Monnew by Ahmadou Kourouma

Djigui didn't suffer from any illness, or enchantment, or poison, and no accident could vanquish him, finish him off. He had prayed too much, exposed too many sacrifices and offerings against those venal faults, permanently eliminating them from his destiny. Against Djigui there remained only Djigui. He had attained the immunity of those serpents on desert rocks who die only by suicide, by biting their own tails. His end was found in himself, in his fits of anger, his saliva. This truth was accepted by everyone, even the Toubab toubib of Soba. It was s cientifically established that, to prevent him from undoing himself, he had to be spared monnew, anger and shame, and if unfortunately they didn't manage that, the only remedy known on this earth was to bring to the feet of the AgeOldMan the person by whom the monne had come (in the Bolloda he was called the accursed one), on his knees, naked to the waist, hands tied behind his back, and let the AgeOldMan take a big nasty bite in the victim's occiput.

The word monnew means a great and powerful shame. For Djigui, the king of a fictional African country named Soba, monnew is found in the arrival of the white Frenchmen, called Toubabs, who have taken control of the country and made Djigui a vassal. At first, it seems as if Djigui's vassalage may be to his benefit. The French mostly keep away, and their selection of Djigui as king over all the competing groups and tribes of Soba cements his power in a way that his own prayers and sacrifices, his own years of constant warfare, never could. But the French are fickle, and soon Djigui's power is on the wane; they depose Djigui and turn to his rascally son Bema, but they cannot diminish Djigui's status and notoriety as the "AgeOldMan" of his people. Monnew follows the fictional African nation as it becomes more closely incorporated with the French metropole; after DeGaulle confers citizenship upon France's colonial subjects, they are even invited to send representatives to French parliament, but this, too, becomes a political powderkeg with Djigui at his center. By the end of his life, Djigui--who we are told reaches the age of 125--is witness to the the whole arc of African colonial history.

I found Monnew really fascinating. Kourouma, as I understand it, was a Malinke, the same ethnic group as the legendary Mansa Musa and Sundiata Keita, though he was from the Ivory Coast and not one of the West African countries where the Malinke are most associated today, like Mali and Senegal. One of the hallmarks of West African society is/has been the griot, the historian-storyteller whose facility with the oral tradition makes them a kind of poet-slash-official-recordkeeper. Djigui is surrounded by griots who support his struggle against the French by memorializing his deeds and those of his ancestors in their poetry. When his best griot is killed, it is as big a blow for Djigui as the death of his greatest general. The story of Djigui in Monnew is not just a story of continued degradation and shame, but a story of the growth of Djigui's legend; at the beginning, he is a struggling chieftain whose sacrifices seem to be barely heeded by the gods, but toward the book's end, he's been ennobled somehow by his significant place in the larger struggle between the Africans and their French conquerors.

Monnew reminds of Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King, another book about the collision of African powers and European colonials set in a fictional African country that is meant to stand in for a huge swath of colonized places and peoples. But Laye's book has the tight psychological focus of modern literature, whereas Kourouma's book reads more like one of those griot-poems: a sweeping epic that covers a lot of time and a lot of ground. The prose is richly ironic (it was an... interesting choice to translate whatever French or Malinke word the people of Soba use to describe themselves with the n-word in English) but it also has the unmistakable tenor of something translated from another language, and another worldview. It's so steeped in the context of pre-colonial West African society that there are many details I didn't quite get; but on the whole it felt like a real window into something that must be quite difficult to communicate to a "Western" audience.

With the addition of the Ivory Coast, my "Countries Read" list is up to 96!