Kourouma, Ahmadou (b. 1927). Novelist and playwright from Ivory Coast. His personal history encompasses student radicalism, four years spent in Indo-China as a punishment for ‘subversive’ behaviour during his military service, qualification as an actuary, and appointment as director of the Institut National des Assurances in Yaoundé.

Perhaps the most strikingly original francophone African novel to date, Kourouma's Les Soleils des indépendances (1968) was hailed by some as the first truly African novel in French, and condemned by others for its unapologetic disregard for standard French syntax. The story of a Malinké prince reduced to the status of a beggar in the Independence era, Les Soleils is set in two West African republics whose fictive names hardly conceal their real identities (Ivory Coast and Guinea). The novel is a brilliantly humourous satire of the regimes of both Houphouët Boigny and Sékou Touré, and of the one-party state in general, though Kourouma does betray marginally more sympathy for the socialist option.

The novel's originality lies more in its style than in its content. It is the first real attempt to subordinate the French language to the artistic demands of African reality. Malinké idioms are translated literally not only in the dialogue but in the body of the text. Kourouma is a highly sophisticated artist, master of both modern Western and African literary cultures, and he exploits the differences between the two traditions to marvellous comic effect. Though he sometimes gives the impression of merely revelling in neo-colonial Africa's multiple ironies for their own sake, Les Soleils, in bringing the pre-colonial prince and the neo-colonial masters face to face, is, in fact, a serious attempt to grasp the basic mechanisms of African history.

After a virtual silence of 22 years (apart from the brief appearance of a play, Tougnantigui, diseur de vérité, performed in Abidjan, banned in mid-run, and never published), Kourouma's second novel, Monnè, outrages et défis appeared in 1990. Like Dongala and Fantouré, having dissected neo-colonialism Kourouma now returns to the final days of the pre-colonial era, to the French invasion and conquest, to re-examine the roots of Africa's present crisis. Monnè was awarded the annual prize of the French Association des Nouveaux Droits de l'Homme.

[Firinne Ni Chréach´in]

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.