Mongo Beti, the father of African literature

The recent publication by IUP of Cruel City (2013) by the renowned Cameroonian author Mongo Beti (born Alexandre Biyidi Awala, 1932 – 2001) can best be appreciated in the context of this programmatic endeavour. ILLUSTRATION | NATION

What you need to know:

  • In Kenya, this publication should be especially welcome. It gives us reason to bring to light the little known but important fact that Mongo Beti’s first significant work of fiction was the short story, ‘Without Hatred or Love,’ published in 1953 in Présence Africaine.
  • In the essay, Mongo Beti examines the state of contemporary African literature in French and comes to the conclusion that, there is “not one quality literary work inspired by Black Africa”. He sees the reason for this deplorable state of affairs in the compromises Black writers are willing to make to please the European public for whom they primarily write and who determines their publication fate.
  • Only two years after Cruel City, Mongo Beti gained widespread acclaim for his novel, The Poor Christ of Bomba. But the novel was banned in the colony due to the satirical and highly critical description of the missionary and colonial world.

With every new translation in its Global African Voices series, Indiana University Press, USA, moves a step further towards the realisation of its goal of overcoming the fragmentariness of modern African literature by integrating originally French-language literary works into the English-language stream.

This is a significant undertaking, one which, when augmented by similar efforts of translation from Portuguese, Arabic, and, of course, African languages, will not only consolidate the rich tradition of African writing, but will also invigorate this tradition through the creative possibilities the new contact links will offer.

The recent publication by IUP of Cruel City (2013) by the renowned Cameroonian author Mongo Beti (born Alexandre Biyidi Awala, 1932 – 2001) can best be appreciated in the context of this programmatic endeavour.

In Kenya, this publication should be especially welcome. It gives us reason to bring to light the little known but important fact that Mongo Beti’s first significant work of fiction was the short story, ‘Without Hatred or Love,’ published in 1953 in Présence Africaine.

The story tells of a young Mau Mau rebel and his fight against the white oppressors and their black lackeys. With its denunciation of the devastating effects of colonial occupation, this short piece set in Kenya can be seen as the precursor of Mongo Beti’s great novels of liberation.

BLACK SCRIBE

Kenya may thus lay partial claim to Mongo Beti as a writer whom it inspired!’

Cruel City is a combined edition of two unique creations. One is Cruel City itself, the first novel Mongo Beti wrote, published in French in 1954.

The excellent English translation of Pim Higginson thus takes us to the very origins of a writer, who was destined to become one of the founders of modern African literature.

The other is the translation of Mongo Beti’s essay, ‘Romancing Africa’ (1955), which stands out as the first ever published Francophone critique of the representation of Africa in French-language African literature.

In the essay, Mongo Beti examines the state of contemporary African literature in French and comes to the conclusion that, there is “not one quality literary work inspired by Black Africa”.

He sees the reason for this deplorable state of affairs in the compromises Black writers are willing to make to please the European public for whom they primarily write and who determines their publication fate.

This public will “do everything to nip any realistic African literature in the bud” because “the reality of Black Africa, its only true reality is before all else colonisation and its crimes”.

To avoid rejection, the 'Black scribe' will avoid this reality like plague and instead seek refuge into the folkloric. In his writing, he will invoke “sorcerers, his grandfather’s snakes, initiations at nightfall, fish-women”; he would claim “to have belonged to the brotherhood of lions, to have petted a sacred crocodile, etc”. This “nonsense” will invariably be received with White “enthusiasm”.

Such enthusiasm serves to entrap the African writer further “in the quicksand of the folkloric, a mess from which it is difficult to extricate oneself”.

Written 60 years ago, ‘Romancing Africa’ is important not only in its historical context, but also for its continuing relevance. It is undoubtedly the great predecessor of Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical guide on How to Write about Africa.

Cruel City reflects the intense anti-colonial fervour of the time of its writing and is permeated by a muted but unmistakable revolutionary spirit.

Set in the 1930s in an unnamed French African colony, it follows the travails of Banda, a young man who moves between village and city driven by his determination to fulfil his dying mother’s last wish to see him successfully settled.

When the novel opens, he has left the village for the nearby city of Tanga to sell his perfectly healthy cacao bean harvest to the traders in town.

His mission, however, is bound to fail because his rebel mentality, combined with his naïveté, do not allow him to bow to the French administration, whose newly introduced “quality control” inspection in the cacao trade is nothing but a scheme to exploit African labour.

CRUEL CITY

The inner struggle Banda goes through as he contemplates his “strange destiny: to always suffer”, is portrayed with realistic insight. One thing the hero knows is that he will never give up.

The city of the title is a newly industrialised area, whose African residents have little to show for their daily struggle in the lumber mills and rail yards where their jobs are dangerous and their working environment “ugly”.

Mongo Beti, who published Cruel City under the pseudonym Eza Boto, later distanced himself from the work, finding it weak. Other critics of the time also raised objections.

But in spite of certain signs of apprenticeship exhibited by the 22-year-old author, David Diop was right in his praise of the novel’s rigorous depiction of the damage wrought by colonialism.

Most importantly, Cruel City charted the territory of protest writing that Mongo Beti was to make his own, becoming one of Africa’s foremost anti-colonial and politically conscious writers.

Only two years after Cruel City, Mongo Beti gained widespread acclaim for his novel, The Poor Christ of Bomba.

But the novel was banned in the colony due to the satirical and highly critical description of the missionary and colonial world. Gerald Moore notes that, in this novel, the young protagonist’s naïve reflections on his experiences with the priest whom he assists “become the pure mirror through which we see greed, the folly, and the tragic misunderstandings of a whole epoch in African history”.

Mission to Kala (1957) and King Lazarus (1958), both won the French Academy’s Sainte Beuve Literary Prize. All the four novels of the 1950s depict a society which has fallen prey to the colonial system, experiences the constraints of patriarchal family and village life, and rises in revolt against these.

Following the military defeat of the Union of the Populations of Cameroon (UPC), which Mongo Beti supported, and the assassination of its leader, Ruben Um Nyobé, in 1958, Mongo Beti went into exile.

In France, he continued both his activism and his literary activities.

He started and ran Black People/African People, a political and cultural bimonthly periodical devoted to an analysis of the evils in post-independence Africa; published political essays denouncing the neo-colonial state of affairs in Cameroon; and wrote fiction.

He remained an outspoken opponent of the autocratic rule of Ahmadou Ahidjo, who governed Cameroon from 1960 to 1982.

In both his polemical writings of the time, like The Plunder of Cameroon: An Autopsy of Decolonisation (1972), and the two novels inspired by the memory of Um Nyobé, Perpetua and the Habit of Unhappiness (1974) and Remember Ruben (1974), Mongo Beti stressed that decolonisation had been derailed in Cameroon.

FAILURE OF INDEPENDENCE

Upon returning to his homeland in 1993, Mongo Beti intensified his criticism.

He began with the political essay 'France against Africa' (1993), denouncing President Paul Biya for his anti-popular rule. His novels about contemporary Cameroon, History of the Insane (1994), Too Much Sun Kills Love (1999) and Commotion in Black and White (2000), all focus on the failure of independence in Cameroon.

The dissidence that informs Mongo Beti’s writings is seen by Cameroonian novelist Patrice Nganang as both central to and representative of “the critical intelligence of the Cameroonian people that has always been able to read in the diverse forms of reality that Cameroon has experienced a repeated usurpation, an institutionalised illegality”.

It would be true to say, as Cilas Kemedjio observed upon Mongo Beti’s death, that “the militant path of this novelist, chronicler, and essayist has been governed by one obsession: the quest for the dignity of black African peoples.”

Prediction

At the end of ‘Romancing Africa,’ Mongo Beti makes the prediction — “to the extent that such things can be predicted” — that an authentic African literature of the future will “necessarily be not only African but even national: by which we mean that the African writer will speak to his co-citizens in the language they are looking for; he will speak to them about aspirations that they all have in common.”

Perhaps the success of any African writer today should be measured against this requirement: to speak about the common aspirations of the African people, in other words, to highlight their persistent determination to rise above the diminished lives thrust upon them by leaders with warped vision.