Of Postcolonial Entanglement and Durée: Reflections on the Francophone African Novel

Comparative Literature, Summer 2004 by Adesanmi, Pius

Docteur, il y a une chose que j'aurai apprise pendant mon séjour d'une trentaine d'années sous les tropiques. C'est que vous êtes plus cruels entre vous, que ne le serajamais un toubab à votre égard. Croyez-moi, le venin ne vient pas de l'extérieur. Vous sécrétez vous-mêmes votre propre poison. (116)

Doctor, there is one thing I've learnt during the thirty years I've spent in the tropics. And that's that you are more cruel to each other than any white man ever can be to you. Believe me, the poison doesn't come from the outside. You are secreting it yourselves. (115)

What in the wake of colonialism the white French officer identifies as the poison within is the personalization of power and its concentration in the hands of a single individual, the consequent ascription of anthropomorphic qualities to this individual through a systematic fabrication of official narratives to which all subjects must subscribe, and a homogenization of identity that results from the elitist praxis of constructing the illusion of a common national destiny for disparate ethnic nationalities that have been forcibly welded together by the colonial machine. This is the totalitarian incubus that characterizes the postcolonial landscape of much of Francophone Africa in the two decades following political independence in the early 1960s. Its transformation into the dominant idiom of fictional production, beginning with Le cercle des tropiques, constitutes a postcolonial power durée that will span more than two decades in Francophone African fiction.11

One of the main characteristics of the African postcolony is that in the contest for meaning between subjects and power the boundaries between what Althusser calls "ideological state apparatuses" and the body of the Maximum Ruler are progressively blurred. This is the moment when, according to Mbembe, the postcolony creates, through administrative and bureaucratic practices, its own world of meanings-a master code that, while becoming the society's central code, ends by governing, perhaps paradoxically, the logics that underlie all other meanings within that society; attempts to institutionalize this world of meanings as a socio-historical world and to make that world real, turning it into part of people's "common sense" not only by instilling it in the minds of the cibles, or target population, but also by integrating it into the period's consciousness. (103)

Le cercle des tropiques offers a powerful representation of this process. Bohi Di, first person narrator and protagonist of the novel, provides a heuristic analysis of the process through which the body of Baré Koulé, the Maximum Ruler, is transformed into a "master code" that is consequently institutionalized and foisted on the consciousness of a "target population":

Baré Koulé était salué comme un nouveau dieu par ses compatriotes . . . C'était un sauveur, disaiton, son mythe avait pris forme. Déjà depuis quelques jours, les habitants ne parlaient que de sa sagesse, de son éloquence, de son intelligence, de sa lutte contre les toubabs pour l'indépendance des Marigots du Sud. Tout lui était imputé, tout lui était donné, tout lui était dû. Il était le maître. (126)