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the same, politically engaged cultural circles that once attacked western colonialism began portraying abuses of power by African governments, authors were often met with censorship, imprisonment, or worse.

      These new power structures forced writers to take on a very different literary approach, creating a range of what Dominic Thomas has called “non‐official” authors, who, through a diversity of political affinities, challenged the use of culture as a legitimizing arm of the state. As Thomas explains: “Non‐official authors may focus on aesthetic considerations explicitly as they attempt to distance themselves from reductive official guidelines … Non‐official authors challenge the official picture and the power structures which the governing authorities depend on” (Thomas 2002, 30). As Thomas illustrates in his study of Congolese authors, these writers often maintained complex relationships with state power, as with Henri Lopes, whose most read work, Le Pleurer‐Rire (The Laughing Cry, 1982), is a poly‐vocal parody of dictatorial power although the author himself has had a long career in the halls of such regimes, though mostly serving as a diplomat or as Minister of Culture. The diversity of influences in such non‐official authors is also evident, for example, in the case of Emmanuel Dongala, a prominent Congolese writer, many of whose cultural references are rooted in the African American civil rights movement and his experiences living and teaching in the United States.

In his Jazz et vin de palme (Jazz and Palm Wine, 1982), a collection of short stories situated in Africa and the United States, Dongala employs a variety of narrative discourses to resist depicting the African and African American experience as something that can be easily summed up or even known through literary representation. His portrayal of postcolonial African realities is steeped in paradox. In the short story “L’étonnante et dialectique déchéance du camarade Kali Tchikati” (The Surprising and Dialectical Decline of Comrade Kali Tchikati), the protagonist, an anti‐animist crusader of the country’s Single Party, has lost his “faith” in science. When his family casts a spell on him rendering him sterile, the man is reduced to abandoning the scientific explanation of his affliction and asks, despite his convictions, that the spell be lifted. “L’Afrique a bien ses mystères” (Africa does have its mysteries), the narrator explains without offering a closing explanation of the cause of Kali’s predicament (Dongala 1982, 45). Dongala’s work deeply interrogates received wisdom regarding the state of postcolonial African contexts, going so far as to point out, in his short story “Une journée dans la vie d’Augustine Amaya” (A Day in the Life of Augustine Amaya), about a woman who struggles to survive as a vendor while regularly embarking on the arduous journey between Brazzaville and Kinshasa, that “Du temps des colons, il était facile d’aller à Kinshasa” (In colonial times, it was easy to go to Kinshasa) (56). The evocation of an easier life under colonialism does not imply nostalgia for French rule but rather an indictment of the state to which post‐independence political leaders have led their respective countries. Yet Dongala’s writing does not enter into programmatic political dialogue at any point. Instead it focuses on tensions and points of paradox between political ideology and the inherent messiness of subjective experience. Far from focusing solely on Africa, Dongala also casts his gaze on African American life in the United States, most notably in a story called “A Love Supreme,” inspired by the music of John Coltrane and nearly finishing on the salutary note of art’s ability to save the individual. Bringing a cold dose of political reality to this idealism, Dongala finishes the story, and indeed his collection of short stories, with the narrator learning of the shooting of a thirteen‐year‐old boy by a New York City policeman.

      Perhaps most notable of Central African authors writing in French in the early postcolonial period is Sony Labou Tansi, whose deft use of language and genre allowed him to walk the line between satirizing abuses of power and falling foul of state authorities. In the preface to his novel La vie et demie (1979; Life and a Half, 2011), Labou Tansi adapts the figure of the African auteur engagé to his needs, writing, “A ceux qui cherchent un auteur engagé je propose un homme engageant” (To those who seek an engaged author, I offer an engaging man) (Labou Tansi 1979, 9; 2011, 3). This new authorial figure, as illustrated by the novel, reflects a fluid, borderless approach to language and genre that owes as much to the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez as to the notion of political engagement. The genre‐switching novel begins with a gruesome act of dictatorial violence, then unravels through an endless succession of attempts at armed resistance that culminate in an explosive ending worthy of a science fiction novel. Throughout, Labou Tansi breaks with lexical and syntactical conventions of the French language, rendering it new in order to suit his needs at the convergence of the engaged, the poetic, and the grotesque. Calling his novel a fable, Labou Tansi openly criticizes the authority seized by postcolonial dictatorships. However, the use of literary excess helps the author to maintain a slim measure of plausible deniability. Although his work evokes visceral reactions from readers, as characters are torn limb from limb or forced into acts of anthropophagy, throughout, Labou Tansi creates a disconnect between words and meaning, literature and genre. The author informs us that he must write with “chairs‐mots‐de‐passe” (flesh passwords) (1979, 9; 2011, 3). As Thomas (2002) argues, this is a means for this Congolese writer to step within the French language and wield it as a weapon, perhaps not frontally attacking dictatorship, but rather stepping within its repressive logic so as to exaggerate it ad absurdum and unravel it from within.

In Labou Tansi’s play La parenthèse de sang (Parentheses of Blood, 1981), the playwright employs a wide range of literary and dramaturgical influences, where customs of Kongo theatrical tradition interact with characters and stage tropes borrowed from Shakespeare (especially in the character of the Fool), theater of the absurd (with the repeated mention of a central character who never appears on stage, recalling Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot), or French existentialism (in the parallels between this and Jean‐Paul Sartre’s play No Exit). The play is equally relevant to mythical figures of the African postcolonial struggle, as clownish military figures massacre each other one by one in futile pursuit of a revolutionary leader Libertashio, who is said to be dead but whose specter nonetheless haunts the authoritarian regime in place. The character is a veiled reference to Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the work of symbolic erasure that followed his assassination in 1961. Yet against a backdrop of extreme violence, an indomitable ludic aspect persists within the characters’ interactions, tripping up authoritative power grabs at every turn. This playfulness comes through in the poetic license Labou Tansi takes with French grammar and syntax, as well as in his characters’ fumbling with certain key words, like the soldier who comically struggles to get out the French word for the ballot box (“urnes”), only managing variations on the word “urine” (“aux urines … aux urinaux”) (Labou Tansi 1993, 21). We also find a playful dynamic in the staging of role‐play, as soldiers take turns donning the grade of sergeant each time one of theirs is executed on the spot for declaring that Libertashio is dead, which of course he is. This linguistic and theatrical playfulness seeks to undermine authoritarian repression through grotesque satire.

It is worth noting that Labou Tansi’s theatrical work arrived in the wake of an innovative, French‐sponsored experiment in Francophone African writing for the stage. In 1967, the French radio station Radio France Internationale (RFI) launched its Concours Théâtral Interafricain, a contest that encouraged African authors to send in stage scripts for consideration. A selection of these would be performed on air and the contest winner for best play earned a full production at the prestigious Avignon Theater Festival in France. The initiative, and many others like it, was not without its critics. Undergirding the many cultural projects and collaborations between France and Africa at the time was a strategic attempt by the French government to maintain its influence in the former colonies of the region through cultural diplomacy. This form of soft power was implemented under the umbrella of France’s Action Culturelle, which included the upkeep and promotion of the many French cultural centers established in the now former colonies. Such cultural initiatives took place in tandem with more direct, though clandestine, maneuvering to maintain economic dominance in the resource‐rich countries of the region.⁵ RFI’s radio play competition was one of many aspects of a broader attempt to promote

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