S.N. Tita: 1929-2001 (I) The Bookman

By Franklin Sone Bayen Playwright, Bole Butake said at a 1994 “Conference on Anglophone Cameroon Literature” in the University of Buea that indigenous writing and publishing was rare in decades past because books in their printed form looked so perfect – they so looked like the Bible – and thus could only have been made by God, if not Whites only. Neither God nor White, S.N. Tita (1929-2011) who died December 1 in Limbe aged 82, may have been immune to that complex. At the time he wrote and printed books in his own printing press from the late 1950s, the art and technology were still a marvel and looked alien to even some of the most enlightened of his time. He was author, publisher and printer of the legendary series History, Geography, Rural Science for Cameroon from his Nooremac Press. He was a bookman par excellence in all senses. What study manuals would we have used in primary school had Tita not written and printed? In my schoolbag the only other indigenous author was E.K. Martins, rather co-author – with a foreigner – of “New Nation”, the famous Arithmetic textbook. Incidentally our neighbour during my childhood in Clerks Quarters, Limbe, Martins was a Krio, member of a community of freed (Black American) slaves from West Africa who sailed to Victoria (Limbe) with Baptist Missionary, Alfred Saker. He was therefore not so indigenous. Even when there was another early indigenous author, Tita had evidently pulled his hand along. S.E. Abangma’s “Civics for Cameroon” was printed by Tita’s Nooremac Press. Martin Amin’s Mathematics textbook for senior primary only came later towards the 1980s and the first indigenous English reader with a Cameroonian co-author, “Cameroon Primary English” by David Weir and Augustin Ndangam, was introduced when we did senior primary in the early 80s. And that launched the post-Tita age of indigenous publishing. A decade later, local publishing began to open to the floodgate we know today. Before them, primary school textbooks, the “Evans English Reader” series by J.C. Gagg with Work Books, Lacombe’s senior primary Mathematics, “First Aid in English” and its cousin “Student’s Companion”, were in the category of “perfect” books that intimidated local author’s, according to Butake; not S.N. Tita. So thanks to Tita, we read Whiteman books and read Blackman books and for us, they were all just books without distinction. How natural therefore, that when publishing became an academic discipline in the University of Buea’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communication in the mid 1990s, my Publishing professor was Julius Che Tita, son of S.N. Tita. Born and bred in his father’s factory, Nooremac Press and exposed and initiated into his father’s rudimentary, instinctive printing, Che had returned from the UK, polished with some of the most modern literature and techniques in the art, scientifically measured and computer assisted. If his father’s printing was self-made like Michael Henchard in Charles Dickens’ “Mayor of Casterbridge”, Che Tita gave the touch of Farfrae when outside amphitheatres, he published books and other documents as a business. S.N. Tita was some man. Elsewhere people of his ilk are heroes. In my country, while those who gain fame hurting the nation are hailed because of the flamboyance ill-gotten wealth enables them to show off, true heroes who give so much from so little, fade away like the star of the morning, without a heroes’ song sung in their honour. But God knows they can always be remembered at least by us the lowliest for what they have done. S.N. Tita will be remembered.