Beti, Mongo 1932–2001

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Mongo Beti 1932–2001

Writer

Expelled from School

Twice Won Literary Honors

Noveis Critical of Post-Colonial Politics

Returned to Homeland

Selected writings

Sources

Cameroonian author Mongo Beti, under the pen name of Alexandre Biyidi-Awala, wrote several sharply satirical novels in French critical of colonial and post-colonial African politics. Beti used his fiction as a vehicle to condemn the imposition of European culture on African peoples, but also negatively portrayed those Africans who came to power—and then abused it—in nations like Cameroon. He died on October 8, 2001. His death prompted London’s Guardian newspaper to call him “one of the foremost African writers of the independence generation,” journalist Kaye Whiteman declared. “His biting satires of the colonial period still rank among the best African novels. He also acquired the status of an icon, as a brilliant political polemicist who never gave up on his radicalism.”

Expelled from School

Beti was born Alexandre Biyidi-Awala in 1932 near M’Balmayo, Cameroon, when the west central African nation was still a colony of France. His family had a cocoa plantation in this southern part of the country, and when he was ejected from school at age 14 for insubordination, the future writer worked in its groves for a time. He eventually finished school and left for France to attend the University of Aix-Marseille. He went on to the Sorbonne in Paris, a university whose heady intellectual reputation attracted other politically-minded young men and women from African nations. Their families were often at least prosperous enough to send them abroad, and such exiles were sharply critical of colonialism and its legacy on African political, social, cultural, and economic traditions. Beti joined their ranks as well, and wrote his first novel, Ville cruelle (“Cruel City”), under the pseudonym Eza Boto. The city of the title is a newly industrialized area, whose African residents are uneasy with a transition that forces them to survive by working dangerous jobs in newly created lumber mills and rail yards. He later distanced himself from the 1954 novel, feeling that it was not the finest example of his writing.

Critics consider his first work published under the pseudonym Mongo Beti, 1956’s The Poor Christ of Bomba, as one of the writer’s finest. The novel is set in the 1930s in Cameroon, and features themes that World Literature Today writer Robert P. Smith Jr. described as “familiar Mongo Beti territory.” These

At a Glance…

Born Alexandre Biyidi-Awala, June 30, 1932, in Akometam, near M’Balmayo, Cameroon; died October 8, 2001; married Odile Tobner (a teacher), late 1950s; children: three. Education: Attended University of Aix-MarseiIle; Sorbonne, B.A. (with honors); University of Paris, M.A., 1966. Politics: Marxist.

Career: Educator in Lamballe, France; secondary education instructor in classical Greek, Latin, and French literature in Rouen, France. Writer, 1953-01.

Awards: Twice awarded the French Academy’s Sainte-Beuve Prize, for Mission Accomplished and King Lazarus.

included “origins of fear, persecution, repression, betrayal, conspiracy, tribal conflict, war, revolt, corruption, and the violence and politics of power in post-colonial African republics,” Smith noted. The work centers on a French missionary, Father Drumont, who visits villagers and attempts to convert them from their indigenous religion to Christianity. He also strives to keep them, at the same time, from adopting Western-style materialistic values that he has witnessed elsewhere among the newly converted. Drumont is saddened to learn that the villagers only agreed to convert because they hoped it would bring them prosperity. He is further devastated when he finds that the “sixa,” a missionary house for young African women who live there to learn traditional “wifely” ways, has become a den of venereal disease.

Twice Won Literary Honors

Beti’s second novel, Mission Accomplished, took the Sainte-Beuve prize of the French Academy around the time of its 1957 publication. Its protagonist is Jean-Marie Medza, who fails his exams at a French secondary school, and returns home. His family sends him to a distant village, Kala, to bring back the runaway wife of a relative. The Kala villagers treat Medza as a brilliant, distinguished guest, and shower him with presents. He even takes a wife, but the longer he remains in the remote, unsophisticated community, the more he realizes how little he knows about life. Beti garnered further literary acclaim and another Sainte-Beuve prize for his next work, King Lazarus. Its plot centers around a polygamous tribal chief who heeds a priest’s urging to convert and divest himself of his many wives. The chief keeps just one, and turns the others out; irate, they complain to authorities, and a tribunal is held in which each side presents its case.

Beti lived a politically committed life outside of his fiction as well. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he had ties to the Union des Peuples Camerounais (UPC), a Marxist group in Cameroon. The country achieved independence from France in 1960, but Beti was critical of the new government in the capital city of Yaoundeé. He penned articles for the journals Tumultueux Cameroun and Revue camerounaise, but living in his native land became dangerous because of his political opinions and connections to the UPC. He moved to France in the early 1960s, taking a job as a teacher of classical Greek, Latin, and French literature in Rouen, and did not write fiction for the next ten years.

Noveis Critical of Post-Colonial Politics

An essay titled “The Plundering of Cameroon,” published in 1972, revived Beti’s status in Cameroon as an opinion-maker. Some of it discussed the final, failed UPC rebellion, whose leader was publicly executed in 1970. The work also gained some notoriety in France, where it was banned and seized because of its criticism of Cameroonian politics. Like other African nations in the years following independence, the country had become a one-party state by then.

The attention from “The Plundering of Cameroon” helped spark Beti’s creativity, and he returned to writing novels again. These portrayed life in Cameroon after independence, such as Remember Ruben from 1973, which follows the story of orphaned Mor-Zamba, who is adopted by a village. When he grows into adulthood and wants to marry the daughter of the community’s most esteemed family, he is forcibly sent away to a labor camp. Eighteen years later, he is reunited with his best friend from childhood, and learns the reasons for his internal exile. In a 1979 sequel, Lament for an African Pol, Mor-Zamba becomes a political opposition leader named Ruben Um Nyobe.

Beti began a political journal with his wife, Odile Tobner, Peuples noirs, peuples africains (“Black People, African People”), and returned to Cameroon in the early 1990s. He owned a book store there and continued to write polemical tracts and novels. His later works include Trop de soleil tue l’amour: Roman (“Too Much Sun Kills the Love”), which appeared in French in 1999. Its plot borrows some elements from the African detective genre in its story of Zamakwe, a political journalist and jazz fan. The theft of his extensive music collection and the mysterious kidnapping of his girlfriend set in motion a chain of events that bring him to a militia group and its leader. Writing in World Literature Today, the critic Smith observed that the novel followed certain themes found in Beti’s work. He “criticizes repressive forces, external as well as internal, which keep his fellow Africans in an unbearable state of subordination,” Smith wrote, and the critic concluded that the novel “retains much of Beti’s powerful reasoning, sometimes deadly serious and sometimes familiarly humorous. His storytelling technique remains vibrant and captivating.”

Returned to Homeland

Zamakwe’s story was continued in Branle-bas en noir et blanc: Roman (“Commotion in Black and White”), which appeared in 2000. Here, Zamakwe’s friend Eddie dreams of a career as a detective, but all mock his ambitions, reminding him that solving crimes in a society where the police force is so corrupt is an impossible dream. The plot centers around Eddie’s search for the missing Zamakwe. Another reviewer for World Literature Today, Marco D. Roman, observed that the novel “holds up a mirror to African society in order to wake it into a realization of the imposed images put upon it by its own corrupt government as well as by those Western institutions that force Africans to view themselves as unable.”

Beti died in Douala, Cameroon on October 8, 2001, from renal complications. He was survived by his wife and three children. He had been invited to read excerpts from his books at a Harvard University Bookstore event on October 21st, along with Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat and Olive Senior, the Jamaican writer. Instead, organizers decided to make the reading a memorial tribute to Beti. “He was such an important figure in the development of African literature in French,” a scholar at Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute of Afro-American Research, Andrew Horn, told Africana.com writer Tanu T. Henry. “When his novels first came out they came as a shock to many in Europe and as gratification to many in Africa.”

Selected writings

(Under pseudonym Eza Boto) Ville cruelle (title means “Cruel City”), Editions Africaines, 1954.

Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba, Laffont, 1956, translation by Gerald Moore published as The Poor Christ of Bomba, Heinemann Educational [London], African Writers Series, 1971.

Mission terminee, Buchet Chastel/Correa, 1957, translation by Peter Green published as Mission Accomplished, Macmillan, 1958, published in England as Mission to Kala, Muller, 1958, rewritten by John Davey and published as Mission to Kala (illustrated by Peter Edwards), Heinemann Educational, African Writers Series, 1964.

Le Roi miracule: Chronique des Essazam, Buchet Chastel/Correa, 1958, English translation published as King Lazarus, Muller [London], 1960, published as King Lazarus: A Novel (introduction by O.R. Dathorne), Macmillan/Collier, 1971.

Main basse sur le Cameroun: Autopsie d’une decolonisation (political essay; title means “The Plundering of Cameroon”), F. Maspero, 1972.

Remember Ruben (title in pidgin English), Buchet Chastel, 1973, translation by Gerald Moore published under the same title, Three Continents Press, 1980.

Perpetue et l’habitude du malheur, Buchet Chastel, 1974, translation by John Reed and Clive Wake published as Perpetua and the Habit of Unhappiness, Heinemann Educational, African Writers Series, 1978.

La Ruine presque cocasse d’un polichinelle: Remember Ruben deux, L’Harmattan, 1979, translation by Richard Bjornson published as Lament for an African Pol, Three Continents Press, 1985.

Les Deux Meres de Guillaume Ismael Dzewatama: Futur Camionneur, Buchet Chastel, 1982.

La Revanche de Guillaume Ismael Dzewatama, Buchet Chastel, 1984.

Lettre ouverte aux Camerounais, ou, La deuxieme mort de Ruben Um Nyobe, L’Harmattan, 1986.

(With Odile Tobner) Peuples noirs, peuples africains, L’Harmattan, 1989.

La France contre l’Afrique; Retour au Cameroun, La Decouverte, 1993.

L’histoire du fou; roman, Julliard, 1994.

Trop de soleil tue l’amour: Roman (title means “Too Much Sun Kills the Love”), Julliard, 1999.

Branle-bas en noir et blanc: Roman (title means “Commotion in Black and White”), Julliard, 2000.

The Story of the Madman, translated by Elizabeth Darnel, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 2001.