Mongo Beti

Mongo Beti (born 1932) was one of the great Francophone novelists from Africa. His works satirize the French colonial world and dramatize the dilemmas of the quasi-Westernized African in acrid, sometimes ribald language and outrageous scenes.

Mongo Beti was born Alexandre Biyidi on June 30, 1932, in M'balmayo, a small village of the Beti people about 30 miles south of Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. At 19 he received the baccalaureate from the lycée at Yaoundé, and in 1951 he went to France on a scholarship to take advanced studies in literature, first at Aix-en-Provence and then at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1966 he received the agrégation, or teaching certificate, from the University of Paris.

While a student at Aix he wrote his first (now selfrepudiated) novel, Ville Cruelle (Cruel City), published in 1954 under the nom de plume Eza Boto. Considered a weak novel, it demonstrates strength in its melodramatic but often compelling naiveté, and it well expresses the confusion experienced by the rural Africans crowding into the new industrial lumber and pulping town of Tanga South, "the kingdom of logs."

First Novels Reveal Anti-Imperialist Sentiments

One of the major weaknesses of Ville Cruelle was its long, confessional monologues, but in his second novel, Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba (1956; The Poor Christ of Bomba), Beti mastered the exclamatory monologue to indict both France and the Church through the naive musings of the acolyte Denis, assistant to the well-meaning but ever obtuse Reverend Father Superior Drumont.

Mission Terminée (1957), Beti's third novel, is possibly one of his most successful and deeply humorous works. Again, his hero is a naïf whose initiation into life educates the reader into African verities as seen by an African. Here, however, the young Medza, having failed at the lycée, is initiated "backwards" into the life of the relatively untouched village of Kala, where his uncle's runaway wife has fled. Sent by his own village to reclaim her, Medza learns to appreciate and then to respect the older life and, more particularly, becomes willing to accept the help of his heroic-sized "country" cousin, Zambo. Though at the novel's close the two leave Kala and even Africa for a life of wandering, Medza has discovered that "the tragedy which our nation is suffering today is that of a man left to his own devices in a world which does not belong to him, which he has not made and does not understand."

Beti's fourth novel, Le Roi Miraculé (1958; King Lazarus), confronts a powerful, pagan king with the missionary fervor of Le Guen, Drumont's vicar in the earlier years of The Poor Christ of Bomba. Though priding himself on being more astute and sensitive than the bumbling Drumont, Le Guen stirs up so much confusion and anger in the court of the king that the French Colonial Office has him recalled, for though Paris loves the Church it loves order and decorum much more.

Writer in Exile

Staunchly opposed to the foreign-controlled government in what was then French Cameroon, Beti moved to France. There, finding he could not support himself by writing, even with three well-received and increasingly popular novels to his credit, he turned to teaching, eventually gaining a professorship at a lycée in Rouen where he taught Latin, Greek, and French. A convinced Marxist, he refused to return to his native country even after it achieved independence in 1960. Despite professing himself anxious to visit Africa, he remained hostile to the Yaoundé regime of President Ahmadou Ahidjo. Instead, Beti remained in France with his wife and their three children, and devoted himself to teaching for more than a decade.

In 1972 Beti published a political essay critical of the Yaoundé government. Titled "The Plundering of Cameroon, the essay condemned Ahidjo and his officers as a puppet government of his country's former colonial rulers. The problems of decolonization would serve as the focus of the novels that Beti would once again begin to write.

In works that include Remember Ruben (1973) and Perpetua and the Habit of Unhappiness (1974), Beti turns a satirical eye upon the situation in the Cameroon, creating the fictitious dictator Baba Toura as the focus of his political satire. In Remember Ruben, a young orphan is take in by some villagers and befriended by a village boy. The two grow up and, though they part company for several years, eventually reunite; one as a revolutionary leader, and the other as a cast-off from an unjust society. The two characters would also serve as the subject of a 1979 work by Beti translated as Lament for an African Pol, which follows the effort of the two friends to start a revolt against the rule of unjust tribal chiefs. Perpetua and the Habit of Unhappiness also illustrates the inequities in postcolonial Cameroon through the lives of individuals, this time also depicting the lowly social status of that country's women. The novel would be adapted as a play in 1981.

Retains Focus on Political Injustice

Continuing to write from his self-imposed exile in France, Beti has woven his political concerns - particularly his concerns over continued French political influence in Cameroon - throughout his fiction. Like his novels of the 1970s and the 1980s, L'histoire du Fou (1994) illustrated the two economic and social levels of African society through the relationship between Zoaételeu, a provincial village elder, and his son Narcisse, who is idealistic and in search of meaning in his life. Political repression shadows each of Beti's characters in the novel's complex plot as Zoaételeu is falsely imprisoned without a trial and eventually released, only to find that his beloved son has been killed by an assassin - who turns out to be his own brother. As Robert P. Smith Jr. would note of L'histoire du Fou in World Literature Today, "Beti's reasoning, sometimes dead serious and sometimes familiarly humorous, is powerful, and his style, reminiscent of Balzac with its detailed descriptions and colorful images, and of Proust with its interminable sentences, remains superb."

Further Reading

Information on the life and work of Beti is in Gerald Moore, Seven African Writers (1962); Claude Wauthier, The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa (1964; trans. 1966); Judith Illsley Gleason, This Africa: Novels by West Africans in English and French (1965); A.C. Brench, The Novelists' Inheritance in French Africa (1967); and Wilfred Cartey, Whispers from a Continent: The Literature of Contemporary Black Africa (1969). See also the chapter by Jeanette Macaulay in Cosmo Pieterse and Donald Munro, eds., Protest and Conflict in African Literature (1969).

writer

Personal Information

Born Alexandre Biyidi-Awala, June 30, 1932, in Akometam, near M'Balmayo, Cameroon; died October 8, 2001; married Odile Tobner (a teacher), late 1950s; children: three.
Education: Attended University of Aix-Marseille; Sorbonne, B.A. (with honors); University of Paris, M.A., 1966.
Politics: Marxist.

Career

Educator in Lamballe, France; secondary education instructor in classical Greek, Latin, and French literature in Rouen, France. Writer, 1953-01.

Life's Work

Cameroonian author Mongo Beti, under the pen name of Alexandre Biyidi-Awala, wrote several sharply satirical novels in French critical of colonial and post-colonial African politics. Beti used his fiction as a vehicle to condemn the imposition of European culture on African peoples, but also negatively portrayed those Africans who came to power--and then abused it--in nations like Cameroon. He died on October 8, 2001. His death prompted London's Guardian newspaper to call him "one of the foremost African writers of the independence generation," journalist Kaye Whiteman declared. "His biting satires of the colonial period still rank among the best African novels. He also acquired the status of an icon, as a brilliant political polemicist who never gave up on his radicalism."

Expelled from School

Beti was born Alexandre Biyidi-Awala in 1932 near M'Balmayo, Cameroon, when the west central African nation was still a colony of France. His family had a cocoa plantation in this southern part of the country, and when he was ejected from school at age 14 for insubordination, the future writer worked in its groves for a time. He eventually finished school and left for France to attend the University of Aix-Marseille. He went on to the Sorbonne in Paris, a university whose heady intellectual reputation attracted other politically-minded young men and women from African nations. Their families were often at least prosperous enough to send them abroad, and such exiles were sharply critical of colonialism and its legacy on African political, social, cultural, and economic traditions. Beti joined their ranks as well, and wrote his first novel, Ville cruelle ("Cruel City"), under the pseudonym Eza Boto. The city of the title is a newly industrialized area, whose African residents are uneasy with a transition that forces them to survive by working dangerous jobs in newly created lumber mills and rail yards. He later distanced himself from the 1954 novel, feeling that it was not the finest example of his writing.

Critics consider his first work published under the pseudonym Mongo Beti, 1956's The Poor Christ of Bomba, as one of the writer's finest. The novel is set in the 1930s in Cameroon, and features themes that World Literature Today writer Robert P. Smith Jr. described as "familiar Mongo Beti territory." These included "origins of fear, persecution, repression, betrayal, conspiracy, tribal conflict, war, revolt, corruption, and the violence and politics of power in post-colonial African republics," Smith noted. The work centers on a French missionary, Father Drumont, who visits villagers and attempts to convert them from their indigenous religion to Christianity. He also strives to keep them, at the same time, from adopting Western-style materialistic values that he has witnessed elsewhere among the newly converted. Drumont is saddened to learn that the villagers only agreed to convert because they hoped it would bring them prosperity. He is further devastated when he finds that the "sixa," a missionary house for young African women who live there to learn traditional "wifely" ways, has become a den of venereal disease.

Twice Won Literary Honors

Beti's second novel, Mission Accomplished, took the Sainte-Beuve prize of the French Academy around the time of its 1957 publication. Its protagonist is Jean-Marie Medza, who fails his exams at a French secondary school, and returns home. His family sends him to a distant village, Kala, to bring back the runaway wife of a relative. The Kala villagers treat Medza as a brilliant, distinguished guest, and shower him with presents. He even takes a wife, but the longer he remains in the remote, unsophisticated community, the more he realizes how little he knows about life. Beti garnered further literary acclaim and another Sainte-Beuve prize for his next work, King Lazarus. Its plot centers around a polygamous tribal chief who heeds a priest's urging to convert and divest himself of his many wives. The chief keeps just one, and turns the others out; irate, they complain to authorities, and a tribunal is held in which each side presents its case.

Beti lived a politically committed life outside of his fiction as well. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he had ties to the Union des Peuples Camerounais (UPC), a Marxist group in Cameroon. The country achieved independence from France in 1960, but Beti was critical of the new government in the capital city of Yaoundé. He penned articles for the journals Tumultueux Cameroun and Revue camerounaise, but living in his native land became dangerous because of his political opinions and connections to the UPC. He moved to France in the early 1960s, taking a job as a teacher of classical Greek, Latin, and French literature in Rouen, and did not write fiction for the next ten years.

Novels Critical of Post-Colonial Politics

An essay titled "The Plundering of Cameroon," published in 1972, revived Beti's status in Cameroon as an opinion-maker. Some of it discussed the final, failed UPC rebellion, whose leader was publicly executed in 1970. The work also gained some notoriety in France, where it was banned and seized because of its criticism of Cameroonian politics. Like other African nations in the years following independence, the country had become a one-party state by then.

The attention from "The Plundering of Cameroon" helped spark Beti's creativity, and he returned to writing novels again. These portrayed life in Cameroon after independence, such as Remember Ruben from 1973, which follows the story of orphaned Mor-Zamba, who is adopted by a village. When he grows into adulthood and wants to marry the daughter of the community's most esteemed family, he is forcibly sent away to a labor camp. Eighteen years later, he is reunited with his best friend from childhood, and learns the reasons for his internal exile. In a 1979 sequel, Lament for an African Pol, Mor-Zamba becomes a political opposition leader named Ruben Um Nyobe.

Beti began a political journal with his wife, Odile Tobner, Peuples noirs, peuples africains ("Black People, African People"), and returned to Cameroon in the early 1990s. He owned a book store there and continued to write polemical tracts and novels. His later works include Trop de soleil tue l'amour: Roman ("Too Much Sun Kills the Love"), which appeared in French in 1999. Its plot borrows some elements from the African detective genre in its story of Zamakwe, a political journalist and jazz fan. The theft of his extensive music collection and the mysterious kidnapping of his girlfriend set in motion a chain of events that bring him to a militia group and its leader. Writing in World Literature Today, the critic Smith observed that the novel followed certain themes found in Beti's work. He "criticizes repressive forces, external as well as internal, which keep his fellow Africans in an unbearable state of subordination," Smith wrote, and the critic concluded that the novel "retains much of Beti's powerful reasoning, sometimes deadly serious and sometimes familiarly humorous. His storytelling technique remains vibrant and captivating."

Returned to Homeland

Zamakwe's story was continued in Branle-bas en noir et blanc: Roman ("Commotion in Black and White"), which appeared in 2000. Here, Zamakwe's friend Eddie dreams of a career as a detective, but all mock his ambitions, reminding him that solving crimes in a society where the police force is so corrupt is an impossible dream. The plot centers around Eddie's search for the missing Zamakwe. Another reviewer for World Literature Today, Marco D. Roman, observed that the novel "holds up a mirror to African society in order to wake it into a realization of the imposed images put upon it by its own corrupt government as well as by those Western institutions that force Africans to view themselves as unable."

Beti died in Douala, Cameroon on October 8, 2001, from renal complications. He was survived by his wife and three children. He had been invited to read excerpts from his books at a Harvard University Bookstore event on October 21st, along with Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat and Olive Senior, the Jamaican writer. Instead, organizers decided to make the reading a memorial tribute to Beti. "He was such an important figure in the development of African literature in French," a scholar at Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute of Afro-American Research, Andrew Horn, told Africana.com writer Tanu T. Henry. "When his novels first came out they came as a shock to many in Europe and as gratification to many in Africa."

Awards

Twice awarded the French Academy's Sainte-Beuve Prize, for Mission Accomplished and King Lazarus.

Works

Selected writings

• (Under pseudonym Eza Boto) Ville cruelle (title means "Cruel City"), Editions Africaines, 1954.
• Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba, Laffont, 1956, translation by Gerald Moore published as The Poor Christ of Bomba, Heinemann Educational [London], African Writers Series, 1971.
• Mission terminee, Buchet Chastel/Correa, 1957, translation by Peter Green published as Mission Accomplished, Macmillan, 1958, published in England as Mission to Kala, Muller, 1958, rewritten by John Davey and published as Mission to Kala (illustrated by Peter Edwards), Heinemann Educational, African Writers Series, 1964.
• Le Roi miracule: Chronique des Essazam, Buchet Chastel/Correa, 1958, English translation published as King Lazarus, Muller [London], 1960, published as King Lazarus: A Novel (introduction by O.R. Dathorne), Macmillan/Collier, 1971.
• Main basse sur le Cameroun: Autopsie d'une decolonisation (political essay; title means "The Plundering of Cameroon"), F. Maspero, 1972.
• Remember Ruben (title in pidgin English), Buchet Chastel, 1973, translation by Gerald Moore published under the same title, Three Continents Press, 1980.
• Perpetue et l'habitude du malheur, Buchet Chastel, 1974, translation by John Reed and Clive Wake published as Perpetua and the Habit of Unhappiness, Heinemann Educational, African Writers Series, 1978.
• La Ruine presque cocasse d'un polichinelle: Remember Ruben deux, L'Harmattan, 1979, translation by Richard Bjornson published as Lament for an African Pol, Three Continents Press, 1985.
• Les Deux Meres de Guillaume Ismael Dzewatama: Futur Camionneur, Buchet Chastel, 1982.
• La Revanche de Guillaume Ismael Dzewatama, Buchet Chastel, 1984.
• Lettre ouverte aux Camerounais, ou, La deuxieme mort de Ruben Um Nyobe, L'Harmattan, 1986.
• (With Odile Tobner) Peuples noirs, peuples africains, L'Harmattan, 1989.
• La France contre l'Afrique; Retour au Cameroun, La Decouverte, 1993.
• L'histoire du fou; roman, Julliard, 1994.
• Trop de soleil tue l'amour: Roman (title means "Too Much Sun Kills the Love"), Julliard, 1999.
• Branle-bas en noir et blanc: Roman (title means "Commotion in Black and White"), Julliard, 2000.
• The Story of the Madman, translated by Elizabeth Darnel, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 2001.

Further Reading

Periodicals

• Guardian (London, England), October 25, 2001.
• Research in African Literatures, Fall 1993, p. 25; Summer 2000, p. 91.
• World Literature Today, Autumn 1994, p. 861; Autumn 2000, p. 792; Winter 2002, p. 120.

• Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.
• "Mongo Beti Remembered," http://www.africana.com/DailyArticles/index_20011108.htm (June 11, 2002).

— Carol Brennan

Beti, Mongo (pseud. of Alexandre Biyidi) (1932-2001). Cameroonian writer. After secondary education in Yaoundé, he studied in France from 1951. Apart from two brief home visits, he has remained in self-exile in France as a teacher of literature, finding it impossible to accept the society produced by colonialism and neo-colonialism in his country. Two periods may be distinguished in his work: 1952-8 and post-1970.

‘Sans haine et sans amour’, a story published under the name Eza Boto in Présence africaine (1952), tells of a young Mau-Mau guerilla fighter, his hatred of whites and his disgust for their black friends. Although set in Kenya rather than Cameroon, it is the forerunner of the subsequent novels which denounce the devastating effects of colonial occupation, while rejecting the idyllic image of pre-colonial societies presented by, for example, Camara Laye. Beti shows how the internal structural contradictions of feudal and clan society facilitated the colonial conquest, which in turn, while accelerating the breakup of traditional structures, also preserved and exploited their most oppressive features.

The four novels of the 1954-8 period depict a society which has lost its bearings, a prey to the colonial system, while in revolt against the constraints of patriarchal family and village life. Beti's conclusion is pessimistic: only a handful of very young characters put up a show of resistance, and this is individual and anarchic. He hardly refers to the collective struggle of the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC). Of these novels the first, Ville cruelle (1954), appeared under the pen-name Eza Boto; the others bore the name Mongo Beti. His second novel, Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba (1956), was banned in Cameroon because of pressure from the Catholic authorities, angry that Beti had exposed the links between missionary activity and the colonial conquest. Mission terminée (1957) and Le Roi miraculé (1958) develop themes from Ville cruelle: the resistance of young people to the patriarchal system, and the social destabilization caused by colonial rule.

Beti's ‘Lettre de Yaoundé: Cameroun 1958’ (Preuves, December 1958) expresses the author's difficulty, during a brief trip home, in identifying fully with his people's struggle. Despite his anger, he does not go beyond individual, psychological rebellion to an appeal for revolutionary action.

His second period was heralded by the publication of a pamphlet, Main basse sur le Cameroun (1972), denouncing the despotic rule of Ahidjo, a straw man set in place by the French to defend neo-colonial interests. It was banned in France. In two fictional works of this period, Remember Ruben (1974) and La Ruine presque cocasse d'un polichinelle (1979), Beti pays tribute to the founder of the UPC, Ruben Um Nyobé, assassinated by the French in 1958 as a member of the Cameroonian underground. Perpétue (1974) tells of the defection of a UPC activist and the plight of a woman, symbol of a conquered Africa, and a victim of neo-colonialism.

In 1978-9 Beti founded a journal, Peuples noirs Peuples africains, as a forum for criticizing the nature of Franco-African relations and négritude. He also set up a publishing house, Éditions des Peuples Noirs, to issue works unacceptable to establishment publishers, including his own Lettre ouverte aux Camerounais ou la Deuxième Mort de Ruben um Niobé (1986), an attack on the neo-colonialist policies of Ahidjo's successor Paul Biya. In his two most recent novels, Les Deux Mères de Guillaume Ismael Dzewatama, futur camionneur (1980) and La Revanche de Guillaume Ismael Dzewatama (1982), the main character is a young Frenchwoman married to a Cameroonian; she is a witness to the oppressive conditions and the absence of freedom of thought and expression in Cameroon. The works have structural weaknesses, and they suggest that the only effective way to contribute to radical change is as an individual living abroad. They are, in fact, similar to Beti's early works; there is a break between 1958 and the 1970s, but no real change in the author's perspective.

[Nicholas Mann]

Bibliography

• C. L. Dehon, Le Roman camerounais d'expression française (1989)

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Mongo Beti.

Alexandre Biyidi Awala (30 June 1932 - 8 October 2001), known as Mongo Beti, was a Cameroonian writer.

Contents 1 Life 1.1 Early life 1.2 Early writing and exile 1.3 Later career 1.4 Final years 2 Work 2.1 Ville cruelle 2.2 Le pauvre Christ de Bomba 2.3 Mission terminée 2.4 Le roi miraculé : chronique des Essazam 2.5 Main basse sur le Cameroun and Les procès du Cameroun 2.6 Perpétue et l'habitude du malheur 2.7 Dictionnaire de la négritude 2.8 La France contre l'Afrique: retour au Cameroun 3 Notes 4 References 5 External links

Life

Though he lived in exile for many decades, Beti's life reveals an unflagging commitment to improvement of his home country. As one critic wrote after his death, "The militant path of this essayist, chronicler and novelist has been governed by one obsession: the quest for the dignity of African peoples."^[1]

Early life

The son of Oscar Awala and Régine Alomo, Alexandre was born in 1932 at Akométan, a small village 10 km from Mbalmayo, itself 45 km away from Yaoundé, capital of Cameroon. (The village's name comes from Akom 'rock' and Etam 'source': in old maps of the region, the name is written in two parts).

From an early age, Beti was influenced by the currents of rebellion sweeping Africa in the wake of World War II. His father drowned when Beti was seven, and he was raised by his mother and extended family. Beti recalls arguing with his mother about religion and colonialism; he also recalls early exposure to the opinions and analysis of independence leader Ruben Um Nyobe, both in the villages and at Nyobe's private residence. He carried these views into the classroom, and was eventually expelled from the missionary school in Mbalmayo for his outspokenness. In 1945 he entered the lycée Leclerc in Yaoundé. Graduating in 1951, he came to France to continue his higher education in literature, first at Aix-en-Provence, then at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Early writing and exile

By the early 1950s, Beti had turned to writing as a vehicle of protest. He wrote regularly for the journal Présence Africaine; among his pieces was a review of Camara Laye's Black Child which criticized Laye for what Beti saw as pandering to European tastes. He began his career in fiction with the short story Sans haine et sans amour ('Without hatred or love'), published in the periodical Présence Africaine, edited by Alioune Diop, in 1953. His first novel Ville cruelle ('Cruel City'), under the pseudonym Eza Boto, followed in 1954, published in several editions of Présence Africaine.

It was, however, in 1956 that he gained a widespread reputation; the publication of the novel Le pauvre Christ de Bomba ('The poor Christ of Bomba') created a scandal because of its satirical and biting description of the missionary and colonial world. Under pressure from the religious hierarchy, the colonial administrator in Cameroon banned the novel in the colony. This was followed by Mission terminée, 1957 (winner of the Prix Sainte Beuve 1958) et Le Roi miraculé, 1958. He also worked during this time for the review Preuves, for which he reported from Africa. He worked also as a substitute teacher at the lycée of Rambouillet.

In 1959, he was named certified professor at the lycée Henri Avril in Lamballe. He took the Agrégation de Lettres classiques in 1966 and taught at the lycée Corneille in Rouen from this date until 1994. Following Nyobe's assassination by French forces in 1958, however, Beti fell silent as a writer for more than a decade, remaining in exile from his homeland. After his death,Odile Tobner noted that exile was not easy on Beti; he remained tortured by his concern for his embattled country.

Later career

In 1972 he re-entered the world of literature with a bang. His book Main basse sur le Cameroun, autopsie d'une décolonisation ('Cruel hand on Cameroon, autopsy of a decolonization') was censored upon its publication by the French Ministry of the Interior Raymond Marcellin on the request, brought forward by Jacques Foccart, of the Cameroon government, represented in Paris by the ambassador Ferdinand Oyono. The essay, a critical history of recent Cameroon, asserted that Cameroon and other colonies remained under French control in all but name, and that the post-independence political elites had actively fostered this continued dependence. Beti was inspired to write in part by the execution of Ernest Ouandie by the government of Cameroon. In 1974 he published Perpétue and Remember Ruben; the latter was the first in a trilogy exploring the life and impact of Nyobe. After a long judicial action, Mongo Beti and his editor François Maspéro finally obtained, in 1976, the cancellation of the ban on the publication of Main basse.

Beti returned to critical and political writing at the same time that he returned to fiction. In 1978 he and his wife Odile Tobner launched the bimonthly review Peuples Noirs. Peuples africains ('Black People. African People'), which was published until 1991. This review chronicled and denounced tirelessly the evils brought to Africa by neo-colonial regimes. During this period were published the novels La ruine presque cocasse d'un polichinelle (1979), Les deux mères de Guillaume Ismaël Dzewatama futur camionneur (1983), La revanche de Guillaume Ismaël Dzewatama (1984), also Lettre ouverte aux Camerounais ou la deuxième mort de Ruben Um Nyobé (1984) and Dictionnaire de la négritude (1989, with Odile Tobner). Frustrated by what he saw as the failure of post-independence governments to bring genuine freedom to Africa, Beti adopted a more radical perspective in these works.

In exile, Beti remained vitally connected to the struggle in Cameroon. Throughout the seventies and eighties, acquaintance with Beti or his work could spell trouble for a citizen of Cameroon; on numerous occasions, Beti used his connections in France to rescue one of his young readers, many of whom knew him from his periodical and his polemical essays. Ambroise Kom, arrested merely for subscribing to Peuples noirs, was saved from incarceration by Beti's actions in France on his behalf.

Final years

In 1991 Mongo Beti returned to Cameroon, after 32 years of self-imposed exile. In 1993 he published La France contre l'Afrique, retour au Cameroun.; this book chronicles his visits to his homeland. After retiring from teaching in 1994, he returned to Cameroon permanently. Various business endeavors in Betiland failed; eventually, he opened in Yaoundé the Librairie des Peuples noirs (Bookstore of the Black Peoples) and organized agricultural activities in his village of Akometam. The goal of the bookshop was to encourage engaged literacy in the capital, and also to provide an outlet for critical texts and authors. During this period, Beti also supported John Fru Ndi, an anglophone opposition leader. He created associations for the defence of citizens and gave to the press numerous articles of protest. The government attempted to hinder his activities. On his first return to Cameroon, police prevented him from speaking at a scheduled conference; Beti instead addressed a crowd outside the locked conference room. He was subjected in January 1996, in the streets of Yaoundé, to police aggression. He was challenged at a demonstration in October 1997. In response he published several novels: L'histoire du fou in 1994 then the two initial volumes Trop de soleil tue l'amour (1999) et Branle-bas en noir et blanc (2000), of a trilogy which would remain unfinished. He was hospitalized in Yaoundé on October 1, 2001 for acute hepatic and kidney failure which remained untreated for lack of dialysis. Transported to the hospital at Douala on October 6, he died there on October 8, 2001. Some critics noted the similarity of his death to that of his heroine Perpetua, who also died while awaiting treatment in one of the country's overburdened hospitals.

Work

From beginning to end, Beti's work was informed by two principles. In terms of style, he was a realist. In a critical statement published in 1955, he asserted that "Given the modern conceptions of the beautiful in literature, given at the very least these essential conceptions, if a work is realistic it has many chances of being good; if not, supposing even that it has formal qualities, it risks lacking resonance, profundity, that of which all literature has the greatest need -- the human; from which it follows that it has much less chance of being good -- if only it had some -- than a realistic work."^[2] Beti's fiction remains true to this credo. Thematically, Beti's work is unified by an unwavering commitment to combatting colonialism, both overt and covert. Beti's aim always, even in his harsh criticism of Cameroon's independence government, was to strengthen African autonomy and prosperity.

"Sans haine et sans amour", 1953 is a short story and Beti's first significant work.

Ville cruelle

1954: Like many first novels by African writers, Beti's first novel features a young protagonist caught between European and African cultures. Banda, the novel's protagonist, is attempting to marry the woman of his choice; he is able to do so by way of a string of improbable coincidences. The novel is not widely read now; Beti published it under the pseudonym Eza Boto, a nom de plume he did not use later in order to dissociate himself from the work. Still, the novel received praise from some critics, such as David Diop, who praised its rigorous depiction of the damage wrought by colonialism.

Le pauvre Christ de Bomba

1956. Beti's breakthrough success. Written as the journal of a young priest's assistant, the novel tells the story of a missionary in the 1930s. The priest slowly realizes the futility and pointlessness of attempting to convert Africans who, as he concludes, already worshipped God in their own way. Gerald Moore notes that in this novel, Beti has learned to use his protagonist's naivete as a tool of satire: the apprentice's simplistic reflections on his experiences with the priest "becomes the pure mirror through which we see the greed, the folly, and the tragic misunderstandings of a whole epoch in Africa's history."^[3]

Mission terminée

1957: A comic novel describing the visit of a young Cameroonian man with a western education to a village in the interior. Jean-Marie Medza, the protagonist, has just failed his Baccalauréat exam. He returns home expecting humiliation. Instead, he is charged with the duty of travelling to Kala, a remote village, to secure the return of a young woman who has fled her abusive, domineering husband. In Kala, Medza falls in with a group of friends his own age. The bulk of the novel depicts a series of farcical misadventures that give Medza a deeper understanding of his own culture and of himself. The English translation is titled Mission to Kala.

The novel was well-received, winning the Prix Sainte-Beuve in 1958. Wole Soyinka praised its realism, writing "Idealization is a travesty of literary truth; worse still, it betrays only immature hankerings of the creative impulse."^[4] The novel alo received somewhat contradictory criticism; Chinua Achebe chided Beti for romanticizing the pre-colonial past, while Donatus Nwoga criticized Beti's "cynicism" on the same topic.

Le roi miraculé : chronique des Essazam

1958: Describes the transformation of a fictional African town by capitalism, Christianity, and colonialism. The hero here, Le Guen, had been a minor character in The Poor Christ of Bomba; this novel is set shortly after World War II. Le Guen takes advantage of a seemingly miraculous recovery from death to convince the local Chief of Essazam to embrace Christianity. The Chief does so zealously, but his repudiation of his many wives leads to chaos, as each jockeys for the right to be his one "true" wife. This chaos alarms both the Church and the colonial administration; at the end, Le Guen is transferred, and Essazam returns to its traditional ways.

Main basse sur le Cameroun and Les procès du Cameroun

both 1972; these lengthy essays marked Beti's return to public writing. Both were inspired by Beti's dissatisfaction with the post-independence governments of Ahmadou Ahidjo; this discontent was sparked by the arrest and ultimate execution of UPC activist Ernest Ouandie and Bishop Albert Ndongmo on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government. The works, which took a firm line against neocolonialism, were prohibited both in Cameroon and in France until Beti's legal challenge proved successful in 1976. Beti revised and reissued them in the early 1980s.

Perpétue et l'habitude du malheur

1974. Beti's first novel since The Miraculous King. It is sometimes considered part of a trilogy that also includes Remember Ruben and Remember Ruben 2; however, both in theme and in treatment it is markedly different. The novel treats the investigation of a man, Essola, into the circumstances of the death of his sister. He finds that his greedy parents had forced her into a loveless and inappropriate marriage; her ill-treatment at the hands of her husband began a chain of events that led to her untimely death. The novel is at once a realistic exposition of postcolonial conditions in the nation and an allegory: Perpetua is developed as a symbol of the nation, and her inappropriate marriage symbolizes the squalid and incomplete liberation of the country as a whole.

• Peuples noirs, peuples africains, 1978 - 1991.
• Les langues africaines et le néo-colonialisme en Afrique francophone, 1982.
• Les deux mères de Guillaume Ismaël Dzewatama, futur camionneur, 1983.
• La revanche de Guillaume Ismaël Dzewatama, 1984.
• Lettre ouverte aux Camerounais, or, La deuxième mort de Ruben Um Nyobé, 1986.

Dictionnaire de la négritude

1989; Edited, with Odile Tobner and contributors to the review Peuples noirs - Peuples africains. In this work, Beti set out to clarify (and in large part to reject) the doctrine of négritude. His stated goal was to move the concept from its origins in racial mythology to a site in history. In this new position, he believed, negritude could be employed as a conceptual tool for understanding not only African experience but also the role of colonialism in shaping that experience. Entries cover the experience of Africans both in Africa and worldwide (the first entry is for Ralph Abernathy).

La France contre l'Afrique: retour au Cameroun

1993. This work of journalism chronicles Beti's return to Cameroon in 1991. He treats not only his own experiences, which included long-delayed reunions and police harassment, but also his impressions of what more than two decades of nominal independence and autocratic rule had done to the material and psychological conditions of his countrypeople.

• L'histoire du fou, 1994.
• Trop de soleil tue l'amour, 1999.
• Branle-bas en noir et blanc, 2000.

Notes

1. ^ Kemedjio 147.
2. ^ Rand 82.
3. ^ Moore 78.
4. ^ Soyinka 396.

References

• Bishop, Rand. African Literature, African Critics. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.
• Breitinger, Ekchardt. "Lamentations Patriotiques: Writers, Censors, and Politics in Cameroon." African Affairs 92 (1993): 557-575.
• Gikandi, Simon. Encyclopedia of African Literature. New York: Routledge, 2002.
• Kimedjio, Cilas. "Remember Mongo Beti." Research in African Literatures 37 (2006): 446-50.
• Moore, Gerald. Seven African Writers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
• Soyinka, Wole. "From a Common Back Cloth: A Reassessment of the African Literary Image." American Scholar 32 (1963): 387-96.
• Taoua, Phyllis. "The Anti-Colonial Archive: France and Africa's Unfinished Business." SubStance 32 (2003): 146-64.

External links

• Peuples Noirs. Peuples Africains Journal on black francophone radicals published by Mongo Beti and his wife Odile Tobner from 1978 to 1991.
• Critical bibliography on Mongo Beti's works (Auteurs.contemporain.info) (French)
• Biography and guide to collected works: African Studies Centre, Leiden

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