The Youngman and the Sea

Once, while vacationing in Kribi, I was struck by how poor its inhabitants could get. There is virtually no form of cultivation and the local Pygmies, Batangas, Yassa, Mvais and Bulus live only by hunting or fishing highly depleted stocks. An odd kind of seaside resort if I ever saw one. The greatest spectacle, in fact all the spectacle, it had to offer was hungry fishermen with their hungrier wives and children screaming a silent indictment of the “new deal”. Then, I also learned that one of  the “sons of the soil”, Biya’s all powerful General Eno Benae, owned virtually all the shore line on which he had created a luxury hotel that cannot be built with the total of his wages for all his service life, a luxury so incongruous with the misery of Kribians that the behemoth goes empty roomed for years on end...ahahahaha! What did he think, that the world's rich share his spite for his fellow countrymen? Perhaps the gods were  teaching the greedy general a lesson from what the Oracle overheard. Fortunately, I am never far from pen and paper and this is what I managed to scribble. It is followed by other comments I overheard the gods exchanging on the world class tourist destination “The Nyong”, one of the best in Cameroon according to the Ministry of Tourism. Come and enjoy... Eh, if you think it is poetry then it's normal, it's the language of the gods! Overheard by a youngman, staring at the sea...

1. To the Sea

I/ High Tide

What great ire boils in you

That churns these berserk waves

Snarling at the pot-bellied Frenchman

As if to remind him this is no Cote d’Azur?

Oh Sea, what ire boils in you

That with teeth gleaming like a panther’s barred

You roar and hiss at the sunbathers

Who hug the sands in trepidation?

They say you once were calm

That your surface mirrored the sun’s smile

And you took the frolicking children

On their first trip to seventh heaven

O Sea at Kribi, what can ail thee

That you upturn the fisherman’s canoe

Which he seeks to board for his family’s livelihood

That-it is said- you once washed ashore?

Is it to cleanse his complacent cataract

With your salty balm that he may see

Which of his at the helm piloted the boat of state

All through this half century into a sand bank

On which the pot-bellied Rosicrucian prowls

Smirking as he garners for his state the spoils?

Is this frothing -which to the clapping children

Are benign smiles to welcome the port and oil shelves-

 Spurred by your insightful knowledge

That they applaud but in farewell to their offspring’s victuals

Which their epicurean parents barter for a flea’s ear

Sponsored by the kickback accounts of the winning party barons?

I see you pummel the earth with logs stamped for export!

Is it in exasperation that it meekly yields these riches

Which you through rain and it through minerals, you jointly tended?

Oh Sea! Blame not the land for it is armless and mouthless

Does its nakedness not make it victim of this warless loot?

Blame but its “leaders”, these opportunist heirs of Akademos

Who pompously brandish parchments earned by rote

But muddy the professorship in paunchy self servitude -

Serving as the invisible hands of Babylon system!

II/Low Tide

O Sea, do you recoil from the minister’s fart

Which poisons the beach with an aura of thievery

Or from the whinnying of his deluxe four wheel drive

Which like a medieval knight’s horse

Finds its overfed master an unworthy burden?

Then recoil, lest his excreta may feed and corrupt thy fish

With that cannibal gene of matricide

That makes him condone and part-take

In the rape of Africa, his motherland.

2. The Nyong

Cold black snake, it slithers between the tropical evergreens

In proud self-styled majesty imposed on the tourist map:

“Enjoy black waters and the scenery of thatch less shacks

And the pride of giving cheap brew to begging peasants”

It whips the un-awed fish with its royal sceptre

A tree pulled down from its covetous gallery

And by the pebbles ground it concocts the elixir

Which piped and pumped to Yaoundé, diffuses public majesty

The doorman who drinks is liege to the prince from the province

And the civil servant holds civil master to tribute

In urinal effluents, exhaled air, city dwellers reek with majesty

Bastard toddler, lecherous minx and king of all, white collared thief

Triumphantly flowing in rough hewn billions worth gutters

It gives with the right and takes with the tributary

Then the insatiate glutton hisses at the Nachtigal- a dread cry

Unwilling to pass on the tribute into the sea!