Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem

Mailian fiction

Orignal title – Le devoir de violence

Translator Ralph Manheim

Source – Personal copy

Where to start, this is another book that is a cornerstone of African fiction from the Francophone world.  This book was a book that sparked so controversy when it came out, as there is certain passages that had come from a book by Graham Greene and another piece from the French writer Andre Schwarz-Bart but somewhere in the editing of the book it seems the quotation of these passages had disappeared this meant the book jhad vanished for almost fifty years infact it was another prize winning book this book had won the Prix Renadout when it came out. It was the Goncourt Prize winner, The most secret memory of men, a fictional version of what happened to Ouloguem after the plagiarism claim against his book and how he was treated, led to the republishing of the book as a Penguin Classic a book that captured 700 years of Malian history, but also the way Ouloguem felt his country men had become servility that had become engrained in the local pouplation after years of french rule.

Under these conditions an adulteress incurred pitiless pun-ishment: the very least that could happen to her was to be stripped bare, exposed with shackled ankles in the royal court-yard, and given a douche of pepper water to which – wallahi! -ants had been added. In certain cases (if the guilty woman was pregnant or had been delivered of a stillborn child) another punishment devised by Saif was administered. She was held with spread legs over a wood fire which singed her pubic hair.

On the other hand, a woman whose husband had been unfaithful could do nothing but take note of the fact, seek out her rival, and, having found her -hee-hee-hee! – insult her and thrash her.

The violence of the country under the Saifs

The book is a small epic: the first part deals with the Dogon region of Mali, but instead of Mali, it uses the fictional country of Nakem-Zuiko. What Ouologuem tries to show is Mali’s 700-year past through the various rises and falls of tribes, the Saifs’ rise, the initial encounters with white incomers and slave traders, and how brutal and twisted this history could be.  This is all a lead-up to the last section of the book, which follows the figure of Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi.  He is from a family of ex slaves, but has risen with an education, much studying and ended up going to France to Paris to study and serve in the war, and returns to his homeland, but then sees his future as nothing more than a puppet of the white leaders and French rule and way of running the country.

But it was too soon and too late. Smitten by Europe, a second shadow of himself, Raymond had already known Saif’s fevers.

The white man had crept into him and this white presence determined even the moves that he, a child of violence, would make against it. Despising Africa, he took giant strides to diminish the gulf that separated him from the splendours of white civilization. But a simultaneous grasp of twenty centuries of history, or of their residue, was still beyond his reach: where he should have discovered – may the Evil One be banished! – he accepted

Raymond is caught in between the french rulers and the Saifs

The book is a slicing open of the heart of Mali through the centires a sort of open heart surgery ion his country a warts and all tlook at the history the various ways people got by the violence and way he saw many olf his country men had just got used to tipping there hat of being part of the wider system and this is what we get with raymond with his french name but also his other name of Spartagus the leader of the slave uprising a man that seems like he could break the mould but then goes to France and becomes part of the cogs of the french regime on his return a man caught between those saifs that ruled the country and the french rulers of now neither is appealing this is part of his tryingt o break the vision of his countries past as an idylic place but more a world that has always struggled with the saifs and the tribes before the french rule a country of blood and violence from trafding slaves with the arabic world to then the french world it captures a warts and all pictue of the past. A powerful work that needed to be republished, thanks to Sarr’s book highlighting how long it had been out of print! Have you read this or the most secret memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr I reviewed it here