EXCERPT FROM FOREWORD

“C’était a Tigony is a novel that concerns itself with the central issues of the day in an age of neoliberal capitalism, with a frame provided by a giant multinational corporation investing in extractive industries, an autocratic state rule cast in the modern vein as “democrat” of the people who dissimulates the corrupt relationship with European powers, and the vast struggle of the unemployed masses set against the backdrop of poverty and detritus on the one bank of the river, and the familiar contours of wealthy denizens living on the other. In short, an updated version of the colonial divide now sustained in a postcolonial Africa. However, although the novel sets the action in play with a massive national strike, and with a chorus of voices of the people echoing the complaints of the “wretched of the earth,” the drama of the narrative comes to turn on several key interpersonal relations. The central one involvesDorcasKeurorleonan-Moricet white geophysicist posted to Africa, who falls in love with a young African, Segue n’Di, who reveals to him the joys of physical love which her husband was incapable of providing her with. The enlightened couple represent an ideal of openness, sensuality, and authenticity in the sense of early Existential thought. The binary division of the characters, echoing the strictures of neoliberal ideology, demands the counterpart of corruption, bigotry, and hatred are located in the oppressive white figures who are emblematic of neoliberalism operating in Africa today, alongside a cast of ignorant and vicious Africans and Europeans. The good are assisted by the “old African Hand” journalist, a sensualist and intellectual bonvivant, and another range of idealized children, of reassuring elders, and in particular, an Ethiopean Jewish woman of aristocratic bearing who recites the Song of Songs and the Haggadah in Hebrew.

If Le Chant du lac evoked the trials of a “young” Africa seeking to forge the path for its future between an idealized past and an unstoppable future, C’était à Tigony brings us into that future world, two generations later, and it is not only far from having liberated itself from the heritage of neocolonialism, it finds itself confronting not only the inadequacies of the postcolonial regime, but more ominously, the unstoppable forces of the multinational corporation—with no more spirits of the sky or of the mountains or the sea to turn to. Here it is the neoliberal order working against a new generation of Africans and Europeans armed with the best weapons of High Culture, at home in any corner of Africa or of Europe—the Afropolitans and their lover-allies among the Euro-cosmopolitans.

C’était à Tigony caps the career of one of Africa’s major authors whose life spans the entire breadth of contemporary African fictions, and whose earlier works have been celebrated and well-known to readers and scholars of African literature.”