Book Launch for acclaimed Author Julius M Wamey. OCT 1st in Atlanta Georgia.

The Vulture Family Convention: A Novel of Cameroon Life

Book overview  
Amid a simmering insurgency in the west, its northern regions all but taken over by a terrorist Islamist sect, a civil war in the neighboring Central African Republic spilling over its eastern borders, intertribal fighting among its ruling southern tribes, Russian private military company mercenaries infiltrating its territory, and corruption so rampant that the country itself seems to be on sale to the highest bidder, Cameroon’s most powerful minister Marcel Pierre Efane, dies from a mysterious disease. Efane comes from an obscure tribe in the marginalized Anglophone minority population and has Frenchified his name to fit in with the ruling Francophone elite. No one understands how he has survived successive reshuffles for almost five decades and become the most powerful minister in the government.

Caught in the crossfire of these crises are the ordinary citizens: the Anglophones whose territory is the battleground of a hot war, and the Francophones who have resigned themselves to the whims of perpetual dictatorship.

It falls to Efane’s elderly nephew, bagman, and partner in crime of nearly half a century, the 80+ year-old Colonel Protus Wi-Ekeli to convey the big man’s casket to their mountain village of Kintum in the northwest Anglophone mountains. The journey is fraught with deadly obstacles as the colonel sets off with a convoy of his tribespeople and paid official mourners: crumbling roads left unpaved by unscrupulous contractors, corrupt government officials, breakaway Anglophone insurgent factions threatening to break a tenuous ceasefire, and rainstorms of biblical proportions washing out mountain road tracks. Among the traveling mourners are internally displaced people taking advantage of the military-protected convoy to visit their home region after eight years of war, making observations about the state of the nation and providing entertaining commentary on all subjects under the sun, from politics to the new issue of gay rights.

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