Theatre
Three Suitors: One Husband
Trois prétendants… un mari
Guillaume Oyônô Mbia · 1964
Synopsis
Mvoutessi, in southern Cameroon, in 1960. Juliette, eighteen, a schoolgirl, is the most admired young woman in the village, and three men ask for her hand: Ndi, a peasant farmer, Mbia, a wealthy civil servant from Sangmélima, and Tchetgen, a trader passing through. Without telling her, her father Atangana and his family accept the bride-prices, the largest coming from the civil servant. On her return, Juliette refuses to marry a stranger and reveals that she is engaged to Oko, a schoolboy she loves; with the complicity of her cousin Kouma, she plans a theft so that Oko can pay the bride-price himself.
Context
The play appeared in Yaoundé in 1964, from the publisher CLE, in the form of four acts and an interlude, and the journal L'Avant-scène published it the same year in Paris. Later editions give it in five acts, and Georges Godebert made a radio adaptation of it as early as 1967. An English version appeared in 1968, reprinted in 1988 by the University Press of Virginia in a volume of African theatre. Critics read in it a satire of excessive dowries, of the greed of parents and of imposed suitors, in the comic vein of Molière.
Who it is for
In French, a comedy in five acts in its current editions. It is useful to know that in the village the dowry is negotiated between the families.
Prizes and reception
El Hadj Ahmadou Ahidjo Prize in January 1970, for this play and for the whole of its author's work.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.