The Poor Christ of Bomba by Mongo Beti

First published:Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba, 1956 (English translation, 1971)

Type of work: Satirical realism

Time of work: The 1930’s

Locale: Southern Cameroon, the small village of Bomba and several yet smaller villages throughout the forest

Principal Characters:

• Father Drumont, the archetypal, aging Catholic missionary, who founded Bomba, remaining for twenty years
• Denis, the fourteen-year-old, unreliable, first-person African narrator and naive protagonist, who ironically echoes Drumont’s Christianity
• Zacharia, the adult protagonist, Drumont’s materialistic African cook, who explicitly opposes Drumont’s views
• Vidal, the French colonial administrator of the region, who uses forced labor to build roads
• Catherine, a young African girl, Zacharia’s mistress, who also seduces Denis
• Clementine, Zacharia’s wife, who beats Catherine to defend her belief in Christian monogamy

The Novel

Structured through the device of a young teenager’s daily journal, The Poor Christ of Bomba records the tour of a French Catholic missionary, Father Drumont, and his two assistants—Denis, Drumont’s “boy” and the narrator, and Zacharia, the cook—through a dozen tiny villages in the forest of the Tala region. Bomba, itself a small village surrounded by the forest, teems with activity, sustained primarily by the mission’s sixa, a home for the prenuptial training of young women to encourage monogamy among the traditionally polygamous Talas. These women stay several months at the sixa and provide free labor for various workshops, plantations, and an elementary school. In contrast, the Tala villagers in the forest, who have become familiar with Drumont’s evangelism over the past twenty years, not to mention the German missionaries before him, have remained largely resistant to his faith, despite his practice of soliciting conversions through fear and misery. While nominally accepting Christianity, the Talas have done so only to the extent that the European faith has provided access to what the Talas regard as the secret power of colonialism: money. Ironically, converted Talas have left their villages for those such as Bomba which are scattered along the new colonial roads; motivated by cash rather than Christ, these Talas staff the mission, serving as counterparts to the forest people, who live by essentially traditional customs, integrally bound to the forest’s natural cycles and resources.

Drumont’s tour results from the Talas’ negligence in paying their church dues. Having been absent for three years, Drumont decides that he has “punished” them long enough by withholding his spiritual guidance. As Denis duly echoes Drumont’s bombastic language, the reader soon realizes that the narrator’s voice consists of sustained comic irony. In village after village, chapels have decayed to ruins and the forest people listen obediently but uncomprehendingly to Father Drumont’s sermons, which are composed of alien—to the Africans—biblical rhetoric and anecdotes. Polygamy and “pagan” dances continue, even while Drumont rails against them on his one-day visits to village after village. Zacharia, meanwhile, is joined by Catherine, his mistress from the sixa, and continues his illicit affair with her just as he had done in Bomba. Night after night, Drumont sleeps obliviously next door to Zacharia and Catherine.

Drumont’s aloof blindness to his failure to convert the Talas cannot continue. Stern and stubborn, he struggles to maintain his delusion of successful evangelism, but too much to the contrary confronts him. In a parody of baptism, Drumont is nearly drowned while crossing a river. Catherine seduces Denis, who confesses his sin, and his pleasure, to Drumont. Clementine, Zacharia’s wife, arrives to expose his adultery and beats Catherine to demonstrate her belief in monogamy. Catherine’s fiance arrives and soundly beats Zacharia. The greatest blow comes to Drumont’s confidence as Clementine reveals that Catherine belongs to the sixa. Vidal, the administrator in the region, visits Drumont in the effort to recruit laborers from among the fruits of Drumont’s new evangelical harvest. When Vidal finds that the father superior is failing, he urges the father to stay, threatening to impose a blatant condition of slavery on the Talas if Drumont returns to France as he contemplates doing. Over the course of only two weeks, Drumont’s twenty-year delusions of the spiritual achievements of Christianity in Tala country have utterly collapsed. He retreats hastily to Bomba.

When Drumont returns, the scandals only grow more pervasive and more serious than he had realized on his tour. The sixa has been used for years as a brothel, making his loyal catechists little more than rich pimps. As the widespread pandering comes to light through Drumont’s inquiries of the sixa women, who confess under the duress of whippings directed by Drumont himself, the African supervisors and catechists flee Bomba; the sixa women name more and more of them in their “confession,” parodying those of the Catholic ritual. Worse, Drumont’s “Number One Boy,” Daniel, has introduced syphilis into the sixa; consequently, many of Bomba’s men and their wives are afflicted with the venereal disease. Drumont, demoralized at the fragility of Christian values among the Talas, quickly completes his plans to return to France. He returns Denis to his father and sends the sixa women back to their home villages—still infected with syphilis and gonorrhea.

Despite the missionary’s promises to write, Denis hears nothing from Drumont. Three weeks after his return to France, Bomba is deserted. Rumors surface of men and women being “driven into the labour gangs” under “a real reign of terror” by Vidal’s soldiers. With the Talas abandoned and crippled physically and spiritually, Denis, fearing for his own safety, must awaken to the colonial realities which threaten him. Any hope of continuing his Christian education or even hearing a Mass now gone, Denis decides to escape from the countryside for the more “civilized” servitude of working for a Greek merchant in a larger town. Drumont, called Father Jesus by the young boys of the once-thriving mission and the Cunning One by the forest Talas, has left Africa to suffer not only the degradation of self-destruction but also the oppression of colonial tyranny.

The Characters

Within the insistently ironic voice of the narrator, Mongo Beti subtly develops a gradual opposition between the seemingly inextricable viewpoints of Drumont and Denis. While Drumont realizes slowly his failure to convert the Talas to Christianity in any authentic sense, Denis realizes slowly that Christianity has destroyed rather than saved his people. Because Denis often says just the opposite of what the author means and because the narrator’s amply detailed description of the mission, villages, forest, and customs is factual rather than ironic, the characterization of the two seems at first nearly static. As the pace of comic events becomes more rapid as the novel progresses, Drumont’s disillusionment appears somewhat sudden, yet, as he himself suggests, the reality of his failures has been emerging over several years. Denis, on the other hand, maintains his naive stance until the last pages of the novel, even though the reader senses the waning of the irony in his voice from the point of his first sexual experience. By the end of the novel, what initially seemed a genuine spiritual alliance between Drumont and Denis becomes an irreconcilable conflict between the colonial Christianity of Drumont and the rootless coming-of-age of a modern African boy.

In Beti’s use of an innocent vision to shape a web from which all other characters speak for themselves and to one another, a second conflicting tension develops. Because Denis records an increasing amount of dialogue as the novel unfolds, the reader can discern two sets of characters who hold contrasting viewpoints on the significance of the mission. The first group, those such as Denis, see the evangelism at work from the inside and depend on the omission of details (such as the flagrant pandering), on discrepancy, and on extreme hyperbole to show the irrelevance of a faith so deeply antagonistic to African values. The vicar, Jean-Martin Le Guen, has just come from France, but, an insider, he is as blind as Drumont to the mission’s spiritual poverty. Catherine, while understanding her sins nominally, chooses complicity in the schemes in order to gain easier work assignments and relative freedom in the sixa.

The second set of characters, much greater in number, see the mission from a detached viewpoint, although many of them are employed at the mission. Zacharia is the protagonist for this colonized African viewpoint: He sees that a central source of the mission’s income is derived from the inflated baptism fees of unwed mothers, despite Drumont’s condescending sermons against premarital sex. While Denis is aware of the discrepancy, Zacharia understands clearly the implication of the Father’s high fees: Making money is making money. Raphael, the supervisor of the sixa, understands similarly how the mission prostitutes its own existence, taking the contradiction as license for his own pandering of the sixa women. Consequently, the two groups share materialistic values, but the insiders use their bankrupt spirituality to control African wealth; the outsiders, all Africans who recognize their lack of power as a lack of wealth, pursue directly their own acquisition of wealth—and hence control of it—by any means available.

To Beti’s credit, his attack on Christianity is tempered by restraint in his condemnation of European missionaries. Drumont, for all of his sins, seems genuine (if ignorant of his role as an agent for colonial control) in his concern for the spiritual health of the Talas. He believes earnestly in his own values, blind as he is to their disruptive consequences for the Africans. When he realizes that his twenty years of missionary work have depleted the Talas of both Christian and traditional values, he muses over the validity of the traditional values and, at least, has the good sense to do no further harm: He leaves. Conversely, Beti refuses to glorify his African characters beyond credibility. Save for the traditional Talas, who remain in the descriptive background and from whom not even a minor character emerges fully, Beti’s outsiders are largely self-serving in their actions, whatever their motives or circumstances may be. Sanga Boto, or Ferdinand (depending on what opportunity arises), is a sorcerer and baptized polygamist who quite willingly plays whatever role will enhance his private reputation. To do so is good for the sorcery business. Clementine’s brutal demonstration of her belief in monogamy suggests that she is more interested in Zacharia’s benefits from the mission than in nurturing the intimacies of marriage. Zacharia, after all, represents a consistent source of material goods. In Beti’s evenhanded treatment of both blatant flaws (Vidal’s racism) and subtle ones among both European and African characters, he enhances his portrait of a people on the edge of social and spiritual chaos.

Critical Context

For more than three decades, Alexandre Biyidi (Beti’s real name) has used comic satire, precise observation, and incisive analysis to create a continual record of Cameroon’s transition from a colonial state to an independent nation. While Ville cruelle (1954; cruel town) was a failure critically, even to the point that Biyidi dropped the pseudonym of Ezra Boto forever, The Poor Christ of Bomba, his second novel, earned just praise, although it was translated much later than his two subsequent novels, Mission terminee (1957; Mission to Kala, 1958) and Le Roi miracule (1958; King Lazarus, 1960). After these early novels, which helped create the genre of the francophone anticolonial novel, Biyidi, continuing to write under the name of Mongo Beti because it provided limited safety from persecution, turned his darkening vision of colonial Africa to a satirical attack on Cameroon, Tumul-tueux Cameroun (1959; tumultuous Cameroon). Having returned from Franceas his country prepared for independence only to be jailed briefly as a political suspect, he left Cameroon to return to France, living in exile and teaching French literature. After a decade of silence, he began where he had left off, publishing a scathing attack on the ruling elite of Cameroon, Main basse sur le Cameroun (1972; the plundering of Cameroon), which was suppressed in both Cameroon and France. Almost as if to complete a circle, Biyidi, still writing as Beti, turned again to fiction, examining the position of women in post-colonial Cameroon through two subsequent novels.

In addition to affording a measure of political distance, Biyidi’s pen name has helped him establish an intellectual distance that was once rare among modern African writers. He spares no race or nationality in his early satires, yet the absence of bitterness and self-pity that Beti achieves through his wit, humor, and racy dialogues constitutes the emergence of the African comic novel. While Biyidi might be said to have created a singularly thorough and successful record of the failure of French West African colonialism and independence, it is the ring of laughter from an otherwise grim period of African history on which the reputation of The Poor Christ of Bomba will endure.

Bibliography

Britwum, Kwabena. “Irony and the Paradox of Idealism in Mongo Beti’s Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba,” in Re: Arts and Letters. VI (1972), pp. 48-68.

Cassirer, Thomas. “The Dilemma of Leadership as Tragi-Comedy in the Novels of Mongo Beti,” in L’Esprit Createur. X (1970), pp. 223-233.

Chase, Joanne. “Saints and Idiots: The Fanatic Mentality as Depicted in Mongo Beti’s The Poor Christ of Bomba,” in ACLALS Bulletin. V (1980), pp. 86-97.

Lambert, Fernando. “Narrative Perspectives in Mongo Beti’s Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba,” in Yale French Studies. LIII (1976), pp. 78-91.

Porter, Abioseh Mike. “The Child-Narrator and the Theme of Love in Mongo Beti’s Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba,” in Design and Intent in African Literature, 1982.