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Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa 90 Henri Lopes’s position is especially intriguing and problematic because, while establishing himself as one of francophone sub-Saharan Africa’s most critically acclaimed authors, he has simultaneously occupied influential diplomatic and governmental positions as a representative of the Republic of the Congo. This presents somewhat of a contradiction, given the inevitable collaborationist complicity that such a position entails with the ruling elite, and in light of the complex dynamic that characterizes relations between authors and postcolonial authorities. Of particular interest in this chapter will be those fundamental and complicated questions raised by Lopes’s ambiguous status inside the very power structure his work subverts and challenges by exposing it to the scrutiny of outsiders; the primary focus will be provided by his 1982 novel, Le Pleurer-Rire (The Laughing Cry).3 Furthermore , I want to consider the novel as a confessional and testimonial narrative that further problematizes this relationship, while raising important questions relating to collaboration and reconciliation. Henri Lopes is legally Congolese (that is to say a citizen of the Republic of the Congo), although he was in fact born in 1937 in the Belgian Congo 4HENRI LOPES Collaboration, Confession, and Testimony I would ask my reader not to waste time endeavoring to recognize Daddy in the portrait gallery of African leaders , but rather to kill the Daddy in them. —HENRI LOPES1 The possibility we face is of a confession made via a process of relentless self-unmasking which might yet be not the truth but a self-serving fiction. . . . The more coherent such a hypothetical fiction of the self might be, the less the reader’s chance of knowing whether it is a true confession. We can test its truth only when it contradicts itself or comes into conflict with some “outer,” verifiable truth, both of which eventualities a careful confessing narrator can in theory avoid. —J. M. COETZEE2 Henri Lopes 91 (formerly the Republic of Zaire, but today the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Both of his parents were born of European fathers and African mothers, although Lopes has always identified himself as Congolese: “I am first and foremost Congolese, and then a métisse.”4 The question of métissage is a recurring theme in Lopes’s writing and receives its most complete treatment in his novel Le chercheur d’Afriques.5 However, the multiple dimensions of this hybridity also function metaphorically to designate Lopes’s status as a politician and writer constantly negotiating between these identity markers. There is an important point of intersection between the writings of Bessie Head and Lopes. In a letter Head wrote, she stated that “I could have been born a white man. I have no control over it. I shake with terror at the thought. Say, some merciful fate put me on the receiving side of brutality and ignorance, but what if I were born to mete this out to others.”6 As Jacqueline Rose has indicated, “Since Head is half white, this moment of terrified imagining has its concrete foundation. But it is also part of a capacity for psychic crossover and identification which adds a further dimension of ‘universality’ to her writing.”7 The analogy I draw to Lopes concerns his own ethnic identity as métisse—as both colonized subject (the Black dimension) and colonizer (the White component)—such that the “Tonton” (“Daddy”) in us that is alluded to in the first epigraph to this chapter represents a very real concept for Lopes and his own struggle with his authoritarian impulse. For him, it contains the ambiguity of his biographical identity in which the tenuousness emerges through constitutive components. It designates and underlines his belonging to both sides: on the one hand the postcolonial nationalists, and on the other, the non-official resistance authors. Between 1969 and 1981, Lopes held a number of high-ranking ministerial positions under three presidents: Marien Ngouabi (until his assassination in 1977), Joachim Yhombi-Opango in the interim administration between 1977 and 1979, and finally Denis Sassou Nguesso. His appointments included that of minister of foreign affairs in 1972, prime minister from 1972 to 1975, and minister of finances from 1976 to 1981. Until recently, he worked for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris, abandoning his position to become the Congo’s ambassador to France in 1999.8 Lopes’s literary and political careers are inextricably linked, and the relationship between the two has helped shape...

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