Several times distinguished for his dark novels (Life Is a Dirty Job, La Bouche qui Mange ne Speak pas, African Tabloid, Les Voleurs de Sex…), the 47-year-old Gabonese writer Janis Otsiemi had not published fiction since 2018, preferring to express himself in political essays. Here he is back this February with Au ras des hommes, a new novel in which crime fiction fans will be pleased to discover his ability to set up a detective story full of suspense and peppered with well-felt touches of humor.
The story takes place in Libreville, the Gabonese capital, and begins with a series of crimes, as horrible as they are disconcerting, as unexpected as they are frightening. A man, who appeared in the city center at the wheel of a car, began to shoot down random passers-by with firearms, before killing himself. The event sets the city in turmoil. Comparable killings had until then occurred in different countries in the Western world, but remained unprecedented in this capital of equatorial Africa.
Who is the killer? Did he act on orders from sponsors? Why didn’t he take responsibility for his actions? Why did he take chemicals before committing his crime? And finally, of course, how should we understand his action? Captains Koumba and Owoula embark on a systematic investigation and, based on very weak initial clues – the anonymous killer having quickly succumbed to his injuries – trace the facts back to their origin.
Chapter after chapter, Janis Otsiemi assembles her puzzle in a language that is as precise as it is effective. The writer has the art of portraying his protagonists in daily life in Libreville, making his police officers not heroes but middle-class men, married and fathers of families, accustomed to passing in the same day from posh circles to its darkest depths, from their family living room to their mistress’s bedroom.
All segments of the population
The characters parade, like Papy, a former “robber of Cameroonian origin who had converted to the alcohol trade. He had taken part in several robberies, the last of which, that of the Atlantide bank, had sent him to jail for five years. And Koumba was the one who hugged him. When he was released from prison, the policeman made him his “hello” who gave him good tips when he needed them because Grandpa was respected in local underworld circles. His pedigree, as long as the rails of the Transgabonais, made small pickpockets pale.
The somewhat crooked police officers join the former bosses who have become informers. And petty thieves are likely to repent one day. For Janis Otsiemi, the survey is an opportunity to widen the social spectrum and include all segments of the population. The detective novel, as the author conceives it, is an opportunity to reinvent reality by improving it. Here, in fact, there is no negotiable impunity as so often happens in African countries. On the contrary, at the end of an investigation carried out according to the rules of the art, the culprits are indeed caught and put in prison regardless of their social base. The writer thus offers the reader the opportunity to believe in a world where justice reigns and crime is punished, for the duration of a novel.
Originally from Franceville, Janis Otsiemi grew up in the popular Akebe district of Libreville. In his childhood and adolescence, influenced by the romantic inclinations of his nine sisters, he let his heart beat to the rhythm of the characters of Barbara Cartland and other authors of sentimental works. Until the day when the verses of Le Lac, the famous poem by Lamartine, capsize him. Janis then begins to explore more classic literature and copy long passages from Balzac.
When the boy has to stop his studies at the end of third grade to embark on professional life, he nonetheless continues his discoveries, including that of the dictionary which he reads like a novel. Finally, he dared to take the plunge and try his hand at creation with All Paths Lead to Others (ed. Raponda Walker, Libreville), his first novel, which appeared in 1976, the year he turned 24. .
The autodidact of letters won the prize for the first French-speaking novel 2000 from the Gabonese Union of Teachers for French-speaking culture. But the book, which recounts the horrors of a young man who received a transplant, displeases his friends, who consider it too… literary. “They wanted stories from the neighborhood, where things moved and killed well,” says Janis Otsiemi. It is thus, without further ado, that the writer turns to the detective genre which he sees as a simple way of addressing the social and political problems of Gabon.
“In Au ras des hommes, my plot serves as a pretext for me to talk about the growing circulation of weapons and drugs which enormously affect young people,” he says again. I mean this darkness which undermines society and which, for me, is due to the laxity of the Gabonese state and the policies of the Bongo family for decades [OmarBongo then his son Ali Bongo Ondimba led the country from 1967 to coup of August 30, 2023]. The killer in my book is a criminal, certainly, but also an individual who comes to demand accountability from those in power. » We bet that Janis Otsiemi’s human comedy is far from over.