Mongo Beti

Alexandre Biyidi Awala was born on the thirtieth of June 1932 at Akométan, near Mbalmayo, in the southern Centre Region of French Cameroon, the son of Oscar Awala — a small farmer of the Ewondo Beti community of southern Cameroon — and Régine Alomo. His father drowned in the Nyong River when Beti was seven, and he was raised by his widowed mother at Akométan.

He was placed at the village Catholic mission school of Mbalmayo and was expelled at fourteen for insubordination to the white missionary fathers — the formative incident on which he founded the 1956 novel Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba.

He completed the colonial secondary education at the Lycée Leclerc at Yaoundé and the Lycée Marcellin Berthelot at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, near Paris, on a French colonial scholarship between 1951 and 1954. He took the licence-ès-lettres at the Sorbonne in 1957 and the agrégation in classical letters at the Faculté des Lettres de Paris in 1966.

He taught classical literature at the Lycée Pierre Corneille at Rouen from 1966 to 1994 — the period across which he lived in exile in France under the threat of imprisonment by the Cameroonian régime of Ahmadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya, who had banned his work and revoked his Cameroonian passport.

He published in 1956 the novel Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba — the chronicle of the Catholic priest Father Drumont of the village mission of Bomba in southern Cameroon across the closing years of the French colonial administration — at the Paris house Robert Laffont. The novel was at the time of publication the principal francophone African anti-colonial novel of the period and was banned in French Cameroon.

He published across the following forty-five years a further twelve novels and three works of political journalism, among them Mission terminée (1957), Le Roi miraculé (1958), Main basse sur le Cameroun (1972, a political non-fiction work banned in both France and Cameroon), Remember Ruben (1974), and L’Histoire du fou (1994).

He founded in 1978 with his wife Odile Tobner the bimonthly Peuples noirs–Peuples africains at Rouen — the principal francophone African political and literary journal of the late 1970s and the 1980s.

He returned to Cameroon in 1991 under the political amnesty of the post-Ahidjo Biya régime and opened a bookshop at Yaoundé — the Librairie des Peuples Noirs — in 1993.

He died at Douala on the eighth of October 2001 of complications of acute liver failure, at sixty-nine.

He is honored here as the author of Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba.