Like Ayi Kwei Armah and Wole Soyinka for English literature, the Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi is to be counted among the greatest figures of African literature. Its themes are rooted in the fundamental problems experienced by post-independence Africa: the rampant poverty of the majority of Africans in the face of the ostentatious wealth of this minority that Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls “the comprador bourgeoisie”, the one who took advantage of independence by practicing embezzlement and corruption, that of taking power for power and not for the good of the people. Nationalist, socialist and capitalist ideologies were diverted from any benevolent policy towards the poor.
His first novel La Vie et demi frontally denounces nepotist powers. In the preface to this novel, he explains, “I write [or shout] for him to make man in me. The title of his second novel, The Shameful State, confirms his anger, even his despair. He expresses himself there hoping to restore dignity.
His fourth novel, L’Anté-Peuple, approaches, with an impressive sense of storytelling and a very controlled art of writing, the descent into hell of an innocent man. The words collide there, turn and twirl, come from the banter of the griots, using metaphors and a certain African imagery. Sony Labou Tansi tells the story of Dadou, a perfect anti-hero.
Director of a vocational school for young girls, this handsome, serious, professional man, despite himself, attracts the gaze of the female students and, inevitably, one of them falls in love with him. Success will complicate the life of the “citizen director”, because he ends up giving in to the advances of Yavelde who finds herself pregnant. For fear of reprisals from his family, Yavelde commits suicide. Although claiming his innocence, the mob made up of neighbors and relatives takes revenge, and kills Dadou’s wife and children.
The story switches to political terrain in view of the powers of the Yavelde family, and Dadou finds himself in prison without trial. He then saw the horror of being in a prison where the conditions were inhuman. He notes the privileges and, thanks to corrupt channels, he manages to flee.
To save his skin, Dadou finds himself in political shenanigans which reveal the state of decay of a certain post-colonial Africa. The crossing of the border between the Congo of Brazzaville and the Congo of Kinshasa and the clandestinity feed the intrigue.
The recovery of Dadou in loss of humanity by revolutionary forces shows how uncertain life is in this Africa. It often depends only on the goodwill of the strongest. Dadou is caught in the net of a military-ideological plot whose ins and outs he does not understand.
To survive as an illegal refugee, he agrees to play crazy in order to assassinate the Prime Minister.
As the story progresses, he is embroiled in affairs of coups d’etat, in situations where conflicting interests are always to the advantage of those who foment these overthrows of regimes.
And what about the populations in all of this? They are always waiting for a better future that never comes. To save his skin, Dadou becomes an assassin. And he is acting for a cause that does not concern him.
Sony Labou Tansi’s novels show how much Africa is becoming a place where all shots are allowed and where selfishness is king. The greed of the very people who advocate justice and fairness is pervasive, destructive. The committed novelist excels in describing the feelings of characters caught up in politico-mafia entanglements. While it emphasizes the humanity of those who suffer, it is the term “ugly” that is recurrent. Africa has become “a modern mockery” as the character of the professor proclaims: “This is your Africa, this is your independence and your revolutions of Africa: everything starts with the legs. We need to find a ministry of the legs. »
Speaking of this new Africa with great satire, the narrator says, “There are countries in the world where God no longer comes!” An old African on his side asserts that “absolute power absolutely ensures social imbalance”.
Following the massacres between clans, between interests, the old man speaks his mind: “Here, there, elsewhere. The trigger had become a brain. The barrel, a soul. And it was pulling. And it was falling. What else could it be called if not dog weather? »
Sony Labou Tansi succeeds in expressing truths without the text becoming a pamphlet thanks to a particular style. The old man’s reasoning is a far cry from the demagogic talk of the rulers when he says, “In ten or twenty years, you know, our children will hate the beret as we hated the settler.” And the new decolonization will begin. The most important, the first revolution: the beret against the heart and the brain. If it can come, then there will be no end. There will be the beginning. The hate will be gone. The blood, the flesh, the beret. We will then have our Marxes, our Lenins, our Maos, our Christs, our Muhammads, our Shakespeares, our “ourselves”.
What is striking is how topical Sony Labou Tansi’s novels are. Migrants who lose their lives in the Mediterranean show the despair of young people, something that African leaders should care about and, therefore, empower young people to have hope because they have faith in the destiny of their countries.
Sony Labou Tansi shows the wanderings of African peoples through characters found in Life and a Half, The Shameful State, The Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez, or The Eyes of the Volcano, as well as in his plays such as The Parenthesis of Blood, I the Undersigned Cardiac, Romeo and Juliet an African adaptation of the play by William Shakespeare. It is in this sense that this great non-self-absorbing Congolese novelist regretted that literature was not a priority in the development of Africa.
Sony Labou Tansi, real name Marcel Ntsony, died in 1995 of AIDS. He was 48 years old. The value of his writings and the battles he engaged in through them make him an extraordinary writer who should be rediscovered.
* Benaouda Lebdai is a university professor of colonial and postcolonial African literature.
