Little Boys Come from the Stars (review)

From the author of Un fusil dans la main, un poème dans la poche (Paris:Albin Michel, 1973) and Feux des origines (Paris: Albin Michel, 1987), Little Boys Come from the Stars (Les petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles, Paris: Le Serpent à plumes, 1998) inaugurates a new era in African literature, one that focuses on child issues. In a derelict world, which marginalizes children and threatens the stability of nations, victimized kids, whether called shégués (in Kinshasa) or malatias (in West Africa), have acquired the right to discuss their fate and the events that shaped their destiny. Little Boys is a novel of recollection and reporting, filtered through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old narrator, Matapari, who echoes the collective consciousness of Africa's history, spanning three generations: the colonial period, through his grandfather; the postindependent experience, lived by his father; and himself as the representative of the post-national-conference generation.

The grandfather acts as a bridge between the ancestral and the colonized world, not in a negritudelike nostalgia, but with a focus on everyday life. He highlights the most dramatic moments of French domination in a dual world, pitting the civilizing master against his colonial subjects. Against the backdrop of Christian tenets of altruism and mutual respect, his recollections denounce inconsistencies built on the colonial ideology. For the narrator, such a world fades away in the mist of the past, and hardly justifies the inconsistencies that affect his life.

Of the next generation, the narrator's father offers his views. Headmaster of a school, he is a skeptical and reclusive hard-working science lover, who spends most of his energy fighting excesses of monolithic orthodoxies, including one-party systems. The doute méthodique and the search for the truth become the trusted instruments of his intellectual endeavors, in contrast with his wife's Christian piety. His obsession for objectivity foregrounds the epistemological (Foucauldian) issue at heart with many Africanists, such as Houtondji and Mudimbe, on the way knowledge is organized, archived, presented, and disseminated in Africa. His challenge begs for the appropriation of knowledge as an instrument capable of lifting someone to new heights, stimulate research, and give sense to an irrational world.

Matapari lives the postindependence intricacies through an intimate relationship with his maternal uncle, Boula Boula. The one who, in a matrilineal setting, has the duty of leading the youngster through the meanders of childhood and adolescence, has instead taken a diminished role, that of the colonial uncle, the noko (the Lingala word for "uncle"). As the paternalistic figure, he feeds his nephew on half-truths strewn with deceit and ill-conceived ambitions. He stigmatizes the drawbacks of one-party regimes by conspicuously exposing how greed, personal ambition, and deceit undermine the policies meant to foster better days for the masses. He invests himself in acrobatic maneuvers reminiscent of Defoe's Gulliver's Travels.

The novel is also Matapari's own story. Life starts with his odd birth—as the last of triplets—which took place two days after that of his brothers. If in the eyes of the community his birth is mysterious, his life constitutes an attempt at apprehending the world as it has unfolded before each generation. The last scene of the novel, Matapari at his grandfather's deathbed, amplifies the fragility and the needs for mutual reliance between generations in the weaving and preserving of society's basic values. Mata-pari focuses on the nature of the political system and its impact on everyone's existence. Energy, resources, and brainpower become the main support to celebrate the leader and his political organization; meanwhile, corruption is rampant, freedom curtailed, inventiveness crippled, and development stalled. Changes fostered by outside interests cannot shake off the comprador mentality, ingrained in the leadership. Nevertheless, in the face of such a chaotic performance, the novel hardly gives...