Ake Loba

Ake Loba (b. 1927). Ivoirian novelist. Son of a traditional chief, Loba had a short and unimpressive school career before being sent to France by his father, where he obtained a baccalaureate by correspondence while an agricultural worker. Lacking funds to continue his education, he returned to Ivory Coast in 1959. His first novel, Kocoumbo, l'étudiant noir (1960), won the newly created Grand Prix Littéraire d'Afrique Noire. It describes the difficulties encountered by African students in France. Loba is basically an apologist for European bourgeois values. Generally indulgent towards his French characters (apart from the committed left-wing trade-unionists, whom he treats harshly), he tends to equate Westernization with progress. His second novel, Les Fils de Kouretcha, in which apologists of ‘modernization’ confront traditionalists, won the Houphouet Boigny Prize for Literature in 1970. He has published two other novels, Les Dépossédés (1973) and Le Sas des parvenus (1990).

[Firinne Ni Chréach´in]