A Tribute To Late Professor Bole N Butake

Late Professor Bole N Butake is among the group of young Cameroon intellectuals who got to Yaounde some time after independence - as big university boys.

 In his case, he really had to drudge hard at every turn, given that he was an orphan of both parents, and had managed to go through his pre-university education studies thanks to the charity of benefactors, who had been rightly convinced to have seen him a very intelligent and focused young man.

 From his St Patrick Primary School Nkor, through SAHECO to CCAST Bambili, the young Butake was a bubble of mettle and teeming potential. By tye time he got to the Yaounde university, freshman's proclivity for letters was already evident. His creative streak first came to light especially as a post-graduate student, with the founding and managing of The Mould magazine in 1976; thus would serve as the creative magazine of the then Faculty of Letters, Arts and Foreign Languages for long.

 Butake's initial love was poetry as his many poems in the copies of this mag showed & he was editor while it lasted and came to feature many who later became writers: the Ndumbe Eyohs, the Kitts Mbebohs, the Nalova Lyongas, the Edward Akos, the Tala Kashims, the Tangyie Suh-Nfors, the Tah Protuses, the Bumuh Martins,etc. Even masters like the eminent Bernard Fonlon of blessed memory, who trained them to be writers and critics, as he loved to put it,like the Prof Ze Amvelas, etc, published in that famous mag.

 Prof Butake would later study in Leeds University,after which he became a full time university don in UNIYAO - not yet the splintered I and II. With his peers the likes of late Lambo, late Siga Asanga, late Mbeboh, Lyonga, Futcha, late Jikong Stephen, late Ebot, late Tambi Jot, Alobwede d'Epie, etc and under the mentorship of their venerable Professor Fonlon and his co- professors, the late Butake was among the first group of Cameroonian teachers recruited to man the English Dep't. He would later on move to the African Literature Department, where he made a name as theatre guru and playwright and established an enviable reputation with peers the likes of late Hansel Ndumbe Eyoh, Gilbert Doho,etc.

It was sometime in 1984, after a creative writers' training course which he attended in Iowa in the US of A that Bole Butake abandoned his first love, poetry, to adopt drama, especially drama for "conscientisation" and social awareness. He retired from the Faculty of Arts, Letters and Human Sciences in 2012 and was given a rousing send-off from that dep't that spanned 2 days, 14/06/2012 & 15/06/2012, with testimonies from the likes of Prof Breitinger from Bayreuth Germany, Prof Odhiambo from Moi University Kenya and the cream of the Cameroon intelligentsia.

 He leaves behind a rich legacy of plays: The Rape of Michelle; Lake God; The Survivors; And Palm Wine Will Flow; Shoes and Four Men in Arms; Dance of the Vampires; Family Saga; Bethrotal Without Libation; Zintgraff and the Battle of Mankon (coauthored with Gilbert Doho)