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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.

Language and Postcolonial Performance

      The example set by politically engaged writers like Mongo Béti contributed greatly to notions of what constituted the authentic African author, an idea that played a considerable role in the creation of an early Francophone literary canon. Yet such notions of authentic engagement can also lead to false assumptions of a mythic, unified African voice. As Guy Ossito Midiohouan has written in reference to the critical focus on engagement as a condition for canonical literary status: “Cette démarche a pour fondement le mythe d’une unanimité des intellectuels nègres dans la révolte contre le système colonial; unanimité au nom de laquelle on minimise les différences et les divergences, voire les oppositions, pourtant manifestes, qui caractérisent les options des uns et des autres et qui, seules, éclairent leurs positions respectives par rapport au pouvoir” (At the base of this approach is the myth of unanimity among negro intellectuals in their revolt against the colonial system. Often minimized in the name of such unanimity are differences, divergences, even oppositions, that are nonetheless obvious, indicative of options available to each, and alone able to illuminate their respective stances in relation to power) (Midiohouan 2002, 65). These differences and divergences became increasingly complex in the period following the wave of African independences. With political autonomy came the need to foster and maintain a new sense of national

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