Mongo Beti: la quete de la liberte (review)

Mongo Beti: la quête de la liberté, by André Djiffack. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000. 289 pp.

In the field of African literature, if the value of authors were to be measured by the honors they have reaped, Mongo Beti would easily be considered a minor author. Yet the quality of production of the francophone Cameroonian author of Le pauvre Christ de Bomba would suggest that he is one of the black continent's best. It is also clear that the domain of African literature presents a certain number of specific traits: its relative youth; the paucity of its resources; its weak and rare author-reader interaction; the merit of its leading figures who have attained international renown; and especially its dependence upon production and distribution structures that still remain under the control of the former metropolises, due to underdevelopment.

Mongo Beti's uniqueness lies therefore in that genius, which will likely never enjoy more than posthumous honors, for the activist, teacher, writer, critic, editor, journalist, bookseller to whom André Djiffack devotes his second study belongs to that small number of accursed authors of the French-speaking world. Just as Aimé Césaire, the "fundamental black," has little chance of ever becoming a member of the French Academy, following in the footsteps of Léopold Sédar Senghor, so we can be assured that it will be a long time before Mongo Beti, the relentless chronicler of colonial and postcolonial realities, will attract an audience in France like that of Ahmadou Kourouma. The reason for this marginalization is his compelling quest for freedom (the issue treated by Djiffack, which neatly summarizes the substance of Mongo Beti's work), the common legacy of mainstream humanity from the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, and of black humanity, whose slavery and colonial stamping has resisted the spineless procession of abolitions, departmentalizations, and other forms of independence. Just when the old freedom fighter, the ex-"prophet of exile," was settling back in Cameroon—the writer's muse and the activist's hormone—Djiffack's essay appeared fortuitously to revamp or revitalize Mongo Beti studies, which have been ageing and proving empty. Furthermore, Djiffack sheds new light on the understanding of the rebel pen through his study of a group of texts heretofore largely ignored by critics. Indeed, his use of the critical tools of literary sociology in his reading of Peuples noirs/Peuples africains, the publication the writer headed up along with his wife for twelve years, is able to illuminate Mongo Beti's iconoclastic works, for which the sole prize awarded in France—the Sainte Beuve Prize for Mission Terminée/Mission to Kala, published in 1957—can be understood by truncated interpretations of a novel that led to the impression that the crusader for colorblind freedom had mellowed. Nevertheless, the sociological option chosen by Djiffack ignores a contextual hiatus between the site of utterance and production of the review, and the situation of the expected and the real readership. The critic's eye sees a discursive continuum take shape that can emasculate the concept of postcolony and deflate the significance of neocolony.

By tracking Mongo Beti's undying quest for freedom through journal and magazine articles as well as the writer's novels and essays, Djiffack succeeds—without falling into the obsolete critical model of "the man and his work"—in demonstrating the coherence and unity of the writer and the militant. His exploration of Mongo Beti's work from "Sans haine sans amour" (1953) to L'histoire du fou (1994) is rich in details that help solidify this rare image of a man who is consistently faithful to his causes and principles.

Nevertheless, behind Djiffack's meticulous work there is a profound convergence of views between the writer and his critic, certainly and legitimately due to the fact that an obvious intellectual kinship binds one to the other. That convergence may have merged, cognitively and discursively...