Background
Mr. Dipoko was born in Douala, Cameroon, February 28, 1936. He was a son of Paul Sonne Dipoko (a chief).
Mr. Dipoko was born in Douala, Cameroon, February 28, 1936. He was a son of Paul Sonne Dipoko (a chief).
Mbella Dipoko was educated in western Cameroon and eastern Nigeria during 1952-1956.
Mr. Dipoko served as a clerk at Development Corporation, Tiko, Cameroon, since 1956. From 1957 to 1960 he worked at Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation Eagos as a reporter for Radio Nigeria, until 1968 he was on assignment in Paris. It was in France that he began making a name for himself as a leading African writer and poet with critically acclaimed poems, short stories and other literary pieces in journals such as Black Orpheus, Transition and Presence Africaine. His plays were also broadcast over the BBC and published in a number of anthologies. In 1966, he published his first full length novel, "A few Nights and Days" set in Paris. This was followed by "Because of Women" in 1969, set on the banks of the river Mungo, and then "Black and White in Love" (1970).
Mbella Dipoko did not produce any major work after "Black and white in Love" even though he continued to write poetry, short stories, plays and literary criticism in French and English. His most popular poems also continued to appear in numerous anthologies, the most popular being 'Our History (To Precolonial Africa)' which is still widely used in many literature departments in the West.
After a quarter of a century in the West, Mbella Sonne Dipoko returned home in 1985 to his native Misaka in Tiko sub-division in Fako division. He took up farming and fishing, led an ascetic life and shunned most vestiges of the West which he had so readily embraced in his early life. He was always a sight to behold with his overflowing beard, his simple white shirt, and his sanja or traditional loin always matched with either a pair of slippers or sandals.
In 1991 Mr. Dipoko was enthroned as the chief of Misaka, a position previously held by his late father. In February 1995 he was appointed mayor of the Tiko Municipal Council, a position he held until February 1996, when the opposition SDF took over the municipality.
Later Mr. Dipoko was affiliated with fesence Africaine. He's also widely known as a writer. Mbella Dipoko was a contributor to anthologies, including Modern Poetry from Africa, West African Verse, African Writing Today. Contributor to Transition and United Asia.
(Poems of love and wandering, from a Cameroon born poet wi...)
(The story of a womanizer and his love for family, by Came...)
By 1990, Cameroon, like the rest of Africa, was swept by calls for a more liberal political landscape and the reinstitution of multiparty politics. Mr. Dipoko, who unlike other Cameroonian writers in exile, had shunned political activism because “it really is not courage when one can only shout invectives from the safe distance of exile,” quickly made his position on the new or emerging political dispensation known.
In an article titled “The New Politics” which was serialized in Cameroon Life (it was described by some as his political manifesto), Mbella Dipoko condemned the excesses and failures of the Biya regime and warned the public not to be taken in by the unrealistic promises and holier-than-thou attitude of the budding opposition, and insisted that salvation would come only from a new African spirituality. It was in this manifesto that he began to lay the foundation for what many would later consider an incomprehensible political volte face against the very ideals and principles he once espoused in his writings.