Novel
Nnanga Kon
Not translated into English
Jean-Louis Njemba Medou · 1932
Synopsis
In Monezula, a Bulu village, life follows custom: net hunting whose game is shared, work in the fields, struggles with the neighbouring Fang, evening tales. One evening, however, the war drum announces that an albino revenant has appeared in the region. Éla Mvondo, the patriarch of the lineage, has just died, and preparations are under way to put slaves and widows to death so that they follow him to the ancestors. It is then that the stranger appears: he saves the widow Angoneman, who agrees to leave with him for the coast.
Context
Written in Bulu, the book was printed by the American Presbyterian press at Elat, near Ebolowa; according to the scholar Eloise Brière, it appeared despite the French ban on publishing in the languages of the country. The sources date its first edition to 1932 or 1939, and further printings followed. The narrative starts from a real event, the arrival in Bulu country of the American pastor Adolphus Clemens Good, on 8 September 1893, whose hair, like the silk of maize, led people to take him for a ghost. Jacques Fame Ndongo translated it into French in 1989, and Rachel Efoua Zengue produced a rewriting of it in verse in 2005, in Bulu and French.
Who it is for
In Bulu, and readable in French since 1989. It helps to know that a great man then took part of his household with him into the grave.
Prizes and reception
Margaret Wrong Prize, awarded in London in 1932. Eloise Brière sees it as the best known of the books in the local language published by the missions.
Sources for this page 3
The pages consulted to check this page.