Hard facts A singular voice	Ahmadou Kourouma an African novelist’s inside story Interview by René Lefort and Mauro Rosi.
© Ulf Andersen/Editions du Seuil, París 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! Hard facts “We African writers work in gruelling conditions,” says Ahmadou Kourouma. “Writers are seldom rich anywhere in the world, but for us things are even tougher. We have fewer resources, fewer readers and fewer publishers.” The only available statistics, which are not recent but are probably still valid, reveal that sub-Saharan Africa publishes three times fewer titles than the average for developing countries and 25 times fewer than that for the developed countries. “There are two ways of writing in Africa,” Kourouma says. “The first is to write about Africa and Africans. Writers denounce situations they know relatively well, and run risks by shouting out the truth. They can’t expect big sales. They write for readers in developing countries, where people either can’t read or can’t afford to buy books. The second is to write for a wider public by tackling topics that are of interest to non-Africans as well as Africans. There are African authors living in France, for example, who write for an exclusively European readership. They are European writers even if they were born in Africa. Others manage to publish best sellers in France and are read in Africa as well, but that is more unusual. “I think that we should try and write for everyone by presenting our problems as universal human problems. We should follow the example set by the best Latin American literature. But Africans are changing. The first African authors took up the pen to show that they too could express themselves as writers, that they too were human beings. At the time, some people had doubts about that. . . . My generation has gone further than that. We have often chosen literature as a campaigning medium.” Photos © Charles Lénars, París In West Africa, hunters belong to a brotherhood which is at the top of the traditional social hierarchy. Map of Côte d'Ivoire • Population: 14.7 million • Density: 42 persons/km2 • Illiteracy rate: 57% • GDP/per capita/year: $690 • UNDP ranks Côte d’Ivoire among the countries with low human development, in 21st position among the countries of sub-Saharan Africa.	Ahmadou Kourouma is a writer from Côte 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 Côte 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, Malinke1. 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 bêtes 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. But it was the most brutal, ignorant leaders who won the internal power struggles in African countries. Yes, and they also had to be cynical. The foreign powers needed them. Apart from a few exceptions, they didn’t want bright people. Those who wanted to defend Africa, who wanted to strike a balance between the two sides by playing cat-and-mouse with them, were immediately eliminated. But when opposition movements came on the scene at the beginning of the democratization process after the Cold War, they turned out even worse than the dictators. That’s a fact. The earliest opposition leaders turned out to be drunken, drug-addicted looters without principles or scruples. And the opposition leaders who returned after a long exile were, as I have described them, “persons alien to their country’s people and way of life” and therefore incapable of grasping what was really going on. It’s true that both wanted first and foremost to take revenge and to get rich. Why? Because they all still believed in the mirage that power is all that matters. People had given up and let their leaders behave as village chiefs did in traditional Africa. The dictators thought they could go it alone, taking decisions without even listening to their advisers. Government money was their money. All those who got rich were pawns of the government. The dictator’s power was so absolute that all kinds of things were expected of him. To give you one example, in my country even today, when a fairly well-known person dies, the family still expects the head of state to pay 10,000 or 20,000 French francs ($1,800 or $3,500) for the funeral! Since that’s how things were, it’s not surprising that democratization got off to a very bad start. The old power structure and all its works had to be destroyed, because everything revolved around them. It was impossible for anything constructive to be built on the existing foundations, not only by the corrupt dictators and their cronies, but also by the opposition leaders who came back from exile abroad and hadn’t a clue about what was really going on. People always behave in the same way. As the Malinke proverb says, “The dog won’t give up its awkward way of sitting.” One criticism that has been made of your most recent novel is that in Africa reality and magic seem to be inseparable. Your anti-hero, the dictator Koyaga, defeats all his adversaries largely because of the strength of his magical powers. I don’t believe in magic. And when Africans ask me why I don’t, I say that if magic really existed, we wouldn’t have allowed the abduction of 100 million people, of whom perhaps 40 million reached the Americas and 60 million died on the way. If magic really worked, the slaves would have turned into birds, say, and would have flown back home. I don’t believe in magic because when I was a boy, I saw forced labour. If magic existed, the victims of forced labour would have been able to escape. But in a novel you have to describe your characters’ mentality and ideas. Power and magic are inseparable in the minds of most Africans. The dictator not only has power and money, he also has the best fetishists and sorcerers. Because they are the best, the dictator is invulnerable and his power is limitless. For the dictator’s entourage and for the people at large, power and magic are one. So how can Africa be successful in a world where science and technology are increasingly important? Rationality will gain ground at the same time as democracy, which is still far off but is slowly coming in. It won’t solve every problem, but we already have its foundation stone–the spoken word. Everywhere, we say what we want, and that’s quite an achievement. And one important thing we can say–and see–is that the chief’s almighty power is on the way out. The press can now expose corruption and abuses of power; a leader has to campaign against his opponents in elections; it’s possible to get rich without being a stooge of the government. The leader is no longer a superman. He no longer has everything going for him. He has to shoulder duties and responsibilities. He is becoming like everyone else. And consequently the magical part of his power is disappearing. And yet at the end of your latest novel the dictator is forced to hold elections, but “if people refuse to vote for him, the animals will come out of the bush, get hold of ballot papers and elect him with a landslide majority.” Odd as it may seem, many people think that kind of thing is possible. They’re even sure presidents get elected that way. But we’re making some headway. Before, either there weren’t any elections at all, or if an election was held, the dictator only had to ask for 99 per cent of the vote for his wish to be granted. Now he is forced to cheat. Votes from wild animals are the last refuge of dictators in distress. 1. The Malinke are the largest of the groups composing the Mande ethnic group. Most of them live in Guinea, Mali, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, where they make up 11 per cent of the population. Converted to Islam in the 11th century, the Malinke have ruled powerful empires which they dominated by force of numbers, arms and economic power. They are reputed to have a good head for business, and are also known as Dioulas, a word meaning “merchants” in Malinke.
A singular voice “A week ago Koné Ibrahima had finished in the capital,” runs the opening sentence of The Suns of Independence, meaning that Koné Ibrahima had died the previous week. It set the tone for a novel in which Ahmadou Kourouma transposed into French the speech-rhythms and images of Malinke, his mother tongue. This was a new departure in the world of French-language African literature, which had hitherto tended towards academicism. Kourouma’s fiction may owe much of the originality of its form and content to its author’s eventful life story. Ahmadou Kourouma was born in 1927 in the little town of Boundiali, today a local administrative centre in Côte d’Ivoire. His father was a nurse, and as such belonged to the colonized elite. He was called “doctor” and his rank gave him the right to use the services of Africans subjected to forced labour. But Kourouma was brought up by an uncle who was on the other side of the fence. He was a master-hunter, a leading member of the brotherhood that stood at the top of the traditional social scale because of the power it enjoyed by virtue of its weapons and the magic it acquired from bonding with nature. As a student Kourouma took part in protests at the Bamako Technical High School in Mali. Then he was drafted into the French army and ordered to Côte d’Ivoire to participate in a crackdown on the emerging liberation movement, the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain. When he refused to do this, he was drafted into the French colonial army in Indochina, a posting he only accepted because Bernard Dadier, then Côte d’Ivoire’s most famous writer, persuaded him that military experience would prepare him for the anti-colonial war which he believed to be inevitable. The next stage of Kourouma’s life came when he travelled to France to study science–a field spurned by most children of the African elite. He returned to Côte d’Ivoire just after independence and worked as an insurance executive, but did not stay long. “I was impervious to the magic of the single party, which claimed to be the only form of authority capable of developing the country,” he says. Kourouma was jailed for a few months and eventually went into exile. His second homecoming, in 1970, was almost as brief. When his play Le diseur de vérité (“The Truth Teller”), was published in 1974, it was deemed “revolutionary”. So he left the country and lived in Cameroon and Togo until 1993, continuing his career in private insurance companies. At 72, he thinks that his “generation first got things wrong and then wasn’t up to the job.” This was the generation that came after the birth of the concept of Negritude developed by Léopold Sedar Senghor, “who had recognized the Negro’s qualities as a man, but an incomplete man. We naively believed that only colonization prevented Africans from becoming fully rounded people like any other. If Africans thieved, for example, it was because of colonialism. If colonialism ended, they would all get down to work. Everyone was going to make sacrifices for Africa. But we didn’t take the reality and psychology of Africa into account. The Suns of Independence was the first book of its kind to emphasize that Africa was partly to blame for its own plight. The lure of wealth and power had got the better of Africans. And, like everyone else, intellectuals thought only of lining their pockets.” As he says this, Kourouma, who is a friendly giant of a man, bursts into a hearty laugh. “If I didn’t yield to temptation,” he says, “maybe it’s only because I didn’t have the opportunity!”