Litumbe Larger than Life
I once told Albert Mukong (RIP), in a serious joke, that he could one day become president and still create an opposition party. His reaction to views expressed by our mutual friend, Vincent Feko (RIP), were to me a clear sign that Mukong was an unrepentant political activist but, by his low tolerance level, not much of a democrat and, by implication, hadn't much of what I would look for in a politician.
Like Mukong, his contemporary, Mola Njoh Litumbe, was an uncompromising activist who pulled no punches in the fight to decolonise Southern Cameroon. It's a wonder their paths did not meet in Kondengui where Mukong was the Prisoner without a Crime.
But it was perhaps their styles that made the difference. While Mukong was given to unguarded petulance and testy explosions, Litumbe was a suave and circumspect public speaker. Without a script, he spoke his mind fluently and effectively, with a disarming touch of humor and persuasion.
If one sees party politics as the pursuit of power and privilege, then Mola Njoh was even less of a politician than Mukong. And if his stint with the LDA proved anything, it was that Mola was not cut out for the dog-eat-dog intrigues that are the Hallmark of party politics.
He once expressed very amusing shock and dismay at the fact that Fru Ndi came campaigning in Buea. He had expected the SDF to leave Buea to the LDA since the two parties had a common opponent, the CPDM, to beat.
But his apparent political naivete was nothing compared to the myopia and suicidal egoism of his supposed allies who did not see the need to tap into his obvious strengths for their collective good.
It was also obvious that he found Fru Ndi's flirtation with Yaoundé in devilish bad taste. But it took accompanying Foncha and Muna to the UN and later on their contrition tour of Southern Cameroon for Litumbe to identify publicly and unambiguously with the one cause that made him tick - the cause for the statehood of Southern Cameroon.
In this regard he quickly distinguished himself as an archive on two legs. Facts, figures and dates from Southern Cameron's history cascaded from his lips with such ease as can only come of being an eye witness, or better still a participant - which he was.
And you can't mention facts and figures without recalling that Mola Njoh was a high-flying auditor, and hence a stickler for probity in public management.
Normally, being an activist of any kind in the evening of one's life is a tall order, but Mola stunned everyone by both his activism and physical vivacity even as he clocked a century.
And he not only carried that rare endowment in years with astounding grace and elegance, he used the accompanying wisdom to imprint the Southern Cameroon struggle without ever being sucked into the baneful horsetrading that bedeviled it. He thus remained till his death, arguably, the most widely respected and politically unblemished patriarch West of the Mungo.
Would that his mantle of altruistic activism fell on an Elisha among those jostling to lead the way to Buea - someone driven by the zeal to right the wrongs done our people, not by the lust to feather their personal nest.
Victor Epie Ngome.