Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono

The new Commandant needs a boy. Father Vandermayer told me to report to the Residence tomorrow. I am glad because I have not been able to bear life at the Mission since Father Gilbert died. Of course it is a good riddance for Father Vandermayer as well.

I shall be the Chief European's boy. The dog of the King is the King of dogs.

A Cameroonian is summoned to the bedside of a fellow countryman, dying in Equatorial Guinea. "What are we blackmen," the dying man says to the other, "who call ourselves French?" When he dies, the man reads his notebook journals, which tell the whole of his tragic story: the dead man, Toundi, fled his parents to become the servant to a white priest, believing in the superiority of French culture and religion. When the priest died suddenly, he became servant to the Commandant, who treated him with contempt and suspicion.

Toundi's story is a familiar colonial one: the way racism becomes internalized, and the disillusionment that follows on the heels of colonizer cruelty. Toundi is a good servant, conscientious and discreet, but it doesn't matter, because it is in the nature of the Commandant to be cruel. He doesn't want a good servant, actually: he wants a servant he can beat and upbraid, and if Toundi refuses to be that servant, he will beat him and upbraid him all the same. Toundi falls in love with the Commandant's wife when she arrives at the compound, but she turns out to be even worse. She carries on an affair with one of the Commandant's underlings, and treats Toundi poorly though a single word from him would betray their secret. Of course, when the Commandant does discover the affair, he punished Toundi for the imagined offense of being a go-between.

Houseboy is, like Toundi, a rather passive figure: Toundi is so obedient that the book has little narrative energy. The Commandant is cruel; his wife is cruel; Toundi cultivates a mindset that lives beyond and apart from their hatred toward him, or even their need of him. He becomes disillusioned, but circumstances will not allow him to act on disillusionment, though what one really desires is for him to "misplace" one of M. Moreau's letters to the Commandant's wife one day. Instead, he becomes even more the victim, accused by the French police of abetting a woman who has run away with her master's money. In another life, Toundi and the woman Sophie might have been lovers, but in this one she is repulsed by his obeisance, and his obeisance prevents him from becoming her accomplice--though that hardly matters to the police. They torture him until he makes an escape, limping off to Spanish Guinea where, as we know, he shortly dies.

Houseboy is wry, mocking, but at its heart is an essential bitterness: if Toundi had been a little wiser, had played his masters a little more artfully, he might have been better off. But European colonialism requires a subject to be disciplined, and it always begins, we learn, with the close at hand. The Commandant and his wife share every vice, from adultery to malice to greed, but by projecting these evils onto their houseboy, they are able at last to put aside their differences.