Mongo beti biography of michael

1The discussion of the African novel often focuses on the tragic or ‘serious’ novel, thus emphasizing the textual orientation of this type of novel as shaped by contextual factors. The tradition of the comic novel in Africa is often understated. For instance, Chidi Amuta, who claims that “[a] common denominator of African literary scholarship […] is a disturbing theoretical anaemia” (5), does not make the sort of generic distinction that distinguishes the comic from the tragic in The Theory of African Literature. Many of the well known and often-discussed modern African novels – such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood, Ahmadou Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence, Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road – are tragic or semi-tragic novelizations of the traditional or the contemporary African experience. Even though both the African comic novel and the African tragic novel are often shaped by the same sociopolitical experience, each genre is distinct in terms of technique. A characterization of the African comic novel, with Nkem Nwankwo’s Danda and Mongo Beti’s The Poor Christ of Bomba as primary examples, illustrates the nature of the comic or the poetics of laughter in the African novel — a poetics that ranges in this instance from the comic simplicitas of Danda to the comic magnitude in The Poor Christ of Bomba.

2Nkem Nwankwo’s novel, Danda, exemplifies comic density. Published in 1964, Danda is set in Igboland, as is Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), and the two novels more or less traverse the same socio-historical territory. But Nwankwo’s novel does not have the same sort of gravitas as Things Fall Apart. Where the comic tendency in Achebe’s novel, as is only tentatively suggested through the character of Unoka, is overshadowed by the overall tone and tragic mood of the novel, Nwankwo’s intent is clearly to laugh at the assumptions and pretensions of t

Writer

Expelled from School

Twice Won Literary Honors

Noveis Critical of Post-Colonial Politics

Returned to Homeland

Selected writings

Sources

Cameroonian author Mongo Beti, under the pen name of Alexandre Biyidi-Awala, wrote several sharply satirical novels in French critical of colonial and post-colonial African politics. Beti used his fiction as a vehicle to condemn the imposition of European culture on African peoples, but also negatively portrayed those Africans who came to power—and then abused it—in nations like Cameroon. He died on October 8, 2001. His death prompted London’s Guardian newspaper to call him “one of the foremost African writers of the independence generation,” journalist Kaye Whiteman declared. “His biting satires of the colonial period still rank among the best African novels. He also acquired the status of an icon, as a brilliant political polemicist who never gave up on his radicalism.”

Expelled from School

Beti was born Alexandre Biyidi-Awala in 1932 near M’Balmayo, Cameroon, when the west central African nation was still a colony of France. His family had a cocoa plantation in this southern part of the country, and when he was ejected from school at age 14 for insubordination, the future writer worked in its groves for a time. He eventually finished school and left for France to attend the University of Aix-Marseille. He went on to the Sorbonne in Paris, a university whose heady intellectual reputation attracted other politically-minded young men and women from African nations. Their families were often at least prosperous enough to send them abroad, and such exiles were sharply critical of colonialism and its legacy on African political, social, cultural, and economic traditions. Beti joined their ranks as well, and wrote his first novel, Ville cruelle (“Cruel City”), under the pseudonym Eza Boto. The city of the title is a new