George Ngwane

[Obituary] Simon Nkwenti: The Drum Major for Policy Engagement

By Mwalimu George Ngwane

Simon Nkwenti was by design or by default a teacher. He would have easily traded his career for that of a Member of Parliament or a Barrister-at-law.  For in his heart was entrenched the sterling qualities of a society’s spokesman; in his soul was sown the grains of a people’s Advocate and in his spirit was engraved the fighting splendour of a committed crusader.

But he remained a teacher-one who had made the nation his classroom and policy engagement his drum major.  Simon spoke when others chose to whisper, he ran when others chose to crawl and he took the heat when others chose to leave the kitchen.

Thomas Sankara: In His Own Words

Compiled by Mwalimu George Ngwane

Today 15^th October 2010 marks the 23^rd anniversary of the murder of Captain Thomas Isidore Noel Sankara, erstwhile President of Upper Volta cum Burkina Faso 1983 – 1987. According to Doug Cooper, the thirty-seven year old Sankara was assassinated with twelve of his aides in a counterrevolutionary military coup by troops loyal to Blaise Compaore. Alongside other Presidential icons in Africa like Murtala Mohammed of Nigeria and Nelson Mandela of South Africa, Thomas Sankara’s brief but bright stint as President of Burkina Faso attests to the mantra that leadership is not necessarily the quantity of years we put in but the quality of service we give out.

 Hear Thomas Sankara in his own words:

Dead Presidents Don’t Bite

By Mwalimu George Ngwane

It is twenty years today, 30th November 2009, since Cameroon’s first President El Hadj Ahmadou Ahidjo took his exit from this world to be laid in Yoff cemetery Dakar Senegal.
 
George Ngwane at Ahidjo's grave in Dakar, Senegal

In September 1995, I was invited to an International Conference on Peace in Dakar, Senegal and was privileged to accompany one of Ahidjo’s family members to the Ahidjo home.

Remembering That Mandela Night

By Azore Opio (The Post Newspaper)

Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday celebrations on July 18 turned out to be a great day in Buea, Cameroon.

The idea of celebrating Mandela's 90th birthday in Buea was first mooted at the beginning of the year by some scholars and pan-Africanists under the platform "Mandela Forum".In June, a series of meetings were convened at the Bamboo Bar in Great Soppo, where the magnitude of activities to be put in place to honour the statesman, were elaborated.

Introducing George Ngwane

A Portrait by Dibussi Tande

I have known George Ngwane in both a professional and personal capacity for close to 15 years, during which we have been comrades in arms in the search for possible solutions to Cameroon's socio-political challenges. In the 1990s, we both were regular contributors to leading English language newspapers and magazines in Cameroon such as Cameroon Life Magazine, Le Messager, and the Cameroon Post. We were also at the frontline of the struggle to protect the rights of Cameroon's Anglophone minority through events and organizations such as the All Anglophone Conference (AAC) of April 1993.

Nzo Ekhah-Ngaky and the Africa he did not see

By Mwalimu George NGWANE

Joseph Nzo Ekhah-Ngaky, apart from his rich national career, will for long be remembered as the youngest Secretary General of the Organisation of African Unity (O.A.U).  At the age of 38, the patriarch Nzo was the second African (after Boubacar Diallo Telli of Guinea) to occupy this pan African post between 1972 and 1974.

Bye Barry, Farewell Fohtung

By Mwalimu George Ngwane

It is with a heavy heart that I read (in The Post of Monday , January 31, 2005) of the death of ace columnist Barry Fohtung.  Ah! memories; memories of the early 90s when together with Dibussi Tande,Jing Thomas Ayeah, BB, Taku Charles, Rodcod Gobata, Paddy Mbawa, Charly Ndichia, Francis Wache and the rest of the Young Turks, Barry would write those fine essays on the state and future of our collective destiny as a people.

Even though we shaped the countours of our geo-poltical space with our pens, I only got to meet Barry for the first time in the year 2000. Tall and taciturn, dark and daring, handsome and hale,Barry's sarcastic style in writing contrasted with his seducing smile in demeanour. The last time I met him was at Bate Besong's book launch in Yaounde March 2004 and there was nothing on his physique that betrayed death's hidden agenda.

I wonder whether he lived to see the democratic train he had so much wanted to board for his life's sruggle got caught at the crossroads of mortality. But I know he will, with a golden pen in hand, join the angelic scribes to scribble those celestial verses that will one day  make our terrestrial triangle live to the tenets of its National anthem.

Bye, Brother, bye.

Mongo Beti: the writer-gadfly

BellagioPublishingNetwork Newsletter Issue No 30, May 2002, pp 20-21

George Ngwane

[The Cameroonian-born writer Alexandre Biyidi Awala, alias Mongo Beti, died in October 2001. He was one of the key Francophone African writers of the post-war and independence era. Educated in Catholic mission and public schools in Yaoundé and later in France, where he studied literature and lived for most of his life, Beti's early writing reflected the tensions in colonialism and the social dislocation and disorientation in the lives of the colonised, western educated and independent African.