Cruel City. Mongo Beti

      INTRODUCTION

      Collected here are two of the most important works of Francophone African literature, finally available in English: the critical essay “Romancing Africa” (“Afrique noire, littérature rose,” 1955), and the novel Cruel City (Ville cruelle, 1954), both by the Cameroonian man of letters Alexandre Biyidi Awala, whom the world would come to know as Mongo Beti (1932–2001). Beti was born in the Northern Cameroonian town of Akométan near Mbalmayo, a city whose river and old reinforced concrete bridge can easily be imagined as models for Tanga. Indeed, numerous biographical details match up well with the novel, such as the early death of Beti’s father and the discussions the author had with his mother about religion and politics. The big difference of course lies in the character’s relative illiteracy. Over the course of his nearly fifty-year career, Beti would receive broad acclaim as one of the greatest literary tellers of political and existential truths; he spent decades in exile for his criticism of Cameroon’s post-independence regimes, and his writing would, on occasion, even be censored in France. Both on their own and taken as the beginning of this substantial literary production, “Romancing Africa” and Cruel City represent a pivotal moment for the continent: the first drafts of a Francophone African literary canon.

      “Romancing Africa” was published in the celebrated Paris-based journal Présence Africaine.¹ The young author’s essay is a single-minded manifesto: a programmatic and radical break with the past; a bold challenge to colonialism and its various avatars; and a call to literary arms. Beti’s first anti-establishment attack forcefully announces—demands, in fact—a path forward, toward a postcolonial African literary production. Along with its sheer brashness and daring, this youthful text also enumerates the challenges facing the sub-Saharan African novelist working in French. In summarizing these challenges, “Romancing Africa” first posits the total absence of quality literature in or on Africa, by which it means books that are actually read. By the essay’s own account, this initial criterion immediately creates a series of problems. First, given the historical, economic, and cultural effects of colonialism, there is no African reader-ship; only the French will consume such works. This French (bourgeois) readership thus single-handedly determines literary success; France controls the means of publication, distribution, and by extension, the terms of consumption.

      According to Beti, the French reader in turn expects two things: that writing on Africa(ns) stress the folkloric; and that the colonial enterprise be celebrated, or at the very least not criticized. This latter expectation comes into immediate conflict with Beti’s second determining criterion for a quality literary work, besides its popularity: that it objectively—that is to say critically—represent the effects of colonialism. Intervening literary history has thereby revealed Beti’s two conditions for a quality African novel in French to be mutually exclusive. Indeed, any novelist wishing for success on the French literary scene will, according to Beti, avoid like the plague the truth of African modernity (its cities, its multiple engagements with global capital, its repressive administration, etc.); this author will necessarily dodge the complex and violent legacies of colonialism. Such a book, according to Beti, while popular, won’t be a quality work of fiction because it won’t be realistic, won’t be honest about its subject matter. Significantly, this tension that Beti raised so succinctly almost sixty years ago remains in various forms at the heart of most African writing today, and certainly informs and shapes critical debates.

      Of course, having established the essay’s argument, how does “Romancing Africa” explain the author’s own fiction? Or in other words, does Beti’s text reach the author’s own standards of excellence? If we hold him strictly to the very first rule, namely that the work should sell, the answer would have to be no. Despite its importance to the Franco-phone African canon, Cruel City has been through only three small printings in French. Regarding the second criterion, does Cruel City escape the fundamentally testimonial—what Beti calls the picturesque—expectations of a French reader-ship? This is far more difficult to assess; rather, this question highlights Beti’s ambivalence about where his character— indeed the African novel as whole—should go. “Romancing Africa” objects most strenuously to the representation of Africa as folkloric atemporal space; in this sense, to a Hegelian “timeless Dark Continent” Beti’s novel opposes the historical present of a land coming to grips with its modernity, that is, with the colonial experience itself. What confuses matters is that the central protagonist, Banda, ultimately never makes the transition to the city; he remains caught in the maternal space of tradition that Odilia clearly represents. At the end of the novel, Banda knows he must listen to the one voice he trusts, namely his own, but can’t quite yet bring himself to make the move . . .

      While the relationship between the two texts is subject to interpretation, what we can infer from “Romancing Africa” is that Cruel City is experimental; the novel formulates its own conditions of