From oral tradition to collection
Time and space are sometimes blurred and happy notions, contrary to what the colonists who strove to write down historical events and draw borders might have thought. As a result, no one can really remember when the Mvett epic first appeared, or to which geographical area the Fang-Beti-Bulu, who have been passing it down through the generations to the sound of their eponymous instrument, can be linked. In any case, this original legend tells of a migration, of repeated attacks on the road that led this Bantu people to Central Africa, of one of their number, Oyono Ada Ngone, who sank into a strange coma and awoke a week later, inhabited by secrets allegedly transmitted to him by a superior entity, Eyo. From this contact with another world, he remembered the incessant battles between the Engong, who possessed the secret of immortality, and the Oku, mere mortals. The songs to which this inaugural episode gave rise were not simply intended to restore hope and the desire to move forward, they became a veritable philosophy, reserved for the initiated and from which were long excluded the foreigners who, following the Portuguese navigator Fernando Pó who landed in 1472, began to take an interest in Cameroon and then to settle there. Although many specialists confirm the literary interest of the Mvett, there are still few transcriptions available, including the version by David Akue Obiang, born in Mékom around 1910, published by L'Harmattan in a bilingual edition.
It's no coincidence that the country's first recognized writer was a polyglot who made his gift for languages - he mastered a dozen of them - his profession: he worked as an interpreter for the various successive colonial administrations, German, English and French. It was around 1920 that this translator, Isaac Moumé Etia, began writing his own texts. He was in his forties at the time, and soon published in the "Literature and Oral Traditions" section of La Gazette du Cameroun. A man who oscillated between the two worlds - that of blacks and whites - he believed that good inter-knowledge would promote better cohabitation. Throughout his life, he strove to convey the colonial language to his fellow citizens when he became a schoolteacher, and native customs and legends when he became a particularly prolific author. His numerous works - from Quelques renseignements sur la coutume locale chez les Doualas (1920) to his dictionaries and grammars published over the following decade, including Les Fables de Douala.. in two languages (printed in Bergerac in 1930) or his posthumous writings(La médecine indigène, Le Cameroun avant, pendant et après la guerre de 1914) - are certainly rarities today, but the collective memory does not forget either his commitment, which also took the form of a trade union, or his funeral which, on October 22, 1939, brought together, for the last time, thousands of anonymous people as well as high-ranking European dignitaries.
In the generation born with the century, others followed in his footsteps, such as Pierre Mviena (1915-1988), who won the Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique noire in 1971 for L'Univers culturel et religieux du peuple béti, the culmination of his career as a religious scholar and essayist, but also Abel Moumé Etia (1919-2004), who published in the fields of anthropology, mathematics and meteorology, and his brother Léopold Moumé Etia (1913-2004), for whom heritage preservation was synonymous with political commitment and, indeed, with freedom from French tutelage. Among the thirty or so titles he wrote or co-wrote, Cameroun: les années ardentes (a 1991 edition of which is available on the BNF's Gallica site) is the best-known. In it, he evoked the period 1935-1955, and in particular the bloody clashes of 1945. Raphaël Onana (1919-2002) also used the autobiographical approach: in Un homme blindé à Bir-Hakeim, he recounts his experience as a non-commissioned officer during the Second World War.
Reality and realism
Without denying this desire to focus on reality - whether through collecting or testimonies - little by little, the desire to resort to fiction began to emerge. The first attempt was undoubtedly confidential: Nnanga Kon, a fantasy novel by Jean-Louis Njemba Medu (1902-1966) written in Bulu in 1932, was not translated into French and published in Yaoundé until 1989, which finally gave it a wider audience. Joseph Owono (1921-1981) is generally considered to be the precursor, thanks to Tante Bella, published in 1959, which, although a novel, was nonetheless realistic in that it questioned the condition of women in Cameroon. This seemed to be the credo adopted by the first Cameroonian writers, who finally crossed the Rubicon, bridging the gap between simple description and the crudest denunciation. Among them is Ferdinand Oyono (1929-2010) and the scandal caused by his trilogy written in French, which was obviously not his mother tongue, but in which he allowed himself greater freedom to move from one register to another. The three titles evoke daily life during the colonial era, and between the lines we find criticism and the desire to break away from this heavy yoke. Thus, in Une vie de boy, published in 1956 and now in the Pocket catalog, the other side of the master-domestic relationship is sketched out, at its most perverse. In Le Vieux nègre et la médaille (published by 10-18), the ambivalence of the relationship between the colonized and the colonists is explored, with the former granting recognition and admiration that are deemed absurd, and the latter responding with decidedly cynical hypocrisy. Chemin d' Europe, published in 1960 and the last of the trilogy, is now out of print, but it was one of those exile stories where the gap between the fantasy of reaching France and the disillusionment on arrival widens. In a nutshell, Oyono confronts the unspoken and, in so doing, leaves an indelible mark on the history of Cameroonian and, more broadly, African literature, thanks to the acuity he developed throughout his career as an ambassador, which took him to live on both sides of the border at a pivotal time.
On January1, 1960, independence was proclaimed, and this breath of fresh air, followed by many years of apnoea and just as much repression, animated the authors. There were so many of them that it would be pointless to quote them all, but some works have survived the decades and are still with us today, intact and full of the atmosphere of the time. In his poem Ils m'ont dit (They told me), François Sangat Kuo (1931-1997) explains in a few words colonization, resignation and then revolt; in his collection Kamerun! Kamerun ! (Éditions Présence Africaine), Elolongué Epanya Yondo (1930-1998) sings of the motherland; in 1959, Sankie Maimo wrote his play I Am Vindicated and initiated English-speaking Cameroonian literature: in 2014, he was awarded one of the GPAL (Grands Prix des Associations Littéraires). We should also mention René Philombé (1930-2001), who was honored by the Académie Française and whose Espaces essentiels, a poetic text advocating hope, is now available digitally from Fenixx. And let's not forget Mbella Sonne Dipoko, who writes about a mixed couple and racism in A Few Nights and Days (London, 1966), Francis Bebey, who won the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire in 1968 for his novel Le Fils d'Agatha Moundio, Guillaume Oyônô Mbia, who won the Concours théâtral interafricain in 1969 for Notre fille ne se mariera pas, and Rémy Medou Mvomo, whose first novel Africa Ba'a is still on the school syllabus, thanks to Editions Clé - fundamental in Cameroon at the time, as they ensured the emergence of new voices - who have carefully preserved it in their contemporary catalog (editionscle.info).
There are also a number of essayists, more or less polemical - Thomas Melone(De la négritude dans la littérature négro-africaine, 1962), Marcien Towa(Essai sur la problématique philosophique dans l'Afrique actuelle, 1971), Daniel Ewandé(Vive le Président: pamphlet, 1968) - and, of course, women who express themselves in turn: Jeanne Ngo Maï (1933-2008), who began to publish her poems in Le Cameroun littéraire and became the country's first female poet in 1967 with her collection Poèmes sauvages et de lamentations; Thérèse Kuoh-Moukouri (1938, Yaoundé), who became the first female novelist two years later with Rencontres essentielles (L'Harmattan), the feminist activist Lydie Dooh Bunya, who published her autobiography La Brise du jour in 1977, and Delphine Tsanga, who pursued both a political career - becoming the first woman minister - and a literary one under the name Delphine Zanga-Tsogo(Vie de femmes, Ekobo ou l'oiseau en cage). In this impressive yet fragmented list, one name stands out: Mongo Beti. Born near the capital in 1932, he moved to France in the early 50s to study. He eventually became a teacher there, and did not return to his native country until 1991. Like his life, his work is divided into two parts that ricochet with history: the anti-colonialist period, which began with his first text published in the magazine Présence Africaine in 1953, Sans haine et sans amour, and continued with a satirical novel that made waves, Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba, two years later. Then came criticism of the post-independence era: Main basse sur le Cameroun, autopsie d'une décolonisation was censored before finally appearing with François Maspero in 1976, after four years of legal proceedings. When he died in 2001, his last trilogy, Bébète, remained unfinished, with only two titles: Trop de soleil tue l'amour and Branle-bas en noir et blanc, both published by Julliard. Mongo Beti is a hard-to-find author today, but Le Rebelle - in three volumes, published by Gallimard - provides a good overview of the theses - political and literary - that he supported.
Decline and renewal
The disappearance in 1982 of the Abbia magazine, launched in Yaoundé twenty years earlier, undoubtedly marked the decline of the golden age of Cameroonian literature. Yet there are still many acclaimed writers, such as Bernard Nanga, who received the Grand Prix littéraire de l'Afrique noire in 1981 for Les Chauves-souris. Most come from the diaspora, like 1982 and 1989 winners Yodi Karone(Nègre de paille) and Victor Bouadjio(Demain est encore loin), both born in France. In the 60s generation, Simon Njami, who initiated the noir novel genre in Cameroonian literature, was born in Lausanne. As for Calixthe Beyala, she emigrated to France at the age of 17 and made a name for herself just ten years later with her first novel, C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée (1987). It was not until the end of the century, however, that she gained real recognition with Les Honneurs perdus, winner of the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 1996.
In Cameroon, the publishing market was attracting sponsors and patrons, awards were multiplying to crown talent, and international writers were attracting readers. The success of essayist Gaston Kelman's Je suis noir et je n'aime pas le manioc (I'm black and I don't like manioc), published in 2003 by Max Milo, is proof, if proof were needed, that certain problems can finally be tackled in the public arena. Playwright Marcel Zang's L'Exilé and La Danse du pharaon, published by Actes Sud, deal with racism and prejudice, while Eugène Ébodé examines mixed couples in Métisse palissade and, above all, delves into his family history in his many novels, from La Transmission in 2002 to Habiller le ciel in 2022 (published by Gallimard). This renewed vitality is above all the work of a new generation, born in the 1970s, who persist in facing up to history and confronting its responsibilities. Patrice Nganang alternates between political writings(La Révolte anglophone, L'Afrique répond à Sarkozy) and often committed literary writings(Temps de chien, Dernières nouvelles du colonialisme, La Promesse des fleurs), Hemley carries the voice of her fellow women(Le Clan des femmes, Les jours viennent et passent), as does the prolific Léonora Miano(Stardust, Elles disent, Rouge impératrice, Contours du jour qui vient..), who navigates continents, subjects and literary genres with such ease that she has won every accolade, including the Goncourt des lycéens, a distinction she shares with Djaïli Amadou Amal (1975, Maroua), who wrote Les Impatientes for Emmanuelle Collas. This novel, which takes an unvarnished look at the subject of polygamy, will undoubtedly go down in history. We could also mention, from the same publisher, Mutt-Lon, whose Les 700 aveugles de Bafia evokes a tragedy that took place in 1929, slammer Marc Alexandre Oho Bambe (1976, Douala), who has easily conquered the literary world thanks to the finesse of his pen and his humanist philosophy, and finally three authors who seem determined to prove that the world must now evolve, whatever the cost: Éric Delphin Kwégoué(Taxiwoman, Lansman, 2020), Imbolo Mbue(Puissions-nous vivre longtemps, Belfond, 2021) and Max Lobe(Loin de Douala, Zoé, 2018).
