Ahmadou Kourouma: an African novelist's inside story

UNESCO Courier, March, 1999 by Rene Lefort, Mauro Rosi

Ahmadou Kourouma is a writer from Cote d'Ivoire whose relatively slender but highly original output - three novels published over 28 years - draws up an eloquent indictment of the injustices imposed on black Africa

Your first novel, The Suns of Independence, published in 1970, has won acclaim as a masterpiece and has sold 100,000 copies. But you had a hard time finding a publisher for it. Why?

The book was rejected for two reasons. First, my style had a certain originality stemming from the particular way in which I used the French language. Some readers found this disconcerting. Second, many people disliked the conception of the novel. I had structured it in the kind of way used by the American writer John Dos Passos earlier this century. I ended the fictional part of the book with a section I would describe as documentary. After telling the story of the protagonist, Fama, I described situations and events that took place in Cote d'Ivoire at the time of the Cold War. I talked about things that might be called sensitive. Some African publishers even sent the manuscript back to me with scathing, almost insulting comments.

How did you come to master what was for you a foreign language-French?

I had no choice in the matter. I didn't know how to express myself in any other language. My English was poor, and I have never learned Arabic. In school I was only taught French and, like everyone who went to school before decolonization, I wasn't allowed to speak our mother tongue, Malinke(1). So I had to use French to describe Malinke people and tell stories of Malinke life. Some people have criticized me for "bashing" the French language and giving it a Malinke twist.

It has even been said that you have "cuckolded" French.

Whatever people might say, I am not trying to change French. What I'm interested in is reproducing to the fullest possible extent the way my characters live and think. My characters are Malinke. And when the Malinke speak, they follow their own logic, their own way of looking at the world. That approach doesn't go into French. The sequence of words and ideas in Malinke is different from what it is in French. There is a big gap between what I describe and the form in which I express myself, a gap much bigger than the gap when an Italian speaks French, for example. I repeat, my objective is not formal or linguistic. What I'm interested in is reality. My characters must be credible and to be credible they must speak in the novel as they speak in their own language.

How would you describe the Malinke language?

Some people may disagree, but it seems to me that African languages are on the whole far richer than European languages. They have a wide range of words to denote one and the same thing and a multitude of expressions to describe one and the same feeling, as well as many mechanisms for creating neologisms. Malinke alone has around ten of these. African languages are rich in proverbs and sayings which people constantly refer to. So it's not surprising that sometimes we get bogged down when we use French to describe our lives and our psychological universe. The French language, on the other hand, is the product of a Catholic, rationalist civilization. That's obvious from its structure, its way of analysing and describing reality. Our language is influenced by fetishist spirituality and is closer to nature.

Western authors often speak of writing as a physical, vital, organic need. For you, it is more a way of getting a hearing.

For us African writers, writing is also a matter of survival. When I wrote The Suns of Independence, I wanted to campaign against abuses of social and economic power. That was a vital and absolute necessity! All contemporary French and other European writers have devoted some of their work to the four years of occupation and oppression that their countries endured during the second world war. But in Africa we had 100 years of occupation, and it's vitally important for us to talk about this and analyse its consequences and effects. We had as many massacres as Europeans did during the last war and under authoritarian Stalinist regimes. In my second novel, Monnew, which was published in 1990, I wanted to get across the message that we too have endured great suffering. That suffering is also the subject of the novel I recently finished. Its title is En attendant le vote des bites sauvages ("Waiting for the wild animals to vote"), and it's based on the tragedy of the Cold War in Africa.

The sufferings you describe are intense and extreme. But in this novel you express gratitude to a dictator for his "courage" in telling his compatriots that they were "thieving, lazy savages."

That remark does not refer to the people "down below", as we say, but to those "on top", the dictators' buddies. Resignation was the only option for the people down below, whom I describe as "coarsened by their beliefs and their poverty, patient and dumb". The Cold War prevented African countries from finding a way out of their predicament. It kept a millstone around their necks. Foreign powers gave the orders and pulled the strings, picked the dictators that suited them and sent in their military whenever there was any resistance.