Remember Mongo Beti (1932-2001)

Mongo Beti died during the night of 7-8 October 2001 at General Hospital in Douala, Cameroon. After his admission to Yaoundé General Hospital for emergency care on 2 October 2001 following a sudden and serious hepatic attack, he was transferred on 6 October to Douala General Hospital due to renal complications to which he eventually succumbed.

Mongo Beti leaves behind a widow, Odile Biyidi, and three children, as well as numerous friends and companions with whom he crusaded for the liberation of Cameroon and Africa from oppression and from numerous forms of exploitation. Shortly before his death, Mongo Beti worked tirelessly with a group of educators to establish a radio station, Radio Alternance, to promote creativity and freedom of expression. Furthermore, he had promised to donate to this project the honoraria he was to receive from Boston University, Harvard, Tufts, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology during his engagements there from 20 October through 4 November 2001.

Since his retirement from public service in France in 1994, Mongo Beti had settled back in Cameroon and put all his energies into several activities there. He had joined the ranks of John Fru Ndi's Social Democratic Front (SDF) and had campaigned for him. He had created and headed up the Committee for the Liberation of Citizen Edzoa (Colicite), a former official of Biya's regime who had been the victim of a parody of justice. He had worked for the protection of the environment and against the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline. We remember that on the occasion of the visit of French President Jacques Chirac to Cameroon at the time of the France-Africa Summit in January 2001 in Yaoundé, his bookstore had served as the scene of a melee with police because he had hung on the bookstore's facade a banner reading "Chirac=foresters=corruption=deforestation."

A journalist in his day, Mongo Beti had published numerous articles in the local papers on the most wide-ranging topics. Beyond the creation of the Librairie des Peuples noirs (The Black Peoples' Bookstore) in Tsinga, Yaoundé, he was responsible for setting up several income-producing ventures to occupy the jobless youths of Akometan, his natal village: food production, pig-breeding, forest development, etc. His office, which occupied a corner of the Librairie des Peuples noirs, had become the gathering place for Cameroonian progressives and an obligatory stop for many Africanists on assignment.

Since his return to Cameroon in 1991 after thirty-two years of uninterrupted exile, Mongo Beti seemed to have recaptured his youth in the domain of literary creation. Between 1993 and 2000, he published an essay, La France contre l'Afrique (1993), and three novels, L'histoire du fou [The Story of the Madman] (1994), Trop de soleil tue l'amour (1999), and Branle-bas en noir et blanc (2000), all of which were texts inspired by the rediscovery of the land of his birth, in what might be called a powerful third phase of his literary production. In the first stage of his career, we find stories that challenge the colonial order, missionary practices, and gerontocratic traditions that suffocate young people and women: "Sans haine et sans amour" (1953), Ville cruelle (1954), Le pauvre Christ de Bomba [The Poor Christ of Bomba] (1956), Mission terminée [Mission to Kala] (1957), and Le roi miraculé: chronique des Essazam [King Lazarus] (1958).

The second stage of Mongo Beti's career began in 1972, after fourteen years of silence that he explained by professional demands and family obligations. This second period appears to be the most fertile, beginning with Main basse sur le Cameroun (1972), a scathing attack that jeopardized Franco-Cameroonian relations. Indeed, through the intermediary of Ferdinand Oyono, then Cameroon's ambassador to France, Ahmadou Ahidjo demanded that Raymond Marcellin, then Minister of the Interior, ban that work by Mongo Beti. That was the beginning of a long judicial procedure that took until 1976 to conclude...