The Last Words of Mongo Beti

In 1991, Alexandre Biyidi, better known under his pseudonym of Mongo Beti, paid a well-publicized visit to his native Cameroon, his first in more than thirty years of continuous absence. Three years later, he retired from the French public service after thirty-six years of service as professeur agrégé of classical letters, and although he had French nationality, he decided to settle and to spend the rest of his days in his original homeland. He embarked after his arrival upon a series of small business ventures in the village of Mbalmayo where he was born, but as none of these ventures prospered, he moved to Yaoundé where, in 1994, he opened a bookshop, which he named "Peuples Noirs, Peuples Africains," after the journal and publishing house he had founded in France some twenty years earlier, but which he had been obliged to close down for financial reasons. At the same time, he threw himself with characteristic vigor into local politics, working in the ranks of the opposition party headed by Fru Ndi, an anglophone Cameroonian, a move that is certainly not surprising, given Beti's well-attested hostility to the regime of Paul Biya, who has ruled the country since 1982.

But perhaps the most striking aspect of the last ten years of Mongo Beti's life is the remarkable upsurge of creativity that resulted in the series of works that he published during this period, beginning with La France contre l'Afrique (1993), half political tract, half diary, consisting of a record of the impressions he had gathered during his 1991 visit to the Cameroons, with reflections that this visit and other events of the time inspired concerning the unequal relation between France and its former African colonies. The work is therefore very much a sequel to Main basse sur le Cameroun, which had appeared just over twenty years earlier. Three other works belong to this period: L'histoire du fou (1994), Trop de soleil tue l'amour (1999), and Branle-bas en noir et blanc (2000), all of which reflect the impact of his renewed contact with the human and natural environment that had always been the reference of all his work.

Mongo Beti parle, with the extended interview it contains, forms part of the series. Although it is possible and even likely that some manuscript or other will come to light in the near future, we may consider the long conversation with Ambroise Kom recorded here the very last burst of Beti's expression. This fact is enough to give the book a special value all its own, but it assumes even greater significance by reason of its content. For, apart from personal reminiscences related to the marking events of his life and the circumstances that have determined the course of his professional career and influenced his work—details that constitute this book into what, in his excellent introduction, Ambroise Kom calls a "pre-autobiography"—it also represents a comprehensive recall of the fundamental themes and concerns that have been central to both his novels and his essays. In this respect, the book reflects the deep personal impulses that have shaped Beti's artistic and moral temperament. There is a sense indeed in which Beti can be said to have bared his soul in the 190-odd pages of this book, which thus assumes the character of a personal testament, in the event a final one.

This is of course an observation one makes after the fact, for although Beti refers once or twice to his age (he was near seventy at the time he recorded the interview), there is no suggestion whatsoever that he had an inkling that his end was near. This book is not, therefore, a self-conscious recounting of a life of achievement nor a solemn declaration of his world view by a famous writer, but rather an informal discourse around the habitual preoccupations that Beti has developed all along...