Novel
Le Temps de Tamango
Not translated into English
Boubacar Boris Diop · 1981
Synopsis
In 2063, African researchers set out to explain what shook their country in the early seventies: a strike backed by a clandestine organisation that wants to overthrow the regime. The president, known as the Old Man, tries to calm the country; the repression causes deaths, and the former colonial power sends General François Navarro, a former Marseille sergeant, to manage the crisis. N'Dongo Thiam, known as Tamango, is given the mission of eliminating a hated political figure. The voices take over from one another without warning, and the narrator calls on the reader as witness.
Context
The volume appeared in Paris from L'Harmattan in 1981, followed by a play, Thiaroye terre rouge, and preceded by a preface by Mongo Beti, who praised the complexity of the construction and the decision to look in Africa itself for the causes of the failure of decolonisation. The title rewrites Mérimée's short story about a slave-ship captain, whose figure here passes to the side of the revolt. The point of view sometimes changes in the middle of a paragraph, from the third person to the first. Le Serpent à plumes put the text back into circulation in 2002; it has not been translated into English.
Who it is for
Two hundred demanding pages, in French: the narrators change without warning and the opening chapters are disorienting.
Prizes and reception
Prize of the Senegalese Copyright Bureau in 1984; it is the book that made its author known.
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