Mongo Beti

Mongo Beti (1932–2001), born Alexandre Biyidi-Awala, was a Cameroonian novelist and essayist whose satirical fiction and dissident journalism made him one of the leading voices of postcolonial African literature in French. He spent most of his adult life in exile in France and returned home only in his last decade.

Beti was born in Akométan, near Mbalmayo in central Cameroon. He attended Catholic mission schools and the lycée Leclerc in Yaoundé, then moved to France in 1951 to study at Aix-en-Provence and the Sorbonne. He passed the agrégation in classics in 1966 and taught for more than thirty years at the lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen.

His early novels, published under the name Mongo Beti, include Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba, Mission terminée, and Le Roi miraculé, which together skewered the alliance of colonial administration and Catholic mission in late-colonial Cameroon. Mission terminée won the Prix Sainte-Beuve in 1957. After a long silence he returned with the polemical essay Main basse sur le Cameroun in 1972, which was banned by the French government at the request of the Cameroonian regime, and with the novels Remember Ruben and Perpétue.

He co-founded the journal Peuples noirs, Peuples africains in 1978 and, after returning to Cameroon in 1991, opened the bookshop Librairie des Peuples noirs in Yaoundé. He died in Douala.

The pen name Mongo Beti is drawn from the Beti people of southern Cameroon, his community of origin; Mongo in the local Ewondo language means 'son'. He used it to mark his work as that of a son of his people.