The Archaeology of Emotional Life in Patrice Nganang’s Mont Plaisant

Patrice Nganang’s historical novel Mount Pleasant (2011) is a beautiful interplay between imagination, archival sources, time, and memory. More than a simple product of the author’s imagination utilizing colonial archives, this novel is a celebration of an unprecedented cultural memory, initiated by a Cameroonian king, Sultan Njoya, whose prodigious cultural creativity and intellectual life is unique in African history. This study aims at delineating the aesthetic entwinement between archive, memory, and emotion. Attention given to the argument that despite the novel’s critics of racialized relations embedded in the ruling strategies of the three consecutive European imperial powers (German, English, and French) in Cameroon, Mount Pleasant can be regarded as an archaeological site, a powerful exploration of human nature as well as a convincing ethics of storytelling on human understanding in this age of mind. The stories created by Nganang ultimately lead to the conclusion that there are coalescent aesthetic influences between historical features of this literary text, which in turn translates these historical sources into new epistemologies of emotional memories and as a result constitutes a call to acknowledge the place and merits of this original cultural memory in the history of African cultural production within the current context of a global paradigm.