Yambo Ouologuem is a literary patricide. His only novel, Bound to Violence, was published to great acclaim in Paris in 1968. This man from Mali, so white critics claimed, had written the first authentic African novel (although these critics had surely ignored René Maran’s Batouala published back in the 1920s).


What did they mean and what assumptions were challenged by Ouologuem? The text itself provides the answer to both these questions and to the claim of ‘patricide’. These issues, however, must be put in context in order to understand the impact of this work and its curious aftermath. If the father in this murder has a name it is that of Léopold Senghor, the Senegalese poet and polemicist who went on to become president of his homeland. He is the best-known protagonist of the literary movement called négritude, which arose in 1930s Paris. In the face of colonial antipathy black students came together to celebrate Africa; to project a positive, vibrant vision of the continent. By the 1960s, however, this vision, some argued, had itself become banal, transmogrified into a ‘Good Africa’ of the time before European colonialisation versus a ‘Bad Africa’ of the time of colonialism itself. Bound to Violence seeks to break down this opposition by telling the tale of the fictional Empire of Nakem, but this Nakem is no prelapsarian fantasy, because its history features African leaders of unspeakable cruelty selling their subjects into bondage in league with Arab slave dealers.


The ‘Good Africa’ of Senghor and his followers is revised by incuding the violence and lust and, above all, a sense of African participation as the colonials themselves are duped and murdered by the ruthless overlords of Nakem. Those critics, however, who found in the book a suitable antidote to the nostrums of the Senghor school were themselves duped in some respects. A controversial success on publication, the book went on to become a plain scandal when it was discovered that it was an elaborate tissue of quotations from the work of authors as diverse as André Schwartz-Bart and Graham Greene. In an oral culture, of course, the recycling of material is taken for granted and in this sense, certainly, Ouologuem’s book falls into the great tradition of the African oral chronicler, the griot.


The novel can be seen as representing Africa stealing back its own complex testimony, even if the English publishers are, for legal reasons, obliged to acknowledge the ‘use of certain passages’ from Graham Greene. Nevertheless this is the voice of the griot telling a hypnotic and terrible tale.

‘How in profound displeasure, with perfumed mouth and eloquence on his tongue, Saif ben Isaac al-Heit endeavored to mobilize the energies of the fanatical people against the invader; how to that end he spread reports of daily miracles throughout the Nakem Empire — earthquakes, the opening of tombs, resurrections of saints, fountains of milk springing up in his path, visions of archangels stepping out of the sunset, village women drawing buckets from the well and finding them full of blood; how on one of his journeys he transformed three pages of the Holy Book, the Koran, into as many doves, which flew on ahead of him as though to summon the people to Saif»s banner; and with what diplomacy he feigned indifference to the goods of this world: in all that there is nothing out of the ordinary.’ p25