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Specialist of East Africa, Léonard Vincent is a reporter for RFI's Africa service. At the same time, he is pursuing a career as a writer, drawing his inspiration from the turbulence of the African world, which he has been following for almost twenty years. The chaos of globalization, flight ahead, loneliness, downgrading are some of the recurring motifs in his literary universe. " Shiftas " to be released March 14 is his second novel.
Shiftas , which means " bandit ", " outlaw " in the languages of East Africa, is the new novel by Leonardo Vincent. An excellent connoisseur of the region, the author made his name in 2012 by publishing a book of inquiry and testimonies on Eritrea of Issaias Afeworki, the hero of independence who took his country hostage for two decades.
The Eritreans , his pioneering essay is above all a tribute to the men and women of this country, victims of an alcoholic and paranoid dictator. As a good professional, with journalistic neutrality across the shoulder, the author told in this first book the tragic odyssey of a people who dies, fleeing their country transformed into a vast prison. Compassion and commitment are read between the lines.
A multiethnic crew
After a first novel Athens gives nothing (2014) whose action is in contemporary Greece, hit by the economic and social crisis, the journalist returns to his favorite country with a new opus with original writing. Punctuated and scripted like graphic books, Shiftas stages an incredible treasure hunt in a ravaged Somalia. This time it is a thriller-like novel, whose action is essentially between Mogadishu and the bushy and arid hinterland. At the heart of this story rich in suspense, cavalcades, leaks and theatrics, an unlikely trio united by their destinies and their common quest for a better future. Bruno, the Marseille chef of " Baraka ", the oil tanker in the bay of Mogadishu, Medhani, an Eritrean deserter and Abdi a Somali shepherd, constitute this heroic trio.
The book opens on the berthing of the oil tanker broken down in the port of the Somali capital, pulled by a tugboat. While waiting for their boat to be repaired and their pay come, the multiethnic crew disperses into the city. A city like no other, destroyed by decades of civil war and terrorist attacks. " Mogadishu is a very pretty city ... a bit like Andalusia, but destroyed, " writes Bruno to his fiancée who stayed in Marseille.
It is in the post-apocalyptic Somalia that only today has the name of the name that Bruno, the French cook, meets Eritrean Medhani and Abdi the shepherd. The last is from the bush of the Middle Shabelle, not far from Mogadishu, where there is a real cave of Ali Baba which is actually an isolated farm in the undergrowth. It is guarded by a mother and son couple and whose cellar houses the war chest of al-Qaeda in Somalia.
This is, the novelist writes, " a colossal sum of cash ", " in bundles of green notes tightened by rubber bands, but also in a few loads of Kenyan and Somali shillings, in large packets of euros, in brick bricks of Turkish and British pounds, the equivalent of several million US dollars is stored in cookie boxes and bags, buried in the dry dust, under a hatch .
Informed about the " Shebabs " by Shepherd Abdi, the trio concocts an unmistakable plan to seize this fabulous treasure, for themselves, for their local sponsors more or less in cahoots with the sponsors of the terrorists and for the local population deprived of everything.
Almost Balzacian Ambition
Will they succeed? How are they doing it? What will they do with this badly acquired cash? Questions that structure the story told by Shiftas about 300 pages. It is an unusual story, conducted brilliantly, even if there are slowness, descriptions that blur the evolution of the central plot. The quasi-Balzacian ambition of camping characters and episodes sometimes comes into conflict with the energetic dimension of a story that is primarily a thriller. With an avidity peculiar to new novelists, Léonard Vincent accumulates the places (Somalia, Dubai, Marseilles ...), the points of view, the psychosociological analyzes which interrupt the spontaneous flow of the narrative.
Nevertheless, the central plot of the mujahideen treasure hunt through the hell of Somalia carries conviction. The reader is driven by the dynamics of the action and the coherence of the characters. Far from being Manicheans, the latter are inhabited by their quest and their contradictions, by their past which determines their present and the future they see taking shape in their open-ended chase.
Finally, the strength of this story is his writing incarnate, under the pen of an author who masters the ground like no other and who puts it in scene with words as graphic as poetic, like this sequence telling the farm where is hidden the treasure: " The farm is set in the middle of the blue of the plain. The big conference of insects occupies the whole horizon. From the promontory where the sentries sleep, one can distinguish only the hasty geometry of the house, the deep shadows, the banana trees, the fiery square of the lit window. It's as striking as it is disturbing.
Shiftas , by Leonardo Vincent. Editions of Ecuador, 272 pages, 20 euros.