Novel
Cette Afrique-là!
Not translated into English
Jean Ikellé-Matiba · 1963
Synopsis
Over the course of two evening gatherings, before the people of his village, Franz Mômha tells his life from before his birth, at the end of the nineteenth century. He sees again his childhood among the Bassa peasants, in the last days of the Africa of old, then the German conquest: enlisted against his will, taught in the language of the colonisers to the point of calling himself a Prussian student, he serves their administration and has to leave to study in Germany when the war of 1914 breaks out. The country then passes to France, which offers him a post in its own.
Context
The novel appeared in Paris in 1963 from Présence africaine, which reissued it in 1997 in its pocket series. Erica de Bary translated it into German in 1966 under the title Adler und Lilie in Kamerun; according to Susanne Gehrmann, the translator's correspondence with the publishers shows how much resistance its colonial critique met with in the Germany of those years. The academic M'bare N'gom reads it as a collective autobiography, written to bear witness and to demystify, in which the African, whom colonial discourse regarded as a being without history, becomes its subject again.
Who it is for
In French. It helps to know that the country was German until the First World War, then divided in 1916 between France and Great Britain.
Prizes and reception
Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire in 1963, a year after the one awarded to Cheikh Hamidou Kane.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.