Fon Echekiye’s ‘Zachary Nkwo’s Ultimate Commentary’

Did you ever imagine that as a student at CCAST Bambili, Zachary Nkwo played football with PWD Bamenda, whose president was then Public Works Department recruit, Peter Mafany Musonge; that he also played with Kilo’s Club as goalkeeper?; that Professor Ephraim Ngwafor had earlier on succeeded him as goalkeeper at St. Joseph’s College Sasse?

Could you ever imagine that the shy, quiet man of very few spoken words had dreamt of joining the forces of law and order as a policeman? Could you believe that Zachary Nkwo grew up in several CDC camps, following his father to the farm during holidays and carrying produce on his head back home?

That Zachary Nkwo was given a majestic trolley ride when he first set to go to Sasse College? That the soft-spoken gentleman of the microphone was locked up in a cell at the Police College in Yaounde?

Many more of these fascinating questions are answered in Fon Echekiye’s new book; ZACHARY NKWO’S ULTIMATE COMMENTARY.

It seems, and this is likely truer than a conjecture, that as soon as Uncle Zac began hanging his microphone, Fon was only waiting to bring it down. And this, he did. Beyond using the microphone as Old Zac did, he has done the unthinkable – he has caused probably the most silent journalist outside the reporter’s booth to talk out loudly.

Uncle Zac has probably never spoken so extensively about himself anywhere that is known; after successfully insulating himself from the madding crowds. Fon has, therefore, provided a golden opportunity embedded in print for anyone to read and enjoy and discover the intrinsic passions that drove little Zac the camp boy to becoming a living legendary sports reporter in Cameroon.

The revelations in the book simply take your breath away.

This is a very intimate interview, cutting wide and digging deep into Uncle Zac’s life and bringing out details many would fear to provoke or offer to answer; Zac’s boyhood occasional crushes on the opposite sex, his religious beliefs as a Catholic Christian, the loss of a very much loved daughter and a bunch of challenges offered by life.

Through Fon’s insightful questions, Zac traces his career path with the scrupulous memory of an elephant. He is proud of the perseverance it took him to go through school and professional work in Francophone Yaounde. You will have a flavour of studying in Yaounde in French – three hours in English against 32 hours in French each week, and he knows that as sports reporters, they helped to spur the national football team. But when he looks back, Zac doesn’t see the triumphs portrayed in the press.

Instead, he says the experience left them disillusioned. And far from spurring the Indomitable Lions, commentating seemed only to clear the path for the journalists’ unstoppable abandonment; little more than just footnotes in the history of Cameroon sports-casting.

This is the story of Zac who as PWD goalkeeper came close to missing a vital GCE A’L examination, but he made it all the same and switched back to academics. He opens up a window into the world of Cameroon’s glorious football history. You will also discover in this book that one of the most formidable opponents of Cameroon football in the form of unpaid dues dates as far back as 1986. That year, the Lions went on strike for three days over unpaid dues as a prelude to the World Cup in Mexico.

In addition, you will wonder that Zac reported football matches without written scripts. As he reported with precision, so does Uncle Zac remember names, dates, places and events as if they have just happened. Zac remembers to the exact minute of the hour when a goal was scored even more than two decades ago. He recalls coaches and referees as if they are his siblings; names, years of coaching and refereeing.

ZACHARY NKWO’S ULTIMATE COMMENTARY is, indeed, a purely nostalgic, if not a torturous trip down memory lane. It is a kind of post-mortem, exploring the innards of Cameroon sports reporting; radically reduced to football and a historical recount that transports the reader through the trail of corruption, retarded development, local and international political intrigues, and so on and so forth.

The story, written in the form of a long interview, is rendered in simple, straightforward English sentences that can be reached easily by anyone. There is no excess baggage of bombastic vocabulary.

Fon Echekiye has carried out an antemortem on Old Zac as he still lives and breathes; to discover what made the cool and shy sports reporter tick so hard and so loud. And so proficiently.

Warning! If you have something very important to do, don’t open this book because you won’t be able to put it back down!