Category: Cameroon

Dark heart of the Night by Leonora Miano

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Dark Heart of the Night by Leonora Miano

Cameroonian fiction

Original title – L’Intérieur de la nuit

Translator – Tamsin Black

Source – Personal copy

I moved to Cameroon in Africa with another book that has a lot to say about female lives within that country. This is my next stop on this year’s Women in Translation Month. Leona Miano has lived in France since the early 90s. This was her debut novel and won some prizes, including the Prix Goncourt’s award for books that appeal to Teenage readers. That book saw a woman going back to Cameroon after three years away a return to the dark heart of Africa and her small village. The book looks at colonialism the violence that has been seen in a lot of different African countries as the colonial powers withdraw, leaving a vacuum of power and mistakes made in the years after. This book tells the story of a girl returning to her village after she had seen the wider world and is a different girl than the one who left her small town a few years earlier.

As for the girls, they stayed put, turning over and over soil that yielded only what was forcibly rooted out. No one had ever had the odd idea of sending them to school. In normal times during the day, only mature women, unmarried girls, and young children were to be found in the clearing. Most of the men lived in towns far away or in other countries, and they came home only now and then. In these distant places, they seldom made a fortune. The life they led there gobbled up everything they were supposed to save to keep the promises they had made to themselves and the clan. When they called in to the village, it was only to drop off a few leftovers and boom out instructions, which they would not be able to see carried out. Then, they went away. And the women stayed, with the world on their shoulders. Women with sons were quick to make them bear some of this weight. They packed them off to work as they might have deposited money in an account. The sons took wives then lived as their fathers had lived before them.

The tradtional nature of the village is shown her.

Ayane has decided to go home, and when she arrives back in her remote village of Eku. But this has been caused by her mother dying, and when she returns, her former friends and villagers view her as different. This woman is now differently educated. Is she a witch? As this happens. The village is caught in a storm as a militia arrives and bloody violence descends on them all. This is all viewed by Ayane as she hides and observes how the villagers react to all this.; The militia are the sort of pan-African forces that cropped up in the post-colonial times of Africa as countries tried to forge a new identity. But this is viewed as a given by the villagers, as this is maybe their resignation to the events and bloody violence, death and heartache, as Isilo, the leader of the Militia, tells the young woman and men what to do. The story shifts between the villagers, Ayane and her mother.

Ayané was a frail child with pale skin. Pale, they said, because her skin was not the coal-black color of the local people, cooked over and again by the sun since time immemorial. But she was in fact as dark as cocoa beans. Of course, the women said she was bewitched, probably a witch returned from the dead. And even though none of them had managed to find a mark on her skin to prove it, they told their children not to go near her. Never had the local children screamed so loudly in the evening at the beatings they received, sometimes with a pestle, for having ventured into a forbidden house. Girls and boys alike all ran after her to play with the toys her father made her and tell her the gossip their mothers whispered to them about her parents. Sometimes, the village women, who had no dealings with Aama, were obliged to talk to her. The fact was, their kids were often in her hut or in her garden. For she had a garden with non-edible plants, which she grew for no other reason than to admire the beauty of their flowers and smell their fragrance. The garden, too, made the women talk:

Ayane was a plae girl but is now a woman her mother stayed inthe village

This is a book that has blurred lines in the story, no real plot, it is about he event in the village and that as a wider view of post-colonial Africa. The use of the woman returning having seen the world beyond Eku, beyond their past and traditions, as the wider world outsider, their village is changing, and this is shown in a way by Ayane, her education and wider view having to return for the funeral makes her an observer on the violence that follows. But also the Militia is a sign of pan-African ideas, the struggle post-colonially to find identity for their country. Then the village and the locals have an almost death-like fatalism as they seem to be so far detached from the world that has been and the world that is coming. Their village is lost in time. In that the violence is almost the death of their way of life, as the modern world comes crashing in on their world! I liked this book; it isn’t a straightforward read, but I’d like to read more from her . Mainly because her later books deal with Afropean matters.

 

Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono

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Houseboy by Ferdinand

Cameroonian fiction

Original title – Une vie de boy

Translator – John Reed

My second 1956 club read take me too Cameroon and one of the first modern African writers . Ferdinand Oyono was educated in France and whilst studying in Paris he took to write his first two novels. This is one of them. He then became a start of stage and television. Then he was a diplomat representing Cameroon at the common market as it was then and was an ambassador he lead a full life and this was written in his twenties.It was published in 1966 as part of the African writer series although it is one of the earliest written books in the series having come out ten years earlier.

Everything I am I owe to Father Gilbert. He is my benefactor and I am very fond of him. He is cheerful and pleasent and when I was small he treated me like a pet animal he loved to pull my ears and all the time i have been getting an education he has loved to watch my constant amazement at everything

He had a strong bond to the father who sadly died before he was a man.

The book starts with the main character in the book Toundia Cameroonain Houseboy. He is found half dying in Spanish Guniea. This is a framing device as with him are discovered two exercise books and this is what the book is made of the diaries of this young boy. This is a tough story of a young boys life he has a violent father so he decides to run of and is taken under the wing of the local Catholic priest Father Gilbert who becomes a second father to the young boy but then in a bike crash the father is killed so the young boy is left to fend for himself. He is eventually taken in by the local Commandant for the region as a Houseboy in the house as his wife arrives from France to run the house all seems great as she is a kind warm characater but when her husband has to go away for months with her job she turns and everything the servents around the house is wrong as he sees the true face of the Europeans which till then he had looked up to and admired.

She tried to whistle but soon ran out of breath and fell silent. The noise of the bottle smashing on the cement floor brought a sharp “Damm”! She called me to clear up the mess. It was one of the bottles of preparation she puts on her face at night. Pieces of broken glass had gone under the bed. I knelt down and probing under the bed with the broom brought out not only the broken glass but also some little rubber bags. There were two of them. Madame heard the sound of sweeping stop and looked round. When saw me turning the little rubber bags over and over with the end of the broom she sprang on me and tried to push them under the bed with her. Instead she trod on one of them and a little liquid squirted out of it on the floor

The discover of these means she has had another man in her bed !!

This has the hallmarks of a lot of the early modern African fiction that came about as the countries where finding the feet it has the change of view in many people of the European former rulers of the countries in this case this is encapsulated in the character of the Madame the wife of the commandant but the behaviour of those others like the lover she has the head of the local prison leaving the young boy with a problem as he has seen this. It has the disillusionment of the young man his hope to be considered worth more with in the house leaves him with the choice that lead to the start of the book as the tale goes full circle. It capture the colonial situation in the view of one houseboy that could be seen as a wider view of the many a young man at that time. This is another reason why many more people should read the African writer series books they need be promoted more.

King Lazarus by Mongo Beti

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King Lazarus

King Lazarus by Mongo Beti

Cameroon fiction

Translator – Peter Green

Source personnel copy

As I said yesterday I was shocked when in Alain Mabanckou in his book ,Black Bazaar, they were discussing early French language fiction from Africa and Mongo Beti was mentioned ,it served to remind me I hadn’t reviewed this book that I had read last year .So too  Mongo Beti ,was out spoken as a kid about religion and colonialism in africa .He was expelled from his missionary school but did manage to get to university in France where he studied literature , first at Aix-en-Provence he then went to the prestigious Sorbonne in Paris ,before returning to Cameroon ,where he wrote journalism ,including a scathing piece on the writer Camara Laye for what he saw as a book pandering to western tastes ,not African tastes.He then choose to write novels himself ,writing a number of books a number of which appeared in the ealry collection of the African writer series  .He did end up spending a lot of his life in exile .

The same day the reverend father mustered all his determination and will-power and sought audience with the chief .What took place no-one discovered .Directly Le Guen left ,the chief summoned his brother ,telling him to send away all the palace wives .

“Except the one and only wife to whom I shall be married in the eyes of god ”

“And which one might that be ? ” Mekenda enquired cautiously .

The Chief makes his choices .

After reading up on Mongo Beti his motivation for writing this book became clear ,this book is a vision of how he saw Cameroon ,missionaries and tribal life in his homeland .The book centres on The chief of the Essazam ,who has decide to embrace the catholic faith .Now this is where the problems start for him ,because he has a number of wives 23 in all .The church has been pushing him to choose just one of the women so he choose the youngest of his wives to be his only bride in the eyes of god .Now this isn’t the simplest thing for him to do because the other 22 wives don’t want to lose the position or lose face within the tribe ,thus setting up a trick situation .On top of this the chief is being pushed into this by Le Guen the priest ,as Le Guen in turn is facing pressure from his bishop to make the chief convert as they see him converting as a powerful figure for the church in the country .

At the time of the events this story describe ,the girl was barely fifteen .An impetuous ,passionate  creature, la bell ,Medzo ,her opulent Bosom the more striking for the bird-fine  adolescent body .Already the most attractive women in the place .

WHat happens to Medzo ?

Well as you see this is very much tribal world and way of life clashing with the incoming Christian religion  .The title is a spin on the old tale because instead of everything turning to gold as the priest and his bishop hopes ,it in fact has the opposite effect for the Chief .Given that Beti was critical of Laye ,you can see that this book which he wrote after that is very much a book that appeals to Africans in the post colonial world at the time it was written 1958 France and both the UK were starting to withdraw from Africa ,in fact Cameroon became independent just two years after this book was published .Satire is the way Beti choose to show the world of the chief and the priest ,to show the madness of the two worlds clashing the Christian world and it values and the Tribal world .The Pressure on Le Guen to make him decide to become a Catholic ,without seeing the bigger picture .Beti has written here a sharply observed  book capturing a shifting world in time that world of older values and western messing with these values .This book seems out of print which is a shame but old African writer copies seem easily available online .This book shows yet again how in the early years of this series the Late Chinua Achebe ,who sadly passed away last week ,made some great choices for this series by picking strong voices out of Africa.

Have you read any books from Cameroon ?