Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa (review)

Dominic Thomas's Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa will appeal to scholars and graduate students across disciplines, in culture, literature, and politics. It transposes to the Francophone African context the study of the nation and the role of the engaged intellectual (novelists primarily), both party bound and independent, in its emergence. Thomas's work joins a growing interdisciplinary literature on the African nation, national literatures, and African nationalists in the colonial and postcolonial periods, including Christopher L. Miller's Nationalists and Nomads (1998), Toyin Falola's Nationalism and African Intellectuals (2001), and Réda Bensmaïa's Experimental Nations (2003). Thomas has chosen compelling subjects very worthy of investigation in the Republic of the Congo: fiction, truth telling, and reconciliation. As African nations such as the Congo continue to try to foster community in the twenty-first century, it is quite interesting indeed to explore what role storytellers have played and can continue to play in the unfolding narrative. As some readers of the book will already know, there is a longstanding tradition of the writer turned politician, and politician turned writer, in the French and Francophone contexts.

Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa explores the relationship between literature, politics, and the state in the Congo specifically and more tangentially in the rest of Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa. Thomas contends that politics and literature are particularly intertwined in the Congo, "where the post-revolutionary Marxist-Leninist elite exercising governmental authority between 1969 and 1991 sponsored an official literature of the state" (5). Noted Congolese writers such as Henri Lopes have participated in government while actively pursuing their craft. The Union Nationale des Ecrivains, Artistes, et Artisans Congolais (UNEAC), created in 1979 by Denis Sassou Nguesso's regime, brought the production of literature directly in line with political initiatives (39). The authors whom Thomas studies were writing at this time, and indeed are still writing today, in the case of Lopes. Thomas reminds readers that the objective of state-influenced art in the Congo was the production of national sentiment (8). One wonders how successful these initiatives were and if any lingering influence survived the shift to pluralism in 1991. It would be very difficult to measure Congolese national sentiment with any level of accuracy and would certainly require another sort of analysis than the one taken here.

How does one identify the (African) nation in our postmodern world of eradicated borders and trasnational trajectories? Does the European-born notion of the nation have salience in Africa? Thomas does not appear particularly interested in this line of inquiry, yet identifying the nation and national literatures in the African "postcolony" is instructive. Individual nations came more clearly into focus during the struggle for independence. National (and arbitrary) borders were curiously preserved in postcolonial Africa. It was at the same moment countries such as the Congo became independent that the production of "national," as opposed to colonial, literatures began. Are these literatures national in the sense that their authors somehow served to represent the diverse forces of the nation? By not addressing such questions, Thomas misses an opportunity to broaden his analysis. He rightly mentions the limitations of print culture in the African context, which however does little to strengthen his argument since virtually all of his own sources are literary. Except for a brief passage, there is little on readership in Francophone Africa (173). If books by Congolese authors are read by so very few Congolese people, in what way do they constitute a national literature? One could argue that by focusing attention on national affairs by writing for others in the dominant (French) language, writers were and are effectively affirming the Congolese nation.

Congolese novelists, Thomas demonstrates quite convincingly, were often in the business not of nation building, but rather of fiefdom destroying. "The fictional text thus becomes an effective medium for articulating criticism of the sociological reality, and for exposing those practices that have contributed to the failure of postcolonial Congolese governments to create...