Conditions in Central Africa have rarely been conducive to the development of any sort of book culture. Dominated by the huge but war-wracked Democratic Republic of the Congo—the successor state to the Belgian Congo, where Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) set his Heart of Darkness (1902)—much of Central Africa remains unstable, as neighboring states are constantly pulled into the decade-old conflict in the Congo. Some of the nations further removed from those hostilities are arguably too stable, controlled by some of the world’s longest-serving autocrats: Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has led his nation since 1979, and Gabon’s Omar Bongo held power from 1967 until his death in 2009.
French is the primary literary language of this region, with a few exceptions such as Equatorial Guinea, whose colonial legacy is mainly Spanish.
Ethnic tensions between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes have repeatedly led to large-scale massacres in both Burundi (notably in 1972) and Rwanda (1994), a legacy that dominates Western perceptions of these small African nations. Much has been published about the Rwandan massacres of 1994 in particular, though most of it is nonfiction. Among the best of these works are Jean Hatzfeld’s (b. 1949) collections of first-person accounts and Philip Gourevitch’s (b. 1961) We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (1998). Fiction dealing with these events also has been written largely by foreigners. Books such as Canadian author Gil Courtemanche’s (1943–2011) A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (2000, English 2003) typically feature a foreign protagonist caught up in events. Jean-Philippe Stassen’s (b. 1966) short graphic novel Deogratias (2000, English 2006) offers a broader look at the events of those years and their effects on a variety of young characters.
In 1998, Nocky Djedanoum, the artistic director of the annual French Fest’Africa festival, called on African authors to respond to the events in Rwanda, and the resulting project, Rwanda: To Write Against Oblivion (Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire), led to the publication of numerous works. Among the novels that are part of this project are Senegalese author
Boubacar Boris Diop’s (b. 1946)
Murambi, the Book of Bones (2000, English 2006) and Guinean-born author
Tierno Monénembo’s (b. 1947)
The Oldest Orphan (2000, English 2004). The main character in
Murambi, Cornelius Uvimana, returns to Rwanda in 1998 after a long absence and tries to come to terms with what happened. Diop’s novel is particularly effective in focusing on the ominous uncertainty in the aftermath of the massacres, with the mass flight of much of the population and calls for vengeance and retribution.
The Oldest Orphan is narrated by the teenager Faustin Nsenghimana, telling his story from prison where he is awaiting his execution. He only gradually reveals both what happened to him and his family years earlier, during those horrible one hundred days of 1994, and his later crime for which he has been sentenced to death. Monénembo affectingly describes a country and a people still crushed by the burden of what transpired there.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
Despite its large population and storied history, relatively little fiction has come out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Previously known under, among others, the names Zaïre (between 1971 and 1997, under the rule of Mobuto Sese Seko), and the Belgian Congo, internal conflicts and authoritarian rule have prevented the development of much of a book culture there.
The academic V. Y. Mudimbe (b. 1941), who has long lived and taught abroad, is among the few authors to emerge from the Congo. The three novels that Mudimbe published in the 1970s have been translated into English, each offering a different reaction to the postcolonial experience. The most compelling of them, The Rift (1979, English 1993), consists largely of the notebooks of a young academic, Ahmed Nana, written shortly before his death. He returned to Africa from France to research the history and customs of a Congolese ethnic group, the Kuba, but has a mental breakdown. The protagonists of Mudimbe’s other novels also are unsure of their roles in a postcolonial world, most notably the former Catholic priest turned revolutionary, Pierre Landu, of Between Tides (1973, English 1991). Although Mudimbe’s cerebral fiction feels dated now, his novels do pose interesting questions about personal and political identity and roles in contemporary Africa.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s (b. 1981) Tram 83 (2014, English 2015) is set in an unnamed country that is clearly inspired by the author’s native Congo. The local restaurant bar Tram 83 is the epicenter of this raucous novel of contemporary Central Africa.
From Joseph Conrad’s time to the present, the Congo has been a very popular setting for fiction, for fantasy-adventure tales such as Michael Crichton’s (1942–2008) Congo (1980) and Albert Sánchez Piñol’s (b. 1965) Pandora in the Congo (2005, English 2008). But writers have also been drawn to the country’s explosive politics and history, as well as to figures like the first elected (and later assassinated) prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, and the outrageous dictator, Mobuto Sese Seko. Most of Ronan Bennett’s (b. 1956) The Catastrophist (1998) takes place during the tumultuous years of 1959 and 1960, telling the dirty story of how Mobuto came to power. Barbara Kingsolver’s (b. 1955) best-selling novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998) also begins in 1959 with the arrival of a missionary family in the Congo and covers decades of their experiences in the country.
CONGO-BRAZZAVILLE
Even though the Republic of the Congo, a former French colony generally known as Congo-Brazzaville, contains only a small fraction of the population of its southern neighbor across the Congo River, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, several well-known authors are closely linked to this country. Sony Labou Tansi (1947–1995) most obviously straddles the river divide, born in the Belgian colony to a local father and a mother from the French colony before moving to Brazzaville in his youth. The best of his novels available in English, The Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez (1985, English 1995), is typical, with its fantastical exaggerations. Like almost all his work, the novel is set in a fictional troubled African country, and even though Sony heaps misery upon misery, it also is a comic farce. Straying far from conventional realism, Sony’s cry of outrage goes beyond much political African fiction in its incorporation of myth and fantasy.
Henri Lopes (b. 1937) also was born in the Belgian colony but has held numerous positions in the Congo-Brazzaville government, including that of prime minister and ambassador to France. His novel
The Laughing Cry (1982, English 1987) is a satire of an outrageous African dictatorship, presented from shifting narrative perspectives. In its self-reflexive parts, it is reminiscent of Milan Kundera, right down to the prominent use of Diderot, and its comic approach is closer to that of the Soviet satirists than what was generally found in Africa at that time. Even though Lopes is a major author, his only other work available in English is the early story collection
Tribaliks (1971, English 1987).
Emmanuel Dongala (b. 1941) taught chemistry for two decades at the University of Brazzaville but fled the country for the United States in the wake of the violent civil conflict that erupted in 1997. His books are among the most approachable fictions of Africa for foreign readers, covering progressively narrower slices of recent history. The Fire of Origins (1987, English 2001) follows its larger-than-life protagonist, Mandala Mankunku, from the arrival of the French colonialists to the period after independence, a quick sweep through the history of twentieth-century Congo. Dongala does not identify Congo as the setting of Little Boys Come from the Stars (1998, English 2001) and Johnny Mad Dog (2002, English 2005), but both are clearly based at least in part on Congolese experiences. The teenage narrator of Little Boys Come from the Stars, Matapari, allows Dongala to present his story from a perspective that retains some innocence, making for a gentle satire that manages to land solid hits on many targets, including both authoritarian and democratic rule. The alternating narrators of Johnny Mad Dog also are in their teens but quickly lose their innocence when they are caught up in a violent rebellion in which child soldiers play a major role. One, a girl, Laokolé, is studying for her final school exams when war breaks out; the other is the thuggish Johnny. Cutting back and forth between the two sides in this fast-paced story, Dongala presents a riveting picture of the horrifying brutality and human toll of these civil conflicts in parts of Africa, including Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Congo-Brazzaville.
The attention-seeking narrator of
Alain Mabanckou’s (b. 1966)
African Psycho (2003, English 2007), Grégoire, whose idol is a brutal killer, hopes to find fame in notoriety but fails miserably.
African Psycho sits uneasily between comic grotesque and moral tale. Mabanckou’s approach works better in
Broken Glass (2006, English 2009), a barroom novel steeped in alcohol, personal stories, and, above all else, cultural and literary references. From the names—the bar where most of the action takes place is the Credit Gone Away, and the narrator is the eponymous Broken Glass—to the tall tales themselves, Mabanckou’s style ultimately triumphs over substance. Clearly, Mabanckou is one of Africa’s most promising Francophone authors.
CAMEROON
Both French and English are official languages of Cameroon, which is among the region’s most politically stable nations. With Ferdinand Oyono (1929–2010) and Mongo Beti (1932–2001), it also boasts two of the most important African writers of their generation. Although Oyono largely abandoned writing to serve in several government and diplomatic posts, two of his darkly comic novels from the 1950s, Houseboy (1956, English 1966) and The Old Man and the Medal (1956, English 1969), are some of the best about the final years of French colonial rule. Beti’s The Poor Christ of Bomba (1956, English 1971) addresses the failures of missionary work in Africa, and his Mission to Kala (published in the United States as Mission Accomplished; 1957, English 1958) is a sharp critique of the colonial educational system. Beti moved to France before Cameroon achieved independence in 1960 and did not return until the early 1990s, but after a lengthy silence, he did resume writing. His later fiction is more overtly political, beginning with a loosely connected trilogy strongly inspired by the revolutionary figure killed by the French, Ruben Um Nyobé (1913–1958). Beti continued to be highly critical of how African leaders failed their states in the decades after independence, with The Story of the Madman (1994, English 2001) the best example of Beti’s style of mixing anger with the comic as it addresses postcolonial chaos and dictatorship in an African state.
Calixthe Beyala (b. 1961) moved to France when she was seventeen and has become a prolific, prize-winning author. In the mid-1990s, however, she was accused of and charged with plagiarism from the works of authors that include Ben Okri and Paule Constant. Her often fragmentary and nonlinear narratives contain graphic descriptions of raw violence and sex. While many of her works are set in Africa, her story of an immigrant family in Paris, Loukoum: The Little Prince of Belleville (1992, English 1995), largely narrated by a young boy, has the most obvious appeal.
ELSEWHERE IN CENTRAL AFRICA
Some fiction from the other Central African nations is published in France, but almost nothing is available in English translation. Sparsely populated, autocratically governed, and generally very poor (with the exception of oil-rich Gabon and Equatorial Guinea), little fiction has emerged from the mainly Francophone nations of the area, including Chad and the Central African Republic. Gabon-born Daniel Mengara’s (b. 1967) Mema (2003), in which a son chronicles his mother’s difficult life in an African village, is among the few novels available in English written by someone who had lived in the region. Spanish-writing Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel’s (b. 1966) novel takes place on his native island of Annobón, in Equatorial Guinea. It is entitled By Night the Mountain Burns (2009, English 2014) and is the first of this prolific and highly regarded author’s works to be translated.
A PRIX GONCOURT–WINNING AFRICAN WRITER
René Maran (1887–1960) was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique but spent much of his life in Africa. His novel Batouala (1921, revised 1938, English 1922, 1932, 1972), set in what would later become the Central African Republic, was widely praised (by Ernest Hemingway, among others) and awarded the Prix Goncourt, making Maran the first black author to win the prestigious French literary prize. Of more historical than literary interest now, its attack on French colonialism and the authenticity of the author’s perspective made it a seminal work of the period; it also was soon banned in the French colonies.