A Companion to African Literatures. Группа авторов
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Whether the sins of past missionaries are expiable in a postcolonial context is precisely the question posed by a later work by Valentin Mudimbe, Entre les eaux (Between the Tides, 1973). In this novel, published in a postcolonial context, Congolese author Mudimbe writes the story of an African priest, Pierre Landu, who struggles to reconcile the tenets of his faith with the realities of a nation, his own, fighting for political stability and dignity. Landu judges himself too removed from the struggles of his home and abandons seminary life to join an armed Marxist militia, determined to find through Marxism a means of delivering a Christian message unsullied by past colonial deformations.3 Although remarking frequently that for others he will always remain a “Black priest” and, for many of his compatriots, a traitor, Mudimbe’s protagonist perceives no inevitable contradiction in his double status. Rather, he finds himself compelled to leave his parish for the life of a revolutionary on the basis of his convictions as both a priest and an African, as he states in a letter to his French superior: “Rester ici, à la paroisse, serait trahir ma conscience d’Africain et de prêtre” (To stay here at the parish would be to betray my conscience as an African and a priest) (1973, 24). The Roman Catholic Church, for Landu, inevitably enforces a form of institutionalized injustice of which he wants no part, and so he seeks out a renewed theology in the fires of political radicalism: “Je choisis le glaive et le feu pour que, dans un cadre nouveau, les miens Le reconnaissent comme leur” (I choose the sword and fire so that, in a new setting, my people might recognize Him as their own) (24). But Landu’s quest proves a failure as well. He first struggles to gain acceptance among his compatriots, who are eventually killed by the national army. Landu finishes in a monastery, forced, much like Father Drumont of Mongo Béti’s novel, to resign himself to accepting the irreconcilable schism between their devotion to the Church and the history of oppression it has brought upon the African continent.
Béti’s strong condemnation, in novels like Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba, of colonial society and its deleterious effects on both the colonizer and colonized reflects his position as perhaps the most iconic politically engaged Francophone author of his generation. As Cazenave and Célérier point out in their study of the role of engagement in African literature, to this day, “Mongo Béti remains for some the embodiment of engagement against which, or with which, the different generations of his fellow writers have come to define themselves” (2011, 32). His considerable oeuvre and nonfiction writing suggest a duty on the part of the African writer to offer an authentic depiction of the continent’s realities. His best known text on this subject, “Afrique noire, littérature rose,” goes so far as to assert that, to date, no African literary work of quality had been produced outside a proliferation of colonial projections.4 A principal culprit in this lack of African works of quality, he argued elsewhere, was the cultural demands of the “Francophone” label on the writer, who was continually called either to justify his use of the colonizer’s language or to declare himself a devotee of French as the literary language par excellence. For Béti, the French language was in fact merely vehicular, a means to an end. “Habitant la banlieue, je prends ma voiture chaque matin pour aller travailler au centre de la ville. Qui oserait me demander de faire une déclaration d’amour à ma voiture” (I live in the suburbs and so every morning my car takes me downtown to work. Who would dare ask me to declare my undying love for my car?) (Béti 1988, 105). The French language was useful to Béti in as much as it facilitated a creative fire, producing work that was accessible to a broad readership. However, Béti declares, a major obstacle to such an end is the preponderance of francophonie, that is, the categorization of works such as his own as peripheral appendices to literature of colonial France, referred to in French as the métropole.
Language and Postcolonial Performance
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.
In his Jazz et vin de palme (Jazz and Palm Wine, 1982), a collection of short stories situated in Africa and the United States, Dongala employs a variety of narrative discourses to resist depicting the African and African American experience as something that can be easily summed up or even known through literary representation. His portrayal of postcolonial African realities is steeped in paradox. In the short story “L’étonnante et dialectique déchéance du camarade Kali Tchikati” (The Surprising and Dialectical Decline of Comrade Kali Tchikati), the protagonist, an anti‐animist crusader of the country’s Single Party, has lost his “faith” in science. When his family casts