"The Son of Agatha Moudio", by Francis Bebey

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By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

The Son of Agatha Moudio is the first novel by Francis Bebey, who was a journalist, musicologist before coming to literature. He was contemporary with the first great Cameroonian novelists such as Mongo Beti or Ferdinand Oyono. Evoking in an uninhibited way Africa under colonization, the novel was a great popular success and has been translated into English, German and Polish.

Publicity

Le Fils d'Agatha Moudio is the novel of a storyteller and a musician. The author, Cameroonian Francis Bebey, is known as a musician, musicologist, singer, lyricist. Everyone knows her song Agatha  : “  Don't lie to me… He's not my son… you know that… he's not my son, even if he's yours…  ”. This is also the argument of his novel Le Fils d'Agatha Moudio , which tells the story of a black woman, married to a black man, and who gives birth to a child… café au lait. Francis Bebey's novel revolves around these events that take place in a traditional African society.

This novel made the reputation of the author as a novelist, peerless chronicler of African life. Published by a Cameroonian publisher and not by a Parisian publisher, Le Fils d'Agatha Moudio has enjoyed great popular success in Africa. Republished several times, it was crowned with the Literary Grand Prize for Black Africa. Francis Bebey has written other novels, five in all, but his name remains associated with the Son of Agatha Moudio who even entered the curriculum of schools in his country.

Reasons for success

Its success, this novel owes it to the original treatment of its subject by the author. Francis Bebey is one of the first generation of post-colonial African novelists. The novel appeared in 1967, seven years after Cameroon's independence on January 1, 1960. One of the missions of this generation of writers was to renew the African narrative perspective and to contribute to the work of national construction by course by refocusing the narrative discourse on the country, on Africa. This is what Francis Bebey does admirably in this first novel by setting up his story in a traditional fishing village called Bonakwan, located in the near suburb of Douala, on the banks of the Wouri.

The story takes place during the colonial period, "  at the crossroads of ancient and modern times  ", as the author writes, but colonization, White-Black relations are marginalized or put into perspective, with the narrative focusing on mainly on the interior life within African society. The author's objective is to tell the daily life of a thousand-year-old people who are trying to adapt to the changes in modern life, as well as to the effects of colonization without sacrificing the vision, the philosophy that make the consistency of this company.

The novel opens with a scene of confrontation with white hunters who have come to hunt monkeys in the forest adjoining the village. The villagers do not take this intrusion very favorably and ask the village chief to claim financial compensation from the whites. The chief hesitates. How to ask for money from these people who order “  you, me, all the inhabitants of the village, our forest, our river, our river and all the animals and all the fish that live there  ”? While the chief is slow to pass on the villagers' request, Mbenda, a young man from the village, more courageous and less complex than the others, takes the hunters to task and forces them to pay their due to the villagers. His fearlessness will be worth to Mbenda, hero-narrator of the story, an assignment to collective work. This balance of power between the dominant and the dominated, admittedly still fragile, will have no impact on the rest of the plot.

Mbenda's loves

The story revolves around the love disappointments of Mbanda, the young man who stood up to the white hunters. Mbenda is in love with the most beautiful girl in the village, Agatha Moudio, and he wants to marry her. But Agatha does not have a good reputation in the village: we saw her hanging out in the European quarter. She would sleep with whites, say the gossips. Mbanda's mother doesn't want a bad daughter-in-law and pushes her son to marry his bride, Fanny. The young man gives in to his mother's insistence, but his passion for Agatha is so strong that he cannot forget it. Even married, he will continue to see her and will eventually marry her too, polygamy being tolerated in his community.

This marriage could have served as a denouement to the novel, but a new crisis darkens the happiness of Mbenda when Agatha gives birth to a mixed-race child. The story ends with this new drama, the resolution of which in a completely dispassionate fashion testifies to the sophistication and maturity of traditional African society, which is the real protagonist of Francis Bebey's novel.

Three reasons to read or reread Agatha Moudio

Simple, subtle and deep, these are the three words that come to mind when we want to qualify this book. The pleasure of the text arises from the successful marriage of the simplicity of the plot and the subtlety of the narrative tinged with irony proper to a storyteller, to which is added an understanding of life and the human condition which is a matter of wisdom or maturity, quite simply. In these pages, we are closer to a moral tale than to a novel, closer to a Maupassant or an Amadou Hampâté Ba than to a Flaubert or a Kourouma. We come out of it enlightened, enlarged and pacified, three reasons which justify reading or rereading Agatha Moudio's Son .

The Son of Agatha Moudio , by Francis Bebey.

Key Editions,

Yaounde,

1967

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