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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Mongo Beti and the responsibility of the African intellectual |
Author: | Kom, Ambroise |
Year: | 2003 |
Periodical: | Research in African Literatures |
Volume: | 34 |
Issue: | 4 |
Pages: | 42-56 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Cameroon |
Subjects: | intellectuals literature |
About person: | Mongo Beti (1932-2001) pseud. for Alexandre Biyidi |
External link: | http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v034/34.4kom01.pdf |
Abstract: | According to Noam Chomsky, 'the responsibility of the writer as a moral agent is to try to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something abouth them'. Following Chomsky and his predecessors, it can be shown that despite the dangers incurred, Mongo Beti took on the difficult role of African intellectual, a role that paradoxically reduced to almost nothing his chances of playing a political role in his chosen space. Breaking with the behaviours of many colleagues of his generation, Mongo Beti resolutely chose the cause of the dominated. The present author articulates Mongo Beti's intellectual thinking focusing on several essential stages: 'Main basse sur le Cameroun' (1972), the journal 'Peuples noirs - peuples africains' (1978-1991), 'La France contre l'Afrique, retour au Cameroun' (1993), and the Librairie des Peuples Noirs - a bookstore as well as a meeting place for numerous sociocultural actors forced to live in the margins of Cameroon's affairs -, which Mongo Beti created in Yaoundé. In this way, Mongo Beti appears to us under his double identity, that of a Western intellectual whose responsibility has been to tell the truth about the 'shaming of the West' to a Western audience, who can act to terminate the crimes effectively, and that of the African intellectual actively engaged in the struggles for the advent of democratic freedom and economic, social and cultural progress in his native country, and in Africa in general. Bibliogr., notes. [ASC Leiden abstract] |