By Martin Jumbam
(Revised and reproduced from Cameroon Life, Vol.1., No. 6, Nov/Dec. 1990, pp. 36-37) 
Before I give you the “meat” of this write-up proper, I’ll take a detour which some of you, eager as I know you always are to read about sex, will find a little irritating. But, please, gentle reader, kindly bear with me and buckle up your seat-belt of patience for a while, for you are about to zoom into something deliciously juicy, just the type of stuff I know you love to hear. Okay? Good, here we go.
The renowned, venerable Professor Emeritus, Dr Bernard Nsokika Fonlon – May the Lord Almighty strew his path with flowers! – always impressed upon his students the importance of starting whatever they were writing with a clear definition of their terms.
“Definirum Terminorum”, my Master’s rich and mellifluous voice, oily with wisdom, would bellow in our ears, and we would rush for our dictionaries, snatch thesauri off the shelves, and flip through the pages of encyclopaedias, lifting up one meaning of a word after another, trying to lay our hands on just the right definition for the right occasion.
So, today when I sat down to write about sex in Lenin’s country, I once more heard my Master’s voice in the ears of my mind, urging me to start by defining my terms.
Responding favourably to that exhortation, I bent down and picked up the word “sex” from the paper, turned it back and forth in my hand, turned it upside down and downside up, looked at it from inside out and outside in, and realised that I had a serious problem there, in my hand.
“Why?” I can hear you wondering to yourself. Well, as I toyed with that word, it began to disintegrate in my hand, and what suddenly flashed itself on the screen of my mind was the action itself portrayed by that word.
Since such an action is unprintable in a respectable magazine like Cameroon Life – so my Editor warned me – I decided to hang it out on the line to dry, knowing fully well that my Master would, for his part, have viewed such a stand as intellectually treasonable, being someone who was never known to have sat on the fence on any issue.
But then, I consoled myself, if there is one word my Master is thought never to have had to wrestle with, it is precisely this three-letter, over-fondled, over-abused word “sex” for, if his legendary abstinence from the action depicted by that word were ever to be confirmed by history, then BNF must go down on record as the greatest enigma of this, or of any other century. In fact, many of us, able-bodied, virile men, with what someone referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as “an alarming weakness for the opposite sex”, always considered his attitude in this domain as synonymous with suicide!
So, after putting sex on hold for a while, I turned round to greet Perestroika. “Hi, good friend Perestroika; how’s the Kremlin?”
My French teacher, no doubt to mask her ignorance – as she always did whenever she came across a word she didn’t understand – would have dubbed Perestroika: “un vrai barbarisme”. And she might very well have been right in this case as that word had indeed sounded strange to some of our ears when we heard it for the first time.
We had been told that that l’enfant terrible of communism, Mikhail Gorbachev, guilty, among other crimes, of having literally wrecked havoc even with the once sacrosanct theories of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and shamelessly accepting the West’s gratitude in the form of a Nobel Peace Prize!!! – had decided to enrich the world’s political vocabulary with such concepts as Perestroika and Glasnost, to explain his own vision of an open and less secretive Soviet society.
To some of us, the matter was simply one of a Soviet leader coining a new concept to explain his country’s lamentable defeat in its cold war against its arch-rival, America. Great then was our surprise when a Cameroonian intellectual recently mounted the podium to defend the intolerance of political monolithism in our country with the outlandish claim that Gorbachev had stolen that concept from none other than our very own, Paul Biya (PB, to those in the inner circle of corrupt power in this country!!). Lord, have mercy on any nation whose intelligentsia has gone down on its knees to lick the toes of politicians!
I remember my friend, Andy “Young”, ever the prophet, predicting two things: 1) Moscow would sever relations with Yaounde over the accusation of plagiarism being levied against its ruler, and 2) PB would be so flattered by the intellectual syrup being poured on him that he would not forget its author, come cabinet reshuffle day.
Events have since proved Andy wrong on both counts; but when he mentioned the possibility of the Russians pulling out of Cameroon, I felt a chill right into my pants.
“If those Russian fellows do become crazy and break relations with our country, where will I ever get spare parts for my car? You know I ride a Lada, don’t you?” I asked sadly.
“Come on! be serious, Martin!” exclaimed a scandalised Andy. “We’re talking diplomacy here, man, and you’re only thinking of your stupid Lada?”
I quickly said I was sorry, but then I was happy when reason held sway over emotions and the Russians decided to stay in this triangle of ours. At least, I am now sure I know where to find spare parts for my Lada.
What astonished Andy and me, though, was PB’s refusal to reward that intellectual, sycophantic grovelling with a ministerial office. Was that perhaps his own way of asking our intellectuals to concentrate their efforts on research that can help our nation out of its present malaise, and refrain from advancing absurd theories, as Andy claimed? You know, with PB, never the talkative type, you’re always left guessing and wondering about his silence, an enigmatic silence indeed which, as someone so brilliantly put it the other day, is not always golden!
I know by now you must be itching to know who has been having sex with Perestroika. I know the only time most Cameroonians read a book or newspaper – and this includes our chicken-parlour intelligentsia, educated, for the most part, in renowned schools at such great expense to the tax-payer – is when the word sex is mentioned in the title. Don’t I know my country men and women’s weakness for sex!! Shame on them!
That said, let me answer a few more questions I know you must have in your mind. You must be wondering: “Why is this fellow trying to lecture us on sex in the Soviet Union, anyway? Has he been over there before?” Well, the answer is Nyet!, which is Russian for “No way!”
If you have any quarrel with what you are about to read, dear Cameroonians, talk to a fellow called Victor Erofeev. I don’t have his address or phone number, but you may talk to the Soviet Embassy in Yaounde; they may have it.
It’s this Victor Erofeev fellow who wrote an article entitled “Sex and Perestroika”, in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4534 of February 23 – March 1, 1990. Intellectual honesty – some people either don’t know, or pretend not to know – requires that I give credit where such credit is due. That is why your humble servant is laying no claim to originality here at all.
Victor Erofeev’s article is a piece rich in juicy details, the type our chicken-parlour-addicted intelligentsia likes to recount with such endless monotony. He tells us that “until recently, the subject of sex was taboo in the Soviet Union” and the mere mention of sexual themes “was viewed by the authorities as dissemination of pornography”, and this could fetch the “offender” up to three years in jail!!!
Boy, oh boy! Imagine what would happen if such a law were to be passed in Cameroon; nearly three-quarters of the nation would be behind bars before you know it; and this would, of course, include our parliamentarians themselves who, true to form, would neither have read nor understood the intricacies of the bill they were passing into law!!
Victor Erofeev tells us that recently the Soviets have been revolting against such sexual strapping in their society. Sexual freedom in the Soviet Union, he tells us, has its genesis in the reign of one of Gobarchev’s predecessors, Leonid Brezhnev, who is said to have treasured pornography so much that he often stuffed his office drawers with pornographic magazines.
When the younger generation got wind of their leader’s delight in everything with a sexual ring to it, they shouted “hurrah!” and took the game one step further, often, according to the writer, engaging in “group sex in private apartments and in city saunas, bribing bath attendants, as if they were promoting the concept of collectivism characteristic of Russian culture.”
So, Perestroika à-la Gorbachev (not à-la Biya) merely took over where Brezhnev had left off. With the advent of Perestroika, exhibitions of erotic art have become the order of the day. In 1989, for example, one of such exhibitions lasted only one evening, ending in a scandal, and with good reasons too, since “one of the exhibits was a live naked woman, lathered in sweet cream. Visitors vied with one another to lick it off…”.
What a sight! I can understand why some of the spectators, mainly the old conservative, prudish type, were not amused at all. Listen to the impressions one of them, a doctor of technical science from Leningrad, entered in the Visitor’s Book:
“Good God! What have we come to!! What will become of us? After this dirt, vulgarity and obscenity, we need a shower to wash ourselves? This is an example of how it’s possible to debase what is wonderful, pure and right. For shame I hope our children won’t see this exhibition. We’ll go far with this kind of Perestroika! An exhibit for sexually depraved idiots!!”
Another equally enraged visitor loudly demanded that “the organisers must be brought to account”.
Such views seem, however, to be increasingly pushed to the wall by the younger generation who acclaim such open display of eroticism, and take delight in reading the now flourishing erotic literature. In fact, one such visitor hailed the above-mentioned exhibition as “a triumph for Freudianism, which has healed the hypocritical consciousness of our warped people."
Some of the younger people have even taken their defiance of the Soviet sexual culture to sacrilegious extent. Who, only a few years ago, could have thought that a Soviet citizen would one day be heard, even in his sleep, referring to that once hallowed Soviet symbol, the Hammer and Sickle, as “a true symbol of copulation”? Even Lenin himself, the father of the Soviet nation – oh abomination of all abominations! – has not been spared the raillery of the saucy-tongued youths either; he is said to have been “a great politician and an erotic symbol [who] impregnated the unhappy Russian land with Communism.” And to crown it all, some of them claim that “the whole of the Soviet social body is now close to a state of orgasm, thanks to its many years of active masturbation.”
Such aberrations are to be expected when a people’s yearning for sexual, or any other freedom, for that matter, has been trampled upon for so many decades. Cameroonians should at least rejoice that their own leaders, who are equally guilty of despicable human rights violations, have not, unlike their Soviet counterparts, stamped their feet on the Cameroonian’s sexual freedom as well. I am talking of that freedom to discuss sex in the open and then retreat to the privacy of their homes to put their discussion into practice.
Hello from Germany,
Posted by: herbert | July 17, 2006 at 02:35 PM