Central Africa

Overview

The first books printed in the region were in Duala, Kikongo and Lingala, by missionaries who learned the language in order to translate the Gospel, then by the scholars they had trained: Isaac Moume Etia published grammars and collections of proverbs in Duala from 1920. The French-language novel arrives after the war, with Mongo Beti's Cruel City and The Poor Christ of Bomba, and at once meets colonial censorship. Cinema remains rare: Congo-Brazzaville produced only a few features in fifty years. Cinema remains rare across the whole region, for want of studios and laboratories.

What circulates

Almost all publishing goes through Paris, Yaounde and Kinshasa having few houses, and local print runs rarely exceed a thousand. Lingala and Swahili circulate through song and radio far more than through books, which gives music the role literature holds elsewhere. Radio has long carried what the printing press could not.

Limits of this grouping

The word central covers countries that nothing brings together but French and Belgian colonisation: Chad belongs to the Sahel, Angola and Sao Tome to the Lusophone world, Equatorial Guinea to the Hispanophone. The Congo basin, for its part, runs through three of these countries without the division taking account of it.

Works cited

• PoetryPiments sangJean-Paul Nyunaï · 1963not translated into EnglishPoems from 1953, printed in Paris ten years later.Literature
• NovelAgatha Moudio's SonLe Fils d'Agatha MoudioFrancis Bebey · 1968A village on the outskirts of Douala, where the fountain spreads every piece of gossip and where the family chooses the wife.Literature
• CinemaThe Ransom of an AllianceLa Rançon d'une allianceSébastien Kamba · 1974A war between two peoples of precolonial Congo, set off by an adultery, shot in the languages of the country.Cinema