Martin Jumbam

Poetry - A review of Joyce Ash's collection of poems: Beautiful Fire

I thank Spears Media for giving me the opportunity to say a word or two on this award-winning collection of poems: Beautiful Fire.  My presentation, which I intend to keep short and simple, is in two parts.  In the first part, I talk about the author, not the traditional bio-data type introduction (date of birth, schools attended, diplomas earned, etc.) No, I simply want to pay the author, who I shall refer to simply as Dr. J., a debt of gratitude, which I have owed her for over a decade. In the second part, I zero in on her book, mainly on the title, which is what caught my attention most.

Martin Jumbam’s “My Conversion Journey with Christian Cardinal Tumi": The compelling testimony of a renewed Christian

By Douglas A. Achingale*

It is often said of well-crafted books that they are usually so enthralling that it would be hard for the reader to drop them until they get to the final word. This observation, to my mind, most conveniently suits Martin Jumbam’s My Conversion Journey with Christian Cardinal Tumi. For, this work of Christian literature, a collection of 16 breath-taking articles and two electrifying interviews, spread over 161 pages, explores the ‘growth’ of the author – from an aficionado of worldly pleasures to a practical believer whose entire being is now animated by the Word of God! Amongst a few other related subjects, of course.

The criticism of Anglophone literature in a deep slumber

Appeared for the first time in Cameroon Tribune of Wednesday, November 27, 1985.

Sankie Maimo’s much assaulted article, which appeared in the Cameroon Tribune issues of Wednesday, September 19, 1979 and of Wednesday, September 26, 1979, respectively, under the rather lengthy and pedantic title of “Literary Lag in English-speaking Cameroon – June 1979 Abbia Editorialist unwittingly Lost His Spear at First Cast”, marks, in my opinion, a decisive turning-point in the critical appreciation of Anglophone literature in this country.

Agostinho Antonio Neto (1922-1979): A tribute to a committed writer.

By Martin Jumbam

Revised and reproduced from Cameroon Tribune of Tuesday, November 18, 1986, p. 16.

Agostinho Antonio Neto, the first President of the People’s Republic of Angola, died in September of 1979 at the relatively young age of 57 (1922-1979). He was felled, not by an assassin’s bullet, but that implacable enemy of man, blood cancer. His sudden and surprising death cruelly robbed progressive humanity of one of its most articulate spokesmen, a man of action whose tragically short life was in itself an embodiment of the struggles of his people for their freedom, first from Portuguese colonialism and, at the moment of his demise, from South African aggressors.