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For a generation of African authors whose work straddled the late colonial period (the aftermath of World War II through the 1950s) and the first decade of political independence in the 1960s, the politically engaged writer stood as a defining and iconic figure in debates around African literature. The term “engaged” here serves as the approximate English translation of the French term littérature engagée, referring to literature that, out of a sense of duty or moral obligation, takes an active engagement with the political and social sphere.² Not to do so, engaged authors would argue, would mean falling for the illusion of political neutrality. In the context of the Central African region, politically engaged writers worked to expose the racist ideologies that had formed the basis of the European colonial project. The colonizers of this region came under many different flags, and most notoriously in King Leopold II of Belgium’s seizure and subsequent exploitation and brutal rule of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The neighboring Republic of Congo, a French colony in the late colonial period, contained the capital of French Equatorial Africa, a grouping of four of the French territories on the continent. This grouping abutted, but did not include, Cameroon, which was taken from Germany through the course of World War I and placed under French and British rule by a League of Nations mandate. At stake for colonial powers were the continent’s natural resources, eagerly sought out since the dividing of the “African cake” at the Berlin conference of 1884–1885. Rather than seeing theirs as the work of looters and usurpers, colonial powers depicted themselves as purveyors of civilization to the African continent, what the French called the mission civilisatrice, or “civilizing mission.” Following the horrors of World War II, however, in which large numbers of African soldiers were enlisted to fight, such lofty claims of an inherently modern and rational European civilization were increasingly difficult to make. Moreover, the declarations of the Atlantic Charter of 1941, with its defense of the right to self‐determination, helped to galvanize a global anticolonial movement worldwide. Central African authors placed themselves in line with this global movement, manifesting their political engagement by shining light on the wide gap between the ideals of colonialism and the violent acts of oppression that undergirded its project.

Two canonical politically engaged Francophone African works of the 1950s explore the themes of colonial violence and exploitation through the form of the diary novel. The first, Une vie de boy (1956, Houseboy), by Cameroonian author Ferdinand Oyono, explores the dilemma of its protagonist Toundi by foregrounding his precipitous unraveling and demise. The novel begins with Toundi at the end of a long escape to Spanish Guinea and on his deathbed, from which he implores an attending compatriot and “brother” to tell him: “Mon frère … que sommes‐nous? Que sont tous les nègres qu’on dit français?” (My brother … what are we? What are all the Blackmen they call French?) (Oyono 1956, 13). Following Toundi’s death, his interlocutor takes possession of his journals, which make up the rest of the novel’s narrative. Through these we learn the story of a young houseboy who fled from his family and community in the keep of a French missionary, eventually coming into the employ of a colonial household where he fell victim to the intrigues of his matron’s affairs and his master’s jealousy.

Central to the novel is Toundi’s adoption of European writing and literary practices. Because of the novel’s form as a diary, it is through the protagonist’s own writing that we learn about his life and impending clash with white colonial society. His first journal entry offers an off‐hand reflection on the kind of introspective, journalistic self‐writing so closely associated with European literature and culture. “Je ne sais quel plaisir cache cette manière de Blanc, mais essayons toujours” (I don’t know what pleasure is to be found in this white man’s custom, but I’ll try it out) (Oyono 1956, 15). His exploratory mission onto the terrain of European writing practices leads to an introduction to the signs of meaning, race, and power at work in colonial society. The novel articulates Toundi’s own gradual apprenticeship within this parallel society through a series of bitter discoveries regarding his own subaltern status, which leads him to adopt a survivor’s approach in his relations with white colonial figures, whose domestic sphere he tenuously inhabits. The fragile veneer of protection afforded by his domestic role chips away as he falls into the displeasure of his patron. Toundi ignores warnings from fellow servants about his dangerous position as one with direct access to the intimate corners of white colonial life. These characters seem to possess an understanding of unofficial power structures at work in the colonial project, making the novel a depiction not only of Toundi’s discovery of colonial racism and repression, but also of the small but meaningful acts of interference that make this work a portrayal of subtle resistances.

In his reading of this novel, Christopher Miller points out how, “Colonized Africans … emit dualistic signals and form in effect an underground resistance movement,” an alternative set of signs, “where nothing is what the whites take it for” (Miller 1998, 135). Sophie, the servant, devises a plan to escape to Spanish Guinea and eventually does so. Kalisia follows her mistress’s orders, but with a visible indifference that infuriates the white matron. Toundi himself, after professing in the first journal his identification with the Christianity of Father Gilbert, later tells Madame that he is “Chrétien parce que le prêtre m’a versé l’eau sur la tête en me donnant un nom de Blanc … La rivière ne remonte pas à la source” (Christian because the priest poured water on my head and gave me a European name … The river does not go back to its spring) (Oyono 1956, 88). So while the novel indeed depicts the unraveling of the colonized subject in the character of Toundi, it also depicts the fragility of colonial society, always vulnerable to the acts of unspoken resistance, even in compliance, carried out by Africans in their interactions with colonial power.

Another canonical, politically engaged diary novel of this period is Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba (1956; The Poor Christ of Bomba, 1971) by Cameroonian author Mongo Béti. Here, the story is also told through the eyes of a young boy who works at the service of a French missionary. Like Father Gilbert, the Reverend Father Superior Drumont is elevated to the status of an idealized father figure for the young narrator, Denis. This time, however, instead of leading to the definitive unraveling of the young African narrator, Béti’s novel depicts the precipitous crisis of faith of the paternal colonial figure. As an experiment to determine the impact of his work, the priest decides to abandon one of the communities of his extensive flock for three years in order to return and see what they have retained of their Christian faith and practices. The priest’s pessimism evinces an awareness of the small acts of resistance the colonized have at their disposal: “Les quelques noirs qui ont adhéré au christianisme l’ont‐ils réellement fait de leur propre gré?” (“Those blacks who have chosen Christianity, did they do so of their own free will?”) (Béti 1956, 62; 1971, 34). Indeed, throughout the novel the priest discovers proof of his limited influence over, and shallow impact on, his flock. The impending crisis of faith is led on by his waning belief in the European colonial project, revealed to be misguided and even absurd, as Drumont opines: “Pourquoi les Chinois ne s’acharnent‐ils pas à convertir les Parisiens au confucianisme ou au bouddhisme” (“Why don’t the Chinese devote themselves to converting all Paris to Confucianism or Buddhism or whatever?”) (245; 151). Moreover, as the priest discovers that an effective brothel has sprung up within his congregation under his surveillance and entirely unbeknownst to him, he comes to realize the role that his own missionary work has played in the economic exploitation of the region, as he confesses to a French colonial: “Pour le moment, je sais que vous nous protégez et que nous déblayons le terrain pour vous, en préparant les esprits, en les rendant dociles” (“All I know is that you protect us and that we prepare the country for you, softening the people up and making them docile”) (252; 155). Thoroughly defeated by these realizations, the priest decides to return to France for good, since, as he explains to a French businessman, “je préfère n’avoir jamais à rendre compte à Dieu de la colonisation” (“I’d rather not answer to God for colonization”) (248; 152). The young narrator is despondent at Drumont’s departure, and closes out the final journal entry with the longing declaration: “Nous l’avons si peu aimé … Comme s’il n’était pas des nôtres … Parce qu’il n’était pas des nôtres” (“We loved him so little … As if he were not one of us … for he was not one of us”) (345; 216). Mongo Béti’s choice of subject matter, missionary culture in Africa, proves significant given missionaries’ central role in processes of colonial conquest. The failure of Drumont highlights the impossibility of the French priest overcoming colonial history’s imprint on his own work as part of the “civilizing mission.”

Whether the sins of past missionaries are expiable in a postcolonial context is precisely the question posed by a later work by Valentin Mudimbe, Entre les eaux (Between the Tides, 1973). In this novel, published in a postcolonial context, Congolese author Mudimbe writes the story of an African priest, Pierre Landu, who struggles to reconcile the tenets of his faith with the realities of a nation, his own, fighting for political stability and dignity. Landu judges himself too removed from the struggles of his home and abandons seminary life to join an armed Marxist militia, determined to find through Marxism a means of delivering a Christian message unsullied by past colonial deformations.³ Although remarking frequently that for others he will always remain a “Black priest” and, for many of his compatriots, a traitor, Mudimbe’s protagonist perceives no inevitable contradiction in his double status. Rather, he finds himself compelled to leave his parish for the life of a revolutionary on the basis of his convictions as both a priest and an African, as he states in a letter to his French superior: “Rester ici, à la paroisse, serait trahir ma conscience d’Africain et de prêtre” (To stay here at the parish would be to betray my conscience as an African and a priest) (1973, 24). The Roman Catholic Church, for Landu, inevitably enforces a form of institutionalized injustice of which he wants no part, and so he seeks out a renewed theology in the fires of political radicalism: “Je choisis le glaive et le feu pour que, dans un cadre nouveau, les miens Le reconnaissent comme leur” (I choose the sword and fire so that, in a new setting, my people might recognize Him as their own) (24). But Landu’s quest proves a failure as well. He first struggles to gain acceptance among his compatriots, who are eventually killed by the national army. Landu finishes in a monastery, forced, much like Father Drumont of Mongo Béti’s novel, to resign himself to accepting the irreconcilable schism between their devotion to the Church and the history of oppression it has brought upon the African continent.

Béti’s strong condemnation, in novels like Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba, of colonial society and its deleterious effects on both the colonizer and colonized reflects his position as perhaps the most iconic politically engaged Francophone author of his generation. As Cazenave and Célérier point out in their study of the role of engagement in African literature, to this day, “Mongo Béti remains for some the embodiment of engagement against which, or with which, the different generations of his fellow writers have come to define themselves” (2011, 32). His considerable oeuvre and nonfiction writing suggest a duty on the part of the African writer to offer an authentic depiction of the continent’s realities. His best known text on this subject, “Afrique noire, littérature rose,” goes so far as to assert that, to date, no African literary work of quality had been produced outside a proliferation of colonial projections.⁴ A principal culprit in this lack of African works of quality, he argued elsewhere, was the cultural demands of the “Francophone” label on the writer, who was continually called either to justify his use of the colonizer’s language or to declare himself a devotee of French as the literary language par excellence. For Béti, the French language was in fact merely vehicular, a means to an end. “Habitant la banlieue, je prends ma voiture chaque matin pour aller travailler au centre de la ville. Qui oserait me demander de faire une déclaration d’amour à ma voiture” (I live in the suburbs and so every morning my car takes me downtown to work. Who would dare ask me to declare my undying love for my car?) (Béti 1988, 105). The French language was useful to Béti in as much as it facilitated a creative fire, producing work that was accessible to a broad readership. However, Béti declares, a major obstacle to such an end is the preponderance of francophonie, that is, the categorization of works such as his own as peripheral appendices to literature of colonial France, referred to in French as the métropole.