What God Has Put Asunder

Description

What God Has Put Asunder sounds like a misquote of Mark 10:9, the biblical consecration of marriage. But can a marriage fraught with infidelity, violence and abuse be considered as put together by God? Weka does not think so. She had reluctantly settled for Miche Garba as the lesser evil of two suitors who were being foisted on her by the authorities of the orphanage where she grew up. They stonewalled against her pleas to be on her own, claiming it would make her vulnerable. Or were they afraid she might become a permanent liability to the orphanage?

Garba turns out a cheating, unloving partner, squandering on his many concubines, the proceeds from the farms and lands Weka inherited from her late parents, while neglecting her upkeep and her children’s. At the height of the disaffection, Weka runs off with her children to rehabilitate her family estate. Having failed to forcefully bring them back, Garba sues Weka for abandoning her conjugal home. Will the court sunder the marriage of inconvenience? And would it help matters if Weka’s full name were “West Kamerun”? This should unmask other ticket names like Sister Sabeth and Father UNOR. For these two What God Has Put Asunder is a call-out for double standards. Can they belatedly remedy the injustice of denying Weka the separate status which they granted, at the same time, to many other damsels who, to date, are far less endowed and more vulnerable than she was?

Praise for “What God Has Put Asunder”

“Victor Epie Ngome’s play, What God Has Put Asunder is a classic in the pantheon of Cameroon literature and a fine piece of art in any pantheon of great plays. An engaging stylist and journalist known for his sophisticated verbal arts, Victor Epie Ngome employs metonymy in developing characterization and the metaphor of marriage in developing plot. With these two stylistic devices, Ngome creates two levels of meaning in his play, one literary and the other allegorical. On the literal level is an all-too-familiar story of a woman who endures gross domestic abuse from a ruthless husband and at the allegorical level, the play explores salient points in the political history of Cameroon that have contributed to the gross marginalization of Anglophone Cameroonians as a minority group. What is common at both the literal and allegorical levels is that Victor Epie Ngome projects the voice of the oppressed and castigates the oppressor. The title of the play, “What God Has Put Asunder” provides a solution for the conflict at the literal and allegorical levels. The contested “marriage” of Weka and Garba has broken down irretrievably and the only solution is for the parties to stay apart. Therefore, what God has put asunder; no man should put together!”

-Joyce Ashuntantang,
Author of Beautiful Fire, University of Hartford, USA

“Victor Epie Ngome’s What God Has Put Asunder is perhaps the most powerfully apt metaphor on what has been called “the Anglophone problem in Cameroon” … The play is frightfully accurately predictive of the outcome of the 1961 so-called Reunification of Southern Cameroons and La République du Cameroun.”

–Godfrey B. Tangwa, PhD, FCAS, FAAS,
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy