WE BURIED HIM IN BAMENDA

The funeral period for Victor Anomah Ngu ran for over two weeks, from 05  to 23 July 2011, culminating in his burial at the St. Joseph’s cemetery of the Cathedral Church at Big Mankon, Bamenda, North West Region of Cameroon.  

 

Over those two weeks, as I attended religious services, academic round-tables and other ceremonies in his honour, and listened to speeches, testimonies, tributes and eulogies, I marveled at the capacity and skill of Cameroonians for post-mortem flattery.

 

The power elite of the country seemed to have hijacked the whole process, each show-casing himself and the close relationship he had with the deceased. I heard strong voices of very influential people in support of VANHIVAX, Victor Anomah Ngu’s scientifically unvalidated candidate vaccine against HIV/AIDS. Had some of such voices been heard earlier at the appropriate time, the Cameroon government might have been persuaded to move more decisively in providing the material means for testing VAN’s idea and claims. I heard commitments to carry on with his work which I hope and pray were not buried with him.

I first met VAN in 1986 while he was Minister of Public Health in Cameroon. I had recently returned from Nigeria, having resigned a lectureship at the University of Ife under the erroneous information that my application for recruitment at the University of Yaounde had succeeded.  As it turned out, I landed into plain joblessness in Yaounde. When Professor Akin Bankole with whom I had done some work at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ife heard of my misadventure, he sent the following letter to VAN on my behalf.

My experience with officials in positions of power and authority in Cameroon made me very apprehensive the day I went to see the Minister of Public Health. I found public officials in positions of responsibility, power and authority in Cameroon highly elusive and overbearing, by comparison with their Nigerian counterparts.  You had to fill applications forms to see them and they received members of the public usually on a specific day, between specified hours, of the week.  The waiting room of their offices would usually be packed full on such days and the secretary who had the prerogative of deciding how and when to present the applications for ‘audience’ with the boss, wielded considerable co-lateral power. You could wait for hours on end without any guarantee that you would succeed in seeing the boss. But I was pleasantly surprised when I went to VAN’s ministerial office and there was little protocol and I was able to see him almost immediately on arrival. Immediately I introduced myself, he put me completely at ease by saying he had once heard the Archbishop of Bamenda, Paul Verdzekov, and Bernard Fonlon discussing about me. After reading Prof. Bankole’s letter, he immediately took a pad and wrote a note to which he attached a copy of the letter, and asked me to go and give it to the Director of the University Centre for Medical Sciences (CUSS), a Frenchman named Cataret, if I remember the name correctly. To shorten a long story, Cataret did his best and presented my application file to the other professors of the Centre, but the majority of them, as I was able to gather, simply laughed at the idea of a philosopher teaching medical ethics in CUSS.

Bernard Fonlon and VAN were life-long friends and great mutual admirers of each other. Fonlon had died in August 1986. In 1987, the Bernard Fonlon Society (BFS) was formed with VAN as the president and the likes of George Kevin Mbayu, Innocent Futcha, Nalova Lyonga, Celestin Tcheo, myself and many others as the very active members. Whenever I was with VAN, which was very frequently from about 1998 when I started trying to follow and understand his work on HIV/AIDS, we would always end up discussing Bernard Fonlon.  One thing that really impressed me was the seriousness and conviction which he used to state that Fonlon was in heaven discussing philosophy with the likes of Cardinal Newman. If indeed heaven exists, then VAN must now have joined them in their philosophical discourses. Fonlon was a great admirer of VAN and in 1982 wrote a remarkable poem for VAN, which he presented with other poems in a bound booklet entitled LUMBERINGS OF LATER YEARS and dedicated to VAN.  I had wanted to read this remarkable poem during the funeral ceremonies but never got the chance. Here it is for your reading pleasure. Download Fonlon's Poem to VAN

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