Oral tradition and theatre
A former colony that suffered the ravages of the triangular trade, Gabon's official language is French, but its population is made up of 50 ethnic groups and just as many idioms are spoken in its streets. Representing a third of Gabon's 2.3 million inhabitants, the Fang are the recipients of a culture that gave the country one of its first literary works. It all began with music for Herbert Pepper (1912-2001), a young conscript who was sent to Africa by De Gaulle in 1939. A passionate musicologist, he fell in admiration of an aesthetic that he hastened to preserve by collecting and creating a sound library, which he incorporated into the Libreville Museum in 1963. Following in his footsteps, Philippe Ndong Ndoutoume (1928-2005) known as Tsira, himself of Fang origin, published the first bilingual version of Mvett in the early 60s. A brilliant mind and schoolteacher under the colonial government, he was posted near Oyem, where he satisfied his curiosity by being initiated. For Mvett is more than just a stringed instrument or a corpus of war stories, it is also a philosophy which, as its name implies, aims to enable the spirit to soar. The written transcription of this mythology began in 1913 with the German botanist Günter Tessmann's Die Pangwe, but the spiritual dimension was not lost on Tsira, who recounted the legend of the warrior-musician Oyono Ada Ngone in the first volume of this cycle published by Présence Africaine in 1970. The Fang were not the only people to arouse interest, as demonstrated by Les Contes gabonais published in 1967 by André Raponda-Walker, a priest born in 1871 who devoted his retirement to the study of the country's various cultures. Although not exhaustive, his collection includes 156 fables from 26 different ethnic groups. These ancestral myths and ancient languages initiated new generations of artists, including Pierre Akendengué, born in 1943, who blended French with Myéné, Pierre Claver Zeng (1953-2010), who was inspired by the Fang tradition, and Annie-Flore Batchiellilys, whose mother tongue is Punu and who became a jazz sensation in the 90s.
Another art form is of crucial importance in Gabon, and became strangely entrenched when missionaries such as Jean-Rémi Bessieux - whose correspondence is published by Karthala - and Grégoire de Sey founded the Congrégation du Saint-Esprit in the mid-19th century. Indeed, these priests used theater both to propagate their faith and to improve the elocution of their young students. Gradually, the practice was democratized and moved out of the religious sphere, but this was all the more true in the 1960s when Vincent de Paul Nyonda (1918-1995) entered the stage. Political life did not always spare him, and it was in playwriting that he seemed to find his true calling. Although only a few of the thirty or so plays he wrote were published, he left a lasting mark on his era with a first trilogy(Le Combat de Mbombi, L'Émergence d'une nouvelle société, and Bonjour, Bessieux) published in 1979 by François Reder in Paris, and a second(La Mort de Guykafi, Deux albinos à la Mpassa and Le Saoûlard) published two years later by L'Harmattan.
Short stories, novels and poetry
At the end of the Second World War, short stories began to become popular, encouraged by the magazines that published them, and by Tsira - again! - who initiated the genre with Que les pieds voyagent afin que les yeux voient. Even if they still followed the rules of oral tradition, or even those of storytelling, with morals and sayings for example, they augured well for the novel, which timidly made its mark in 1971 with Robert Zotoumbat's Histoire d'un enfant trouvé (Story of a Foundling ), which some claim is more of an autobiography.
Over the next two decades, literature was in the throes of research, to such an extent that it was equated with "silence", a term that can be found in the name Rosira Nkiélo gave to her theatre company in 1971, or in the titles of several works(Le Crépuscule des silences by Pierre-Edgar Moundjégou in 1975, Au bout du silence by Laurent Owondo in 1985, which won the Prix Senghor). It was at the dawn of the 90s, when political changes brought new hopes and new violence, that fiction left its naturalistic function to take on a social role, sometimes satirical, often committed. The 1992 publication of Les Matitis by the precocious Hubert Freddy Ndong Mbeng, who was not yet 19, marks a turning point in this respect. He describes the extreme poverty of the suburbs of Libreville where he grew up, thus leaving behind the rural universe that until then had nourished literature with its legends and other rites. In the same way, Angèle Rawiri (1954-2010) abandoned the subject of witchcraft, which had preoccupied her in her first novel Elonga , published in 1980, and set about describing social unrest in her highly acclaimed Fureurs et cris de femmes, published in 1989. The emergence of women's literature was confirmed by Justine Mintsa's fictional diary Un seul tournant Makôsu (1994), and she was one of the first women to join Gallimard's Continents noirs collection in 2000 with Histoire d'Awu. The following year, Chantal Magalie Mbazoo Kassa wrote Sidonie, which evokes AIDS, but also a theme that is becoming less and less taboo, sexuality, which will be at the heart of Sylvie Ntsame's abundant work. Also in 2001, Bessora won the Prix Fénéon for Les Taches d'encre. Although raised in Europe, the young woman, born in Brussels in 1968, asserts her multiple origins and her Gabonese roots. In 2007, she was awarded the Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique noire for Cueillez-moi, jolis Messieurs... (Gallimard). Her latest novel - Les Orphelins - was published in 2021 by Lattès. Last but not least, Charline Effah, praised by Alain Mabanckou for N'être (La Cheminante), which focuses on the relationship between a mother and her daughter. The young author, who was born in Minvoui in 1977, has become the symbol of a new generation that also includes Hervé Ona Ndong, winner of several awards for Jardins Intimes and La Fosse, and Janis Otsiemi, who excels in crime fiction(African Tabloïd, 2013, and La Vie est un sale boulot, 2009, published by Jigal).
