García Márquez in Africa

The title of this article is multidimensional. How was García Márquez’s writing received and distributed in Africa? Beyond Africa’s colonial languages—Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Italian, German, Dutch, and Arabic—into what continental languages was it translated (Swahili, Berber, Chichewa, Malagasy, Sotho, Amharic, Swazi, Comorian, Somali, Oromo, Manding?) and distributed, in what numbers, by what networks, and to which cities of Africa’s forty-eight sub-Saharan nations with their 750 to 3,000 languages? García Márquez published a few articles about Africa and traveled to Africa, reporting, speaking, and conferring. Thereafter the African diaspora in the Caribbean figured more prominently in his work. Finally, and most importantly, the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude inspired and validated writers in possession of rich regional folklore crossed by the stresses of modernization, postcolonialism, and language politics. African writers had already novelized their folklore (e.g., Nigeria’s Amos Tutuola and Guinea’s Camara Laye), experimented intertextually and historically (e.g., Mali’s Yambo Ouloguem), and ironized their history (e.g., Cameroon’s Mongo Beti and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe). The term that was originally interchangeable with “magic realism,” “the marvelous American real,” had been coined to describe Haiti, that is, the African diaspora. Such writers as Sierra Leone’s Syl Cheney-Coker, Nigeria’s Ben Okri and Chika Unigwe, Ghana’s Kojo Laing, Congo’s Sony Labou Tansi, Uganda’s Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Mozambique’s Mia Couto found their realities newly believable—and readable. As the British-Ghanaian Nii Parkes observed, “One Hundred Years of Solitude taught the West how to read a reality alternative to their own.”

Shaming Colonial Africa

An examination of the ways in which shame was used during the colonial period both to encourage submission to the colonial project and to resist that oppression. The primary texts to consider are Le vieux nègre et la médaille by Ferdinand Oyono for its depiction of shame’s utility in maintaining social hierarchies and how, ironically, a shameful narrative can contest that power, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu by Ousmane Sembène, for its more strident shaming and addition of economic and legal aspects of shame, and Le pauvre Christ de Bomba by Mongo Beti and L’Aventure ambiguë by Cheikh Hamidou Kane for their inclusion of the role religious shame plays in colonial oppression.

Narrative Fictions on State-Terrorism and Trauma: Re-reading Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo

The relationship that exists between the state and her citizens has been described by Jean Jacques Rousseau as “a social contract.” In this contractual agreement, citizens are bound to respect state authority while the state, in turn, has the bounden duty to protect her citizens and guide them in their aspirations. In fact, any state that does not perform this duty is guilty of violating the fundamental rights of her citizens. This, however, is not the case in most postcolonial societies where the citizens see the state as an aggressive apparatus against their wellbeing because the state is not fulfilling its own part of the social contract, which requires them to protect the citizens and guide them in their aspirations. This unfortunate situation has laid the foundation for protest and anti-establishment writings in post-colonial societies – especially in Africa. Since literature, as a semiotic resource, is coterminous with its socio-political context, this attitude of the state has drawn inimical criticism from key postcolonial African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mongo Beti, and Nadine Gordimer. Using Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo, this essay shows the relationship between state-terrorism and the traumatic conditions of the citizens in contemporary Africa. From the perspective of trauma theory, the essay defends the premise that the postcolonial subjects/characters, in the novels under study, are traumatized and depressed because of their continuous victimization by the state. Due to this state-imposed terror and hardship, the citizens are forced to indulge in political agitation, radicalism and violence in response to their destitute and impoverished conditions.

Individu, identité et interculturalité dans Mission terminée de Mongo Beti

Cet article se veut une étude analytique de l’identité et de la culture africaine dans Mission terminée de Mongo Beti. Il a pour objectif de faire la lumière sur la spécificité de cette société, la place que l’individu y occupe et les transformations qu’elle a subies avec l’arrivée du colonisateur. Il est centré d’abord sur les personnages du roman et leurs attributions afin de savoir comment est constitué, structuré et hiérarchisé le groupe social auquel appartiennent ces entités. Il reconstitue ensuite les aspects culturels de la vie de l’homme noir tels qu’ils sont suggérés par le texte.

L’histoire et son traitement dans l’oeuvre d’Henri Lopes

À la différence de Mongo Beti ou de Tchicaya U Tam’si, Henri Lopes, dans ses romans, n’a pas cherché à retracer une histoire avec la périodisation qu’un tel projet implique. Dans un premier temps, on examinera l’intérêt que Lopes porte à l’écriture d’une chronique sociale nettement insérée dans le contexte de l’Afrique des années 1960-1970, avec le recueil de nouvelles Tribaliques (1971), La Nouvelle Romance (1976) et Sans tam-tam (1977). Puis, avec Le Pleurer-rire (1982), il sort du cadre strict de la chronique en proposant, dans la lignée de Rabelais et M.A. Asturias, le portrait d’un dictateur, truculent, cruel, obscène. L’article s’interroge enfin sur la façon dont Lopes ne cesse d’entrelacer l’histoire et l’Histoire, en s’appuyant notamment sur le cas de Marie-Ève, l’héroïne peintre de Sur l’autre rive (1992), et sur des textes plus nettement autobiographiques (Ma grand-mère bantoue et mes ancêtres les Gaulois, 2003) ou relevant de l’autofiction (Le Méridional, 2015).

Littérature de combat chez Mongo Béti ou le choix d’un réalisme militant

Les œuvres de fiction, on le sait, reposent principalement sur l’imagination. Pour autant, elles ne s’enracinent pas moins dans la réalité sociale dont elles aident ainsi à réfléchir les problèmes en les mettant en scène dans leurs moindres manifestations. « Le roman est un miroir formidable qui permet aux gens de prendre conscience d’eux-mêmes, de réfléchir sur leur condition et sur leur société. Ceci quelle que soit la situation du pays ». Telle était l’esthétique défendue par Mongo Béti pour dire qu’il y a toujours un rapport entre Histoire et littérature, réel et esthétique. Fortement tirée de l’environnement social et de la vie quotidienne en général, l’œuvre de Béti offre souvent des espaces textuels qui se confondent avec les espaces de vie de son auteur. Le matériau romanesque découle de la mise en commun d’éléments textuels et extratextuels qui constituent ce que Jauss nomme l’arrière-plan référentiel qui s’inscrit dans le texte comme cet ensemble de signes reconnaissables et identifiables par le lecteur. D’où de multiples éléments de création servant à la fois de référence au réel et au référent fictionnel. La société politique et sociale de la fiction mise en scène par Mongo Béti semble souligner des points qui méritent d’être analysés afin appréhender la « marque de fabrique » de l’écriture bétienne. Celle-ci recoupe l’idée de progrès par son engagement ou la critique sociale, la production d’une vision du monde qui se veut précise et exhaustive (d’où le réalisme). Tels sont certains des aspects à élucider à travers Branle-bas en noir et blancetHistoire du fou.

Revisiting trauma and homo religiosus in selected texts by Mongo Beti and Véronique Tadjo

This paper locates religion within the literary narratives of traumatogenic experiences such as war and genocide as depicted in the novels The Poor Christ of Bomba by Mongo Beti and Véronique Tadjo's The Shadows of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda. In spite of evident reference to the role played by religion in traumatic and traumatising encounters, it features simply as a footnote to the ethnic tensions that underpin these encounters. Drawing on the theoretical work of Kurtz (2014) and other scholars as well as casting a glance at anticolonial and postcolonial Francophone literatures, this paper argues that trauma in modern postcolonial Francophone literature is ubiquitous. It reveals itself in the post-independence contradictions and injustices as depicted by modern francophone authors and thinkers whose subject matter is largely dominated by such motifs as corruption, war, violence, insanity, rape, poverty, disillusionment, which all accommodate a direct challenge to religion. The absence of religiosity in trauma literature suggests a reversal of the socio-historical stereotype that frames Africans as highly religious, and whose opposition to religion is a result of enlightenment through education.