A Companion to African Literatures. Группа авторов

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155). Thoroughly defeated by these realizations, the priest decides to return to France for good, since, as he explains to a French businessman, “je préfère n’avoir jamais à rendre compte à Dieu de la colonisation” (“I’d rather not answer to God for colonization”) (248; 152). The young narrator is despondent at Drumont’s departure, and closes out the final journal entry with the longing declaration: “Nous l’avons si peu aimé … Comme s’il n’était pas des nôtres … Parce qu’il n’était pas des nôtres” (“We loved him so little … As if he were not one of us … for he was not one of us”) (345; 216). Mongo Béti’s choice of subject matter, missionary culture in Africa, proves significant given missionaries’ central role in processes of colonial conquest. The failure of Drumont highlights the impossibility of the French priest overcoming colonial history’s imprint on his own work as part of the “civilizing mission.”

      The example set by politically engaged writers like Mongo Béti contributed greatly to notions of what constituted the authentic African author, an idea that played a considerable role in the creation of an early Francophone literary canon. Yet such notions of authentic engagement can also lead to false assumptions of a mythic, unified African voice. As Guy Ossito Midiohouan has written in reference to the critical focus on engagement as a condition for canonical literary status: “Cette démarche a pour fondement le mythe d’une unanimité des intellectuels nègres dans la révolte contre le système colonial; unanimité au nom de laquelle on minimise les différences et les divergences, voire les oppositions, pourtant manifestes, qui caractérisent les options des uns et des autres et qui, seules, éclairent leurs positions respectives par rapport au pouvoir” (At the base of this approach is the myth of unanimity among negro intellectuals in their revolt against the colonial system. Often minimized in the name of such unanimity are differences, divergences, even oppositions, that are nonetheless obvious, indicative of options available to each, and alone able to illuminate their respective stances in relation to power) (Midiohouan 2002, 65). These differences and divergences became increasingly complex in the period following the wave of African independences. With political autonomy came the need to foster and maintain a new sense of national unity, a goal the newly independent states often tried to achieve by promoting a cultural production that legitimized their authority. When the same, politically engaged cultural circles that once attacked western colonialism began portraying abuses of power by African governments, authors were often met with censorship, imprisonment, or worse.

      These new power structures forced writers to take on a very different literary approach, creating a range of what Dominic Thomas has called “non‐official” authors, who, through a diversity of political affinities, challenged the use of culture as a legitimizing arm of the state. As Thomas explains: “Non‐official authors may focus on aesthetic considerations explicitly as they attempt to distance themselves from reductive official guidelines … Non‐official authors challenge the official picture and the power structures which the governing authorities depend on” (Thomas 2002, 30). As Thomas illustrates in his study of Congolese authors, these writers often maintained complex relationships with state power, as with Henri Lopes, whose most read work, Le Pleurer‐Rire (The Laughing Cry, 1982), is a poly‐vocal parody of dictatorial power although the author himself has had a long career in the halls of such regimes, though mostly serving as a diplomat or as Minister of Culture. The diversity of influences in such non‐official authors is also evident, for example, in the case of Emmanuel Dongala, a prominent Congolese writer, many of whose cultural references are rooted in the African American civil rights movement and his experiences living and teaching in the United States.

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