Power, Marginality, and Resistance in John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo

Title: Power, Marginality, and Resistance in John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo
Author: Florence Mbi Nchia
The University of Bamenda, Cameroon
Contact Info: [email protected]
Keywords: Power, Marginality, and Resistance

Abstract
Power, marginality, and resistance is a phenomenon which is very common in our contemporary society and permeates almost every facet of human life. Every human structure has a hierarchy that exerts power in a positive or negative manner that either brings about growth or creates a negative impact on an individual or community. This paper focuses on John Nkemngong Nkemgasong’s Across the Mongolo which explores various manifestations of power and marginality alongside crippling and devastating violence inflicted on the protagonist and other characters. This paper sets out to demonstrate that power, marginality and resistance are interrelated concepts in Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo. The literary work delineates Nkengasong’s portrayal of divergent ways that the hybridized protagonist is ill-treated in a post colonial setting, owing to his ethnicity and cultural background and how he reacts and moves his margin to the centre. This paper is predicated on the hypothetical assumption that marginality presupposes the existence of a negative use of power and also predetermines resistance and change. It posits that marginality can never exist without a hegemonic power and whenever an individual or a group of people is marginalised, there is always a reaction or resistance that could bring about change. The principal theoretical framework employed is the Postcolonial theory, because it embodies the Postcolonial and New Historicist Criticism that address the socio-cultural experience of marginality and fits the researcher’s description of the dynamism of power, marginality, and resistance.

The use of power in society

Most of the upheavals witnessed by most states in Africa and the world at largely emanate from the oppressive use of power by an individual or a hegemonic group over a less powerful group. The reaction to resist or to succumb is very much a part of humankind. Literary artifacts reflect on the day-to-day happenings in the communities, and critique human characters. John Nkemngong Nkemgasong’s Across the Mongolo presents the gross abusive use of power on the characters by the forces of law and order, who ironically are supposed to maintain peace and order in the Federal Republic of Kamangola. Nkengasong uses the technique of a mental disorder through which the protagonist, Ngwe Nkemasaah, recounts his ordeal as experienced from the lone University of Besaardi in the Bilingual State of Kamangola. When the Royal father of the land, Atemangwat Achiabieuh, receives news of Ngwe’s madness, he immediately orders the youth in the village to bring him to the village from the streets of Besaardi.

The narrative account is analeptic in structure, from the second to the nineteen chapter of the novel, with Ngwe narrating the events that led to his state of madness, after having received some treatment from Aloh-Mbong, the greatest traditional healer and paramount priest of Fundem. When Aloh-Mbong asks him to speak out, Ngwe’s first few utterances reveal his embittered subconscious thoughts in a disorderly manner, before his chronological account of events leading to his madness. He begins his account by stating, “I have never done anyone any harm not even Monsieur Abeso. I am a University student, Constitutional Law. No, History…  Have they no consciences, Babajoro and his acolytes? He cannot live long. That man cannot live long. Why did he dread the Young Anglophone Movement” (7)? He later tells Aloh-Mbong and the others with him that he is ready to “tell the world everything; everything from the day [he] peeped through my mother’s womb and saw the world” (7). The author, through a flashback technique, makes use of a narration within a narration, through which the reader learns of Ngwe’s biography, his family, and his nation. Ngwe recounts incidents of physical assault in his childhood when his father beat his mother up for cutting the leaves of the plantains of the gods near the ancestral shrine to prepare khoki.  Even though Ngwe’s mother does not retaliate, Ngwe states, “I hated my father for beating my mother . . . . And so I shunned my father” (7).

In like manner, when Martin Nkolakah, commonly known as Teacher Abento, beats Ngwe up, for not bringing the required firewood to school, leaving him with swollen and bloody traces on his back, Ndi Nkemasaah grabs Abento “on his shoulders to the consternation of all and was taking him towards Bechamfem, a river with ghastly boulders that bordered the school” (12) with the intention of crashing “Teacher Abento against those rocks and then wait for the sanction of the Fon” (12-13). Ndi Nkemassah mishandles Teacher Abento for inflicting injuries on his son. He, therefore, reacts to the marginalization of his son.

After obtaining the Ordinary and Advance Level certificates, Ngwe prepares for Besaadi, the capital of Kamangola, where the lone university is found in “a country with an official bilingual status of English and French in which both the Francophones and the Anglophone are supposed to have equal status” (25). Babajoro, is the proprietor of Kamangola and he is given a demigod-like status as “the man who gives life to men and women and children and take it away without informing them. I fear that man called Babajoro. He is a killer” (25). For Ngwe, his earnest zeal to advance in his studies in order to become another Babajaro was not to kill others, but to be rich and positively influential.

The students from the university had told Ngwe and his mates in High School, that “no one knew about the existence of the English Language in that institution or of the Anglophone heritage anywhere in the University or in Besaadi which was the capital of Kamangola” (25). Ngwe later confirms, “It was not easy switching from one educational heritage to an entirely new one, from one language to another especially where book was more difficult” (26). It is satirical having a bilingual country with a university that does not recognise the other official language.

Marginality Issues

Commenting on the language problem in Cameroon, George Echu in “The Language Question in Cameroon” states “the domination of French is due to the demographic factor, the fact that Francophones have continued to occupy top ranking positions in government and the civil service, and also because there is no effective policy that guarantees the rights of minorities” (qtd. in Ankumah 162). There exits two separate systems of education, which are not given equal status, as one is submerged in the other.

As Ngwe narrates his torment, he keeps switching off from the flow of thoughts, manifesting what could be termed a psychological trauma. He informs his listeners: “Babajoro’s men are coming to arrest me. I shall flee to the village. Babajoro’s men are coming to slaughter me. I was the leader of the young Anglophone movement. We wanted our rights as full citizens of the Republic of Kamangola” (27).  His distorted state of mind makes him feel he is in Besaadi and this explains his pleas: “Please, let me flee. Don’t hold me down! Please, allow me to escape. They will slaughter me.  Babajoro’s men, they will kill me” (27). His torture must have been inhuman and unbearable that he keeps reliving the experience, while the listeners and the reader are left in suspense. The existence of a dictatorial regime could be good at nothing, other than the marginalisation of the minority Anglophones in Kamangola, by paying less attention to their educational system and cultural background.

Ngwe on his way to Besaadi encounters awful experiences when he crosses “The River Mongolo . . . the boundary between the English colony of Kama and the French colony of Ngola, the two federated states that gave birth to the Federal Republic of Kamangola” (37). After a sudden and harsh blasts of whistles that almost sets the bus summersaulting, the bus comes to a halt. The thought of the marquis terrorism comes into Ngwe’s mind, making him “confused, dizzy, and tense” (38) as he passes out.  He is brought back to consciousness by an impudent voice at the window where he is sitting with the utterances: “Piece! identite ! impot!” The bus driver translates in pidgin to the understanding of the passengers: “Wuna shu wuna book.” Three gendarmes with red berets scampered about the window, ordering furiously. One took the document of the vehicle from the driver, “moved away to a distance and sat on a log turning over the pages and peering into them” (38). The other gendarme orders a man of sixty years to seat on the ground: “Assois-toi la bas, vieux babouin!” because the photograph on his identity card had moulded and was invisible. (38). The narrator explains, “The old man did not understand French. He was dragged out of the car” (38).

While the passengers were being controlled, Ngwe decides to stretch his limbs towards the great river. The River Mongolo reminded Ngwe of his civics classes in Wysdom College where they “were taught about the plebiscite that brought the two colonies to function as federated states in one nation. Later in high school, [their] History teacher, M. M. Mbuntsop, always talked about the plebiscite, the functioning of the federated states, and their transformation later into a united republic with a lot of disappointment” (39). Ngengasong makes a maximum use of symbolism in expressing the bondage and suppression the Anglophones have been going through since independence in1961. The author tactfully brings the reader into the show of the forced union through Ngwe’s reflection on the knowledge of the history of his country as taught in school.

For Ngwe, “the bridge was a master piece of metal engineering. It looked like the giant sample of the manacles and the shackles around the neck of slaves that were pulled by the slave master such as one had seen in pictures in history books” (39). Leonard Broom and Philip Selznick in Sociology: A Text with Adapted Readings assert, “of all the animals man alone has culture, because only he is capable of creating symbols. Without symbols there could be social life, as there is among other animals, but it would be rudimentary” (51). For Broom and Selznick, a symbol may be broadly defined “as anything that stands for or represents something else” (51-52). The arched steel structure of the bridge with its iron works is symbolic of slavery and could also serve as a foreshadowing of the enslavement that awaits Ngwe in the French Speaking State of Ngola.

In support of this frame of thoughts, Joel Fineman in “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction” defines the anecdote “as the narration of a singular event, in the literary form or genre that uniquely refers to the real” (56). Thus, an anecdote has something literary about it, and it reminds us also that, there is something about the anecdote that exceeds it literary statues, and these excess is precisely that which gives the anecdote its pointed, referential access to the real. The anecdote, a device in literature is considered a “historeme” being the smallest minimal unit of historiographic fact (57). The form of oppression experienced by the slaves is relived by the Anglophones in Ngola, who are subjected to what could be termed a ‘second’ colonisation from their own Francophones brothers, after the first colonisation from the British.

As Ngwe contemplates on the bridge, “a hand gripped [him] fiercely on the collar of [his] shirt” ordering him “‘impôt.’” When he pleads he does not understand, he gripped his collars so tight that  Ngwe  could not breath freely. He was then dragged towards the bus with punches on his head, and asked to sit on his buttocks like the others. A passenger in the bus later commends, “‘It was a tricky thing, that thing called plebiscite . . .  It could never have been the will of the people. It was a commodity transaction between the colonial masters” (42). He regretted being “tricked again into unification’” (41-42).

Stephen Greenblatt in “Towards a Poetic of Culture” holds literary criticism has a familiar set of terms for the relationship between a work of art and the historical events to which it refers as one speaks of allusion, symbolization, allegorization, representation, and above all mimesis. Each of these terms “has a rich history and is virtually indispensable . . .” (11). Nkengasong makes use of allusion and symbolism through which the past is invoked.

For Peter Barry in Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, documents are seldom offered entire: instead an extract is made which is then subjected to intensive scrutiny. The new historicism approach is a way of ‘doing’ history which has a strong appeal for non-historians (177). The state of Kama and Ngola which formed the Federal Republic of Kamangola and is later transformed into a unitary state reflects the current state of the Republic of Cameroon, which began as a Federal Republic of Cameroon in 1961, and became The United Republic of Cameroon in 1972 during President El  Ahadji Amaduo Ahidjio’s regime and after further manipulations, the two federal states is reduced to a Republic of Cameroon in 1984 with the accession to power of President Paul Biya.

Taiwo Afuape in Power, Resistance and Liberation in Therapy with Survivors of Trauma succinctly describes power as “enacted in what people think, say and do” (25). The crafty change of names could be seen as a strategy by the ruling government to completely erase the Anglophones identity and get them assimilated into the Francophone way of life in order to control and dominate them. This situation in Post Colonialism is referred to as epistemic violence and rupture. For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as quoted by Peter Barry, “imperialisms’ epistemic bellicosity decimated the old culture and left the colonized without the ground from which they could utter confrontational words.

Abdul R. Jan Mohamed’s “The Economy of Manichean Allegory” states, “the dominant model of power-and-interest relations in all colonial societies is the Manichean opposition between the putative superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the natives” (qtd. in Goldie 233). The Francophones in Kamangola have assumed superiority over the minority Anglophones based on their advantage of a majority in terms of land and population.

Talking about the Self and the Other, JanMohamed posits, “faced with an incomprehensible and multifaceted alterity, the European theoretically has the option of responding to the Other in terms of identity and difference. If he assumes that he and the Other are essentially identical, then he would tend to ignore the significance divergences and to judge the Other according to his own cultural values” (18) but if he assumes that the Other is irremediably different, then he would have little incentive to adopt the viewpoint of that alterity: he would again tend to turn to the security of his own cultural perspective (18).

When Ngwe begins registration and lectures in Besaadi, he is despised and pushed to the fringes by the Francophones because of his linguistic difference. Registration takes about two weeks in the divisional office and the admission office. The protagonist is told Babajoro’s name is usually mentioned in whispers, because of the presence of spies, and that “ he ruled by tyranny, that he locked people in the underground prisons and killed them as one would kill flies that pestered a wound” (55-56). Babajoro’s regime was, therefore, tyrannical in Kamangola.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argues that modern society is a disciplinary society, where power is largely exercised through disciplinary means in a variety of institutions such as prisons, schools, hospitals, militaries, and so on (qtd. in Habib 770).

The Faculty officer barks at Ngwe and flings his document at him when he cannot understand the French language ordering him to leave his office: “Sort monsieur” (60). The others Francophone mates in the same process laugh and mock at him: “‘Pauvre Anglo! Anglo for kromba. Tu ne pouvez pas rester chez vous a kromba, Anglo” (60)? He is questioned why he could not remain in the English Speaking town of Kumba, rather than be a nuisance to them. Ngwe goes on his knees and pleads before the officer could look at his file.

Ngwe recounts that all his “lecturers were Francophones except Dr  Amboh who in spite of his rich academic background in legal matters was never given a main course, and so he could never have been of any influence on the Francophones” (64). Dr  Amboh regretted that the country did not use him effectively because he was English speaking. He told Ngwe and his Anglophone brothers, that “since it was government policy to eliminate the Anglophone culture in the country using the university as one of its weapons, [they] had no choice but to give in to complete assimilation into the francophone culture” (64). As resistance to his marginal status, Dr Amboh “preferred to resign than to teach in French, what was expected of him before he could be given a main course to teach” (64).

Francis B. Nyamnjoh in “Cameroon: A Country United by Ethnic Ambition and Difference” holds, that some academic positions are obtained by “conceptual rhetoric” used to shore up government rather than by academic credentials, leading a university group to lament the “misere intellectuelle” [intellectual misery] in Cameroon (qtd. in Ankumah 162). Dr Amboh’s  academic credentials seam not to be of any value to the administration of the university, who are interested most in his assimilation.

On the contrary, none of the Francophone lecturers seemed to have an idea in English” (64).  Ngwe feared asking questions in English in class, till when he dared get some notion in constitutional law that he did not understand. The rest of the lecture hall broke into a tremor of booing and jeering:  “‘Anglo!’ ‘Anglofou!’ ‘Anglobête!’” (64), while some twisted papers and objects and threw at him. Ngwe stood dumbfounded, as though the ritual of disorder had hypnotized and transformed him into a worthless object and he questioned himself if he had no right to express himself in one of the two official languages in a bilingual country (65).

Resilience To Marginality

As reaction to his marginalisation, Ngwe  decided to go into his shell to avoid speaking English in public places during lectures or on campus because he “did not want to be recognised all the time as a second-class citizen who in pursuit of academic standing was in the process of assimilation in the factories of the university” (65).  He further adds “I was the Anglo, the pariah, the slave that had no voice in the high and decent life across the Great River. At all cost, I had to learn the language of my masters and talk to them and write my examination in the language. In short, I had to appear and speak like them at all cost (65).

In her influential essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak posits only the subaltern can speak for himself and tell his own story as the ‘Self’ based on personal experiences encountered. Ngwe’s subjugation is symbolic of the Anglophones’ in Kamangola.

In their article, “A Feminist-Postcolonial Interdisciplinary Approach to the Analysis of Marginalities in Cameroon Literary and Cultural Texts,” Pepertua Nkamanyang Lola and Gerald Nforbin aver that “various forms of exclusion, rejection, oppression, and alienation reproduced by the structures of power are considered as defining characteristics of marginality . . . Such persons, entities or groupings whose historical experience places them among the marginal and the minority include the colonized subjects, women, migrants and other minorities” (14). The Anglophones are treated as second-class citizens in the Republic of Kamangola.

In “Marginalisation and (Un)Belonging in John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across The Mongolo,” Gilda Nicheng Forbang-Looh maintains that  the relationship between the Anglophones and Francophones is blamed on colonialism which has led to the unequal distribution of the terrain and the population, thus giving room for the greater population to marginalize the other  (84).  Those in minority, often than not, constitute a marginalised group.

According to Ashcroft et al. in The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature, Postcolonial literature refers to writing which has been “affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (2) and it also addresses questions of history, identity, ethnicity, hybridity, feminism, gender and language amongst others (130).

Even though Ngwe’s humiliating experience in class had made him resort to maintaining “a low profile for the rest of the year, avoiding any linguistic confrontation with any of [his] superior brothers with the most conscious consideration” (73), he nevertheless becomes very famous when he decides to create the Young Anglophone Movement (YAM) at the University, in a bid to improve the situation of the Anglophones.  The hard times and bitter experiences that Ngwe undergoes in Besaadi spurs him to creating the movement. Marginalisation, therefore, predetermines resistance which could end in a positive change.

This movement to Ngwe, was “the only available means by which young Anglophones could fight for their rights and merits, without which [his] quest for knowledge was going to be in vain” (142). Without this, he was never to get to the position of his dream, nor attain his childhood ambition. Ngwe is bent on reviewing his situation as an Anglophone through YAM because he has lived, and is still living his marginalisation as an Anglophone in minority, who could never enjoy his full rights and merits of citizenship.

Ngwe on the launching of YAM tells his Anglophones brothers and sisters that they had the full rights to be full ministers and Directors and not second-class ministers and directors. He states he failed because “I wrote my examinations in the English Language against the dictates of my lecturers who demonstrated palpable ignorance and bias against the language” (162). It is the norm for the Anglophones to repeat every class twice and spending six years in the university, while their Francophone compatriots sail through in three years. Ngwe gets really frustrated that in his despair and distress he laments “Why was I born an Anglophone?”(110). Ngwe would never have regretted his cultural identity if he were treated equally like the Francophones in a supposedly bi-cultural and judicial state. He regrets everything about colonialism that is responsible for the Anglophone identity when he “curse the day that the white man first came to Africa and tore our world apart, brought misery to our lives, brought anguish, pain, sorrow and despair, changed him from a Nweh man to an Anglophone and then subjected me into slavery in the estates of my brothers who were fortunate to be colonised by the French” (123).

For Ngong Kelvin Toh in‘ ‘The Family Bond and Nation Building in John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo,” “while most post independent masses have surrendered to the power structure Ngwe attempts a resistance through the Anglophone Youth Movement but fails to gain support as Babajoro’s eyes are everywhere” (389).   Babajoro’s power is executed through daily practices fostered through apparatuses such as the military, schools, and the prisons as means of consolidating power and intense control.

Jeff Vail in  A Theory of Power affirms, “Power defines every aspect of our experience of reality” (2).  Power to him is an illusion that cannot be grasped, but whose reality lies beyond the illusion. In like manner, the concepts of power, marginality, and resistance are made concrete through their manifestation and outcome. For kashim Ibrahim Tala, marginality has its roots in issues related to power. From the foregone analysis, one can say that marginality presupposes the existence of a negative use of power and also predetermines resistance and sometimes a positive change in the status quo.

References
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