Tangwa at a glance

Acting Credits


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Conception & Design


  • Jimbi Media

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Jimbi Media Sites

  • AFRICAphonie
    AFRICAphonie is a Pan African Association which operates on the premise that AFRICA can only be what AFRICANS and their friends want AFRICA to be.
  • Bakwerirama
    Spotlight on Bakweri Society and Culture. The Bakweri are an indigenous African nation.
  • Bate Besong
    Bate Besong, award-winning firebrand poet and playwright.
  • Bernard Fonlon
    Dr Bernard Fonlon was an extraordinary figure who left a large footprint in Cameroonian intellectual, social and political life.
  • Fonlon-Nichols Award
    Website of the Literary Award established to honor the memory of BERNARD FONLON, the great Cameroonian teacher, writer, poet, and philosopher, who passionately defended human rights in an often oppressive political atmosphere.
  • France Watcher
    Purpose of this advocacy site: To aggregate all available information about French terror, exploitation and manipulation of Africa
  • George Ngwane: Public Intellectual
    George Ngwane is a prominent author, activist and intellectual.
  • Jacob Nguni
    Virtuoso guitarist, writer and humorist. Former lead guitarist of Rocafil, led by Prince Nico Mbarga.
  • Martin Jumbam
    The refreshingly, unique, incisive and generally hilarous writings about the foibles of African society and politics by former Cameroon Life Magazine columnist Martin Jumbam.
  • Nowa Omoigui
    Professor of Medicine and interventional cardiologist, Nowa Omoigui is also one of the foremost experts and scholars on the history of the Nigerian Military and the Nigerian Civil War. This site contains many of his writings and comments on military subjects and history.
  • Postwatch Magazine
    A UMI (United Media Incorporated) publication. Specializing in well researched investigative reports, it focuses on the Cameroonian scene, particular issues of interest to the former British Southern Cameroons.
  • Simon Mol
    Cameroonian poet, writer, journalist and Human Rights activist living in Warsaw, Poland
  • Victor Mbarika ICT Weblog
    Victor Wacham Agwe Mbarika is one of Africa's foremost experts on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Dr. Mbarika's research interests are in the areas of information infrastructure diffusion in developing countries and multimedia learning.
  • Tunduzi
    A West African in Arusha at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on the angst, contradictions and rewards of that process.
  • Dr Godfrey Tangwa (Gobata)
    Renaissance man, philosophy professor, actor and newspaper columnist, Godfrey Tangwa aka Rotcod Gobata touches a wide array of subjects. Always entertaining and eminently readable. Visit for frequent updates.
  • Francis Nyamnjoh
    Prolific writer, social and political commentator, he was a professor at University of Buea and University of Botswana. Currently he is Head of Publications and Dissemination at CODESRIA in Dakar, Senegal. His writings are socially relevant and engaging even to the non specialist.
  • Ilongo Sphere: Writer and Poet
    Novelist and poet Ilongo Fritz Ngalle, long concealed his artist's wings behind the firm exterior of a University administrator and guidance counsellor. No longer. Enjoy his unique poems and glimpses of upcoming novels and short stories.
  • Scribbles from the Den
    The award-winning blog of Dibussi Tande, Cameroon's leading blogger.
  • Enanga's POV
    Rosemary Ekosso, a Cameroonian novelist and blogger who lives and works in Cambodia.
  • GEF's Outlook
    Blog of George Esunge Fominyen, former CRTV journalist and currently Coordinator of the Multi-Media Editorial Unit of the PANOS Institute West Africa (PIWA) in Dakar, Senegal.
  • The Chia Report
    The incisive commentary of Chicago-based former CRTV journalist Chia Innocent
  • Voice Of The Oppressed
    Stephen Neba-Fuh is a political and social critic, human rights activist and poet who lives in Norway.
  • Bate Besong
    Bate Besong, award-winning firebrand poet and playwright.
  • Up Station Mountain Club
    A no holds barred group blog for all things Cameroonian. "Man no run!"
  • Bakwerirama
    Spotlight on the Bakweri Society and Culture. The Bakweri are an indigenous African nation.
  • Fonlon-Nichols Award
    Website of the Literary Award established to honor the memory of BERNARD FONLON, the great Cameroonian teacher, writer, poet, and philosopher, who passionately defended human rights in an often oppressive political atmosphere.
  • Bernard Fonlon
    Dr Bernard Fonlon was an extraordinary figure who left a large footprint in Cameroonian intellectual, social and political life.
  • AFRICAphonie
    AFRICAphonie is a Pan African Association which operates on the premise that AFRICA can only be what AFRICANS and their friends want AFRICA to be.
  • Canute - Chronicles from the Heartland
    Professional translator, freelance writer and a regular contributor to THE POST newspaper. Lives in Douala, Cameroon

THE LAST WEEK OF MAY 2025

Every year, the last week of May heralds my birthday on 03 June which I have never celebrated. In traditional Nso’ culture and practice, the idea of ‘birthday’ does not exist. Children are classified according to the period they were born or the circumstances that prevailed when they were born. People therefore think and refer to themselves not in terms of birthday but in terms of their generation or age group. This is true of all other African peoples who share the same worldview and metaphysical ideas with the Nso’. The idea of celebrating one’s birthday, which has become the favourite pastime of colonized, indoctrinated, and proselytized Africans today is a foreign idea borrowed from other cultures. That is not to say that the idea is wrong or the borrowing unfortunate, although exaggerating any practice is always a cause for concern and we have greatly exaggerated our obsession with birthdays. In Nso’ culture, what is always celebrated is death, unless it is premature, self-inflicted, or a result of the retributive justice of the earth. 

The last week of May 2025 witnessed the passing unto eternity and the universe of our ancestors of two remarkable people, icons of Africanity, whom I have greatly admired and been influenced by. Both died at a ripe old age, respectively, deserving unrestricted celebrations and I am hereby celebrating their honorable transition to the universe of ancestors. The event has warranted and justified the resumption of the Gobata Website (www.gobata.com) which had gone dormant for some time now, owing to health challenges that prevented me from maintaining its regularity.

The first of the elders whose transition I am celebrating is Fara Clemens Ndze who journeyed on 27th May 2025 at the ripe old age of 95. Fara Clemens was, I believe and here I may be wrong, the fourth native/indigenous priest ordained in 1960 for the diocese of Buea, covering the entire territory of former British Southern Cameroons, later West Cameroon, later Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon, today NOSO. His elders here, those he could not boldly take the gizzard in their presence, are only Fara Aloys Ba’lon Wankuy, the very first African to be ordained a priest in this territory in 1949, followed by Fara Lucas Atang and Fara James Toba.

I remember a period when Fara Clemens served as the parish priest of Shisong, my natal village. For the first time in their experience of Christianity since 1913, when the first Christian missionaries were welcomed in Shisong, the faithful parishioners had a priest talking and preaching to them directly in their mother language. What an experience! The gospel was interpreted directly in the choicest idioms and metaphors in Lamnso’. People would discuss Fara Clemens’ (whom they called ‘Fara Kilemon’) sermons for the whole week until the next sermon.

The second departed elder I am celebrating today is (James) Ngugi wa Thiong’o who connects directly with Fara Clemens on the problematic of the importance of the Indigenous/mother language for any people, any human culture. Ngugi died on the same day as Fara Clemens at the respectable age of 87.

Ngugi sets the problem of language with the following enunciations:

Language as communication and as culture are … products of each other. Communication creates culture: culture is a means of communication. Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, and their entire relationship to nature and to other beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.

 This conceptual position led to protracted debates as to what language colonially educated Africans should employ for expressing their artistic ideas and other knowledge products. Now, in the post-colonial era, should they continue using the colonially-imposed foreign languages like English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc., or jettison them in preference for the marginalized indigenous languages? Furthermore, the question is raised as to whether it is possible for an African authentically to express him/herself or to produce a genuine work of art or other knowledge product in a foreign language?

However, some others argue that the colonial languages are one of the best things that ever happened to Africa, in that they are the languages of civilization and modernization, the languages of science and technology, without which no people can progress in the modern world. Ngugi’s position in the face of this problem and the multiple questions it elicits is firm and clear. He has been an ardent crusader and his arguments on the question are clear, consistent, well-articulated, powerful, influential, sincere in that he tried to practice much of what he preaches but, in my view, perhaps, essentially mistaken. For him, African writing should only mean writing in the Indigenous African languages, and until African writers accepted that any true African literature must be written in African languages, they are not sufficiently mentally decolonized.

In my contribution to this debate, [fully elaborated in Tangwa GB 2017; "Revisiting the Language Question in African Philosophy", The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy, edited by Adeshina Afolayan and Toyin Falola, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 129-140], I submit that Ngugi’s arguments against the continued use of the colonial languages in Africa seem to me erroneous, not in their entirety, but in their exaggeratedness. Language is no doubt very important and an indispensable part of every culture but mainly as a tool for communication and a repository and vehicle of ideational or abstract entities. A mother language is particularly important for an individual in providing ideational paradigms on a mind as yet a relative tabula rasa; being the language with which the neonate first learns to communicate. But language, even the mother language, is not as determinant of human thought and behavior as Ngugi’s arguments presuppose. Attempts to reduce all human problems to problems of language are philosophically futile. Reality or facts should not be confused with the language (signals) with which we attempt to describe them.

I believe in linguistic pragmatism. To claim that an African cannot use a foreign colonial language authentically for self or artistic expression, or for knowledge production, appears simply counter-factual. Whenever I reread, say, Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child, A Grain of Wheat, or The River Between, (all written in the English language) or even if I consider just this piece I am now writing, I am more and more convinced of this conclusion. And yet, in my particular case, this in no way detracts from the emotional attachment I feel towards my mother language, Lamnso’, which I have progressively mastered better, both in speaking and in writing, ever since I started decolonizing my mind.

An African certainly can use a foreign language, colonial or otherwise, for authentic knowledge production, or for self-expression. The value of such a product for Africa, however, would depend on its relevance and importance for Africa. Some Africans have gained international fame and wealth for works or products that are of dubious worth/value to Africa but which clearly satisfy other non-African needs or tastes and there is perhaps nothing wrong with that. Choice of language, problem addressed, genre, and target audience, are the prerogative of the writer/thinker/artist. Judging the worth/value of what is written/produced is the prerogative of the reader/viewer/consumer.

Gobata, 03/06/2025


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