Bèlet is a “city of a thousand cries, located south of the Alima River, in the current district of Ongogni”. There, in the heart of Congo-Brazzaville, live the Mbochi people. A society impacted by colonization and which the journalist François Ondai Akiera recounts with superb in Mwana Okwèmet, the Fetish and the Destiny, his first novel.
This chronicle of an African village in the 20th century follows the figure of the very “skeptical, opinionated, reckless” Oba’mbé Mboundjè. Healer-fetisher, he has put all his knowledge into the perfection of the Okwèmet fetish, which he endows with the power of “infallible justice”. The tall, fair-skinned man is presented to us crowned with his genealogy – the same goes for the multitude of characters in what must be called a fresco, even if this novel with the false air of historical precision makes barely 150 pages.
Because François Ondai Akiera describes quickly and with great clarity the composition of families, customs and conflicts. Details that give depth to the plot without diminishing its intensity. Thus the miraculous birth of Mboundjè’s daughter, in 1903 or 1904, after the numerous miscarriages of her mother, Lembo’o. She consulted an old augur during her pregnancy who predicted that her daughter would live to be 100 years old. At birth, the child is placed by his father under the protection of the Okwèmet fetish, from which he takes the name.
Slavery and collaboration
It is she, Mwana Okwèmet, whom we follow through the storms that will fall on her city, starting with colonization, which had nevertheless begun with fruitful commercial exchanges. Nicknamed “Ebamis” because of their color similar to the eponymous fruit, the colonists without warning remove “the mask of hypocrisy” and move on to “the next stage: conquest and submission”. The French attack is perceived as “incredible” by Mboundjè, who cannot believe this “rumor” of malicious foreigners. Too late, he is murdered.
The strength of François Ondai Akiera is to seize this historical moment outside of any Manichaeism: his novel conceals neither the slavery and the kidnappings practiced in a common way in Mbochi society (and of which the heroine will be a victim), nor the pride of certain village chiefs when they are decorated with a “singa” (the French tricolor scarf), nor the collaboration of the “militiamen-cerberes” with the colonial administration. In the same way, the author in no way qualifies the horror of the “gulag” that was the construction of the Congo-Ocean railway (1921-1934), on which tens of thousands of men were sacrificed.
In doing so, Mwana Okwèmet reveals something rarely mentioned: how the people were tossed about, willingly or by force, in this adventure guided only by the economic appetites of the powerful. This is illustrated by the scene where militiamen take up “a warrior song”, which is none other than La Marseillaise, without understanding anything about it: “Aux Djaraaaaaaa, citoyaaaa. Foromaaaa batralionnnns! Marassooooo, marassoooooo! “, they shout.
memory ferryman
Meanwhile, Mwana Okwèmet survives the forced marriage. She awakens to love and independence and rejoices in her abundant offspring. It symbolizes what continues despite everything. As a transmitter of memory, François Ondai Akiera invites us to listen to this woman of a century who carries history within her.
Published for the first time in 2021 in the form of a serial in the weekly Les Dépêches du bassin du Congo, the text published at the end of 2022 in Pointe-Noire by Les Lettres Mouchetées was amended, on the form, by the author . François Ondai Akiera has indeed understood that he could draw from the 37 signs of the French language (letters of the alphabet, accents and punctuation marks) enough to allow the reader to pronounce his story correctly, whatever his origin. He thus introduced the apostrophe, changing “nianga” to “nia’nga” or even “obambé” to “oba’mbé”.
“Quebecers and Walloons have long resorted to different interpretations and contributions tending to make the French language alive in this [Francophone] space, writes the author in warning. It remains for other French speakers to show that these 37 signs form a perfectible mold in which their intelligence can easily accommodate their local speech. And thus to make heard other stories of this 20th century during which so many societies collapsed.
