Books in Brief: Bound to Violence

Bound to Violence, by Yambo Ouolo-guem, translated from the French by Ralph Mannheim (Harcourt, 182 pp., $5.95). Africa’s writers are its truest and sternest critics. Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe of Nigeria come immediately to mind, and Mr. Ouologuem of Mali, with his first novel, joins their distinguished company. With vivid imagery, he weaves the tale of the Nakem Empire (Mali) from 1200 a.d. to the present day, probing the nature of power (Arab, European, indigenous) and the nature of man (black, brown, and white). A brief passage on the more recent scholarly fantasists of Africa is typical of the novel’s pungent power. Saif, a “notable,” i.e., traditional ruler, “shrewd ideologist that he was, raised . . . the prices on the Negro art exchange, cooking up, to the sauce of tradition and its ‘human values,’ a stew of pure symbolic religious art which he sent to Vandame [a French colonial official], who passed it on to his correspondents who (may the Lord bless their innocence) peddled it to the curiosity seekers, tourists, foreigners, sociologists, and anthropology-minded colonials who flocked to Nakem. . . . He inspired Shrobenius [read Frobenius and his current imitators] to make known—a notion stamped with the genius of lunacy—the civilization and past of Nakem: ‘But these people are disciplined and civilized to the marrow! … It was only when white imperialism infiltrated the country with its colonial violence and materialism that this highly civilized people fell abruptly into a state of savagery, that accusations of cannibalism, of primitivism, were raised, when on the contrary—witness the splendor of its art—the true face of Africa is the grandiose empires of the Middle Ages, a society marked by wisdom, beauty, prosperity, order, nonviolence, and humanism, and it is here we must seek the true cradle of Egyptian civilization.’ Thus drooling, Shrobenius . . . mystified the people of his own country who in their enthusiasm raised him to a lofty Sorbonnical chair . . .” Mr. Ouologuem spares no one his lash, but nevertheless his characters are human and exhibit the full range of man’s passionate and compassionate qualities.

EM

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E. B. Meyer

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Bound to Violence, by Yambo Ouolo-guem, translated from the French by Ralph Mannheim (Harcourt, 182 pp., $5.95). Africa’s writers are its truest and sternest critics. Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe of Nigeria come immediately to mind, and Mr. Ouologuem of Mali, with his first novel, joins their distinguished company. With vivid imagery, he weaves the tale of the Nakem Empire (Mali) from 1200 a.d. to the present day, probing the nature of power (Arab, European, indigenous) and the nature of man (black, brown, and white). A brief passage on the more recent scholarly fantasists of Africa is typical of the novel’s pungent power. Saif, a “notable,” i.e., traditional ruler, “shrewd ideologist that he was, raised . . . the prices on the Negro art exchange, cooking up, to the sauce of tradition and its ‘human values,’ a stew of pure symbolic religious art which he sent to Vandame [a French colonial official], who passed it on to his correspondents who (may the Lord bless their innocence) peddled it to the curiosity seekers, tourists, foreigners, sociologists, and anthropology-minded colonials who flocked to Nakem. . . . He inspired Shrobenius [read Frobenius and his current imitators] to make known—a notion stamped with the genius of lunacy—the civilization and past of Nakem: ‘But these people are disciplined and civilized to the marrow! … It was only when white imperialism infiltrated the country with its colonial violence and materialism that this highly civilized people fell abruptly into a state of savagery, that accusations of cannibalism, of primitivism, were raised, when on the contrary—witness the splendor of its art—the true face of Africa is the grandiose empires of the Middle Ages, a society marked by wisdom, beauty, prosperity, order, nonviolence, and humanism, and it is here we must seek the true cradle of Egyptian civilization.’ Thus drooling, Shrobenius . . . mystified the people of his own country who in their enthusiasm raised him to a lofty Sorbonnical chair . . .” Mr. Ouologuem spares no one his lash, but nevertheless his characters are human and exhibit the full range of man’s passionate and compassionate qualities.