnjoh, as a sociologist is well qualified to explore the social problems and psychological pressures which give rise to the born-again phenomenon, and the strong appeal of fundamentalist religion. 
This humorous tale of the naïve and curious African student-cum-philosopher wandering between North and South, the rural and the urban, has been in gestation for a period of nearly two decades. 
In Mind Searching Nyamnjoh has attempted to do something rather clever - to expose, through the attitudes, feelings and thoughts of one man and a very simple story, the hypocrisy and corruption of Cameroon society and humanity in general, often using understatement and irony in good effect. 
Recently I have been contacted by some African-Americans and agents of African-Americans who have traced their origin to the Tikar of Cameroon and would like to know more about this group of people. I have therefore written up these notes to assist them and interested others in their quest to capture their multiple dimensions of belonging.
Francis Nyamnjoh is back with his fourth work of fiction titled Stories from Abakwa. Although the collection of short stories has been on the market for only three weeks, it is already available worldwide on book retailer websites such as Amazon.com. 
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The Number very broadly articulates the democratization of South African society since the end of apartheid in 1994, and the impact of this transition on prison communities structured on the principles of apartheid and the discipline and punish logic of prisons everywhere. In the words of the author, the book demonstrates “why generations of young black men lived violent lives under apartheid, and why generations more will live violently under democracy” (p.11). Using the life of William Steenkamp/Magadien Wentzel, Steinberg demonstrates the proximity of the history of crime to the central fault lines that have shaped and continue to shape South African society. 
Nyamnjoh's work is a critical and painstaking examination of the role the media have played in promoting democracy and empowering civil society since Africa waged what the author aptly labels as Africa's second liberation struggle in the 1990s. Africa's first liberation struggle no doubt was the one waged in the 1950s against colonialism and apartheid in the 1960s and 70s. The struggle under review is more sociological and psychological in nature, and mainly confined within the geographical space of African nation-states.
Set in the fictional and reluctantly bilingual land of Mimbo in contemporary Africa, A Nose for Money revolves around the tragedy of Prospère, a semi-literate Mimbolander searching for the finer things in life. It offers a graphic depiction of the inevitable frustration of a society that places wealth above love. The author interweaves traditional African culture and modern politics to capture the urban African psyche in a compelling and heartrending style. This cautionary tale may shock the reader,but the haunting character of Prospère is a masterpiece.
Nyamnjoh's new book about the heightened xenophobia that both exploits and excludes is an incisive commentary on a globalizing world that reaches down into the grassroots of so many societies with consequences for ordinary people's lives that have received all too little attention. He meticulously documents the fate of immigrants and the new politics of insiders and outsiders in these Southern African societies, at the same time delivering a telling commentary on the global rhetoric of open societies in an era of increasing closures and exclusions. 
The concept of globalisation is becoming pervasive in social scientific studies,but its effects are still poorly understood, and its dimensions are only beginning to be explored in their wide range of subtleties. Although the movement of ideas, people and material items across parts of the globe has undoubtedly been part of all human history, the currently popular concept of globalisation is associated primarily with modernity and the modern - two concepts with subtle and often underexplored implications. 
One of the paradoxes of the neo-liberal drive, otherwise referred to as globalisation, has been the resurgence of the identity question, that is, “…the gradual unravelling of identities based on the state, a decline of identities based on political ideology — and identities based on culture” 1 as the streamlining effect of the ideological and political context of the Cold War has given way resulting in a radical questioning of the very basis of the modern model of the nation-state.
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