Tussles. Collected Plays

written by G.D. Nyamndi

This collection groups together four plays – {The Bite, Things Fall in Place, The Will and The Imprisonment of Sende Ghandi} – written between 1995 and 2006. The plays in this volume dramatize a comprehensive world view. Through characters and themes chosen for their power to articulate the intended message, the plays paint a convincing and at times funny picture of human beings tussling with daily life. With clearly non-reductionist purpose, the actions all eschew the narrow minority questions so dominant in Cameroon Anglophone drama and instead reach out to concerns of a broader nature.

In these plays Nyamndi does more than entertain. He reaches into the psychology of human relations and individual drives, and intimates responses to occasioned challenges. His wide, penetrating mind meanders in society: detecting the drunk before he takes his first drop; uncovering the embezzler even before he lays his hands on the collective holding; steeling the masses before the calamities of misrule descend on them; hoisting the flag of freedom long before revolutionaries come anywhere near the mast. He uses the play for healing purposes.

G.D. Nyamndi

G.D. Nyamndi is a critic, playwright and essayist of some repute. He is the author of a play collection, The Silver Lining, and of the highly acclaimed political treatise, Whether Losing Whether Winning. Babi Yar Symphony is his first novel, to be followed in the months ahead by another one, Dogs in the Sun. He teaches Language and Literature at the University of Buea in Cameroon, where he is also Head of the Department of English.