From The Sketch, No. 21, April 2, 1993, p. 2
A few years ago, PB, son of Mvondo from Mvomeka’a, made a move which many University of Yaounde staff members at first mistook for one of those pranks for which he has become so famous: he threatened to retire them from their teaching positions at the university. “Is this PB’s idea of a joke?” our learned dons wondered uneasily, hoping they hadn’t heard him well.
“How on earth can anyone in his right mind ever think of retiring university lecturers and professors? What is this world coming to?” they all wondered out loud, inviting sympathy from anyone who would care to listen.
Then, it gradually dawned on them that this catechist’s son from Mvomeka could very well put his threat into execution. Overnight, many of them, even those whose names had never been seen in print anywhere, summoned the courage to pick up their pens to assault the idea of retiring our learned men and women of the university, calling it a frontal attack on intellectual efficiency and integrity, a waste of knowledge of incalculable proportions, an inanity that could only have been conceived by a Third World mind lost in the jungle of fuzzy reasoning, etc, etc.
Out of that cacophony, however, rose a voice of wisdom, that of Professor Ambroise Kom who, I believe, teaches in the Department of African Literature. According to Professor Kom, a professor’s survival at the university should not be predicated on age alone. What of publication? he wisely asked, reiterating that fright-fraught adage of the Americans: Publish or Perish.
There’s little wonder that only a handful of the University of Yaounde lecturers and professors can feel comfortable when that dreadful American adage is pronounced within earshot. After all, many of them are still teaching from age-yellowed, cockroach-licked, dog-eared exercise books, relics of their own student days decades ago, which have never been up-dated.
Your humble Tav-Njong knows what he’s talking about, being himself a former student of that institution. In our days there, many of those lecturers and professors were notorious for dodging classes. Even when they managed to show up in class, you heard nothing new from them, many being apparently more interested in using their research grants to buy second-hand cars from Belgium, or to build houses which they then let to students at outrageous prices.
After that outcry of despair from our lone university at the mere mention of the word retirement, PB must have known that by threatening their “garri”, he had placed his finger right on the Achilles’ heels of our men and women of “Ngoa Ekelle”. In one brilliant stroke of ingenuity – I must honestly, but grudgingly, give him credit for it! – PB decided to capitalise on it by blackmailing them into rooting for him. How? Well, simply by granting those of them due retirement a few more years of respite in exchange for their support of his tottering regime. Clever, eh?
You must have noticed how, over the past few years, many university professors and lecturers, especially those of the older generation, who should rightfully have been retired long ago, have suddenly become fanatical supporters of PB’s recent “precipitated” elections.
Some of us, traditional rulers and title-holders – don’t forget that I am a Tav-Njong, a title honourably earned, not bought with money as some people so shamelessly do these days – were alarmed when rumours reached us that some of our “colleagues”, that is, men and women of title, who also happen to be members of the university staff, were losing their caps and other symbols of traditional power, at an alarming rate, to the fury of the local population in certain parts of the country where they had gone to preach the gospel according to PB. If those rumours were ever to be confirmed, then PB would be guilty of leading many a traditional ruler of this country astray.
One man whose cap of traditional authority is apparently still firmly sitting on his head and who, from time immemorial, has made that scary American dictum of Publish or Perish, wholly his, is Doctor Daniel Noni Lantum, Professor of Public Health at our University Centre for Health Sciences, commonly known by its French acronym of CUSS. A traditional ruler in his own right, Professor Lantum, a.k.a. Faay-wo-Bastos, has recently published a booklet on another Nso traditional ruler, Shufaay-wo-Ntohndzev, the Yaounde University Professor Emeritus, Dr Bernard Nsokika Fonlon, of glorious memory.
Tav-Njong reviews that booklet for you in our next issue. Don’t miss it.
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