Tale
À la belle étoile
Not translated into English
Benjamin Matip · 1962
Synopsis
Tales and short stories from Africa, written in French. Monkeys lecture men on morals, tortoises taunt them, and beneath these talking animals one can read symbols of African realities. Several stories drawn from tradition are reworked here to serve a political thought of Western origin. According to its presentation, the book invites Africa to draw its wisdom from this heritage, whose chroniclers are legion.
Context
The collection appears in Paris in 1962 from Présence africaine, in ninety-one pages, with the subtitle contes et nouvelles d'Afrique. These are not transcriptions: the critic Albert Gérard, in his study of African writing in European languages, ranks these texts among the narratives of the tradition that their author transformed in order to convey ideas learned in the West. The book has entered the digitised collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Who it is for
In French, fewer than a hundred pages. It is worth knowing that these tales have been rewritten, and that their animals also speak of politics.
Prizes and reception
No prize found. The book was reissued in electronic format in 2018, fifty-six years after its publication.