The Story of the Madman

الغلاف الأمامي
University Press of Virginia, 2001 - 190 من الصفحات

Widely acclaimed when first published in French in 1994, Mongo Beti's tenth novel, L'histoire du fou, continues the author's humorous yet fierce criticism of the colonial system in Africa and its legacy of governmental corruption.

Translated here as The Story of the Madman, the novel gives the English-speaking world Beti's comic satire of the fictional Chief Zoaételeu and his favorite sons Zoaétoa and Narcisse. In a modern fable that Beti uses to illustrate the problems of a people's disintegrating values in a postcolonial state, Chief Zoaételeu, a puppet under two dictatorial regimes, is swept into the frontline of politics, where his fortunes unravel. Along with his caustic portrayal of failed government--clearly a reflection of his native Cameroon--Beti's realism provides an intriguing view of the struggle for balance between traditional life and imminent change in African culture.

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نبذة عن المؤلف (2001)

Mongo Beti was born in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, in 1932. He received his early education in local schools, it was followed by studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. Now a French citizen, he lives and teaches in Paris, where he is the editor of the journal Peuples Noirs, Peuples Africains, founded in 1978. Beti wrote his first novel, Ville Cruelle (1954), under the pseudonym Eza Boto. A favorite theme of Beti is the failure of colonial missionary efforts in Africa. He speaks not so much against Christianity as against the futile Europeanization of Africans in the name of religion. The Poor Christ of Bomba (1956), his best-known work, is written as a diary. The novel is a satire of Christian religion in precolonial Cameroon.

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