Novel
The White Man of God
Kenjo Jumbam · 1980
Synopsis
In a Lamnso-speaking village not far from Bamenda, the young Tansa grows up between devout Catholic parents and his maternal grandmother, Yaya, faithful to the customs of the ancestors. The mission gains ground, and Tansa's family joins the campaign it leads against the old practices; Yaya refuses the new faith, whose God she judges cruel, and holds the culture of the land to be more humane. Between the young Father Cosmas and the “Big Fadda” who unmasks a figure of tradition, the child worries about a God of love who can send his children to hell.
Context
The novel appears in 1980 in London from Heinemann, in the African writers series, five years after its author's first book from the same publisher. For years it becomes required reading in the secondary schools of Anglophone Cameroon and a text studied at the University of Yaoundé, of which schoolchildren of the eighties and nineties keep a memory. Richard Bjornson sees in it the best-known Anglophone Cameroonian novel since 1972, and the South African critic Annie Gagiano judges its author less well known than his work deserves.
Who it is for
In English, a novel of childhood. It is worth knowing that north-west Cameroon is English-speaking, a legacy of the part of German Kamerun entrusted to Great Britain.
Prizes and reception
No prize found. The critic Steve Arnold predicted as early as 1978 that its author would soon be widely read.
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