The Story of the Madman

by Mongo Beti

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.

Genres: Africa, African Literature, Fiction

200 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite simply a masterpiece of invention and storytelling.
With a beautiful sense of language and repetition, Beti takes a long walk around a generational history to explain the fate of one son. Its brilliant in its scope - both tightly honed on individual fates while waving from the omnipresent narrator heavens. The whole while the language crackles and stirs, as fortunes are won and tortures inflicted, equally poetic.

Zoaételeu adventures are emblematic of a pre-colonial way of life - large family clans based around a patriarch, who's baby-making ability is his single great skill. But that is not to say he keeps out of national politics or away from the regional authorities. He doesn't, mostly in a satirical fashion he is swept up by favor and disdain. He is accepts a tv set with the same resignation as he does his prison beatings.

Further complicating the satire is the near biblical fates of the favored Narcisse and his more responsible brother, Zoaétoa. Narcisse is a modern opportunist, primping and pimping his way into wealthy society, while Zoaetoa manages the farm back home, so to speak. The intertwined fates of these two is the primary mover of the story, the seismic event, often overshadowed by the years leading up to annihilation.

Beti's scorn is most on display in his parody of Cameroon's national politics. Refusing to name any of the politicians or military officers, instead referring to them only as official titles. By keeping them anonymous these national characters are forced into a space of ahistorical modern myth, divorced from the sacred lineage of Zoaételeu's storied pre-colonial system of social organization and power. Combined with the omniscient narrator, the lawyer's cyncial pontificating (inclusive of the Virgil and Roman quotes) lays out the predestined flow of post-colonialist power struggles.

Beti really created something here...