Revised and reproduced from Cameroon Post # 223 of June 16-23, 1994.
Those who saw the “Lion-Man’s” red-bereted monsters raising their gun-butts over our heads and ordering us out of our car must have, for a moment, thought that some enemy soldiers had been captured in Bakassi and brought into town for grilling. “Les voici! Oui c’est eux!» the four gendarmes, surrounding our car, cried out triumphantly as one of them laid his hands on Gobata’s brown envelope, containing some AAC II literature. That cry almost became a riot when one of them seized dozens of copies of my two pamphlets, respectively entitled “I was also there: Reflections from AAC 1” and ”Mamiyah, a Legend, and Other Essays”, which I had thought I would sell during the AAC II meeting.
Admirers
One policeman, however, said he has always read me with delight and was happy to have met me at last. He said he was taking a copy of “Mamiyah”, but would not be paying for it. I said I was really not in a position to make him pay me since he was standing over me with his gun pointing on my head. He said he would not touch a copy of the other pamphlet on AAC I since it carried the picture of the AAC I opening session at the back. Although he didn’t say so, I could guess that he did not want his “frog” colleagues to think that he too was a silent sympathiser of what they loudly called “ces vandales”.
A gendarme then walked up to Gobata and asked if he wasn’t the actor he often saw on TV. The answer being affirmative, he walked away with a grin on his face and we could hear him telling the others “c’est un bon acteur, celui-là” (That one is a good actor).
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