what is Cameroonian literature?
Cameroon is a country stretching from the coast of the Gulf of Guinea to lake Chad, inhabited by 27 million people speaking some 250 tongues. The postcolonial nation is the successor of the ancient and medieval Sao civilisation that developed in the Chari River basin and was vanquished as late as the 15th-16th century by the expanding Bornu Empire. It is also by that time that the Portuguese sailors reached the region; they gave it the name Rio dos Camarões ("Shrimp River"), at the origin of the country's modern denominations: Kamerun as a German colony established in 1884, and Cameroun after the ww1, when the territory was divided between France and the United Kingdom. The part administrated by France became independent in 1960; in 1961 it federated with the southern part of British Cameroons (the northern part belongs to present-day Nigeria).
Contemporary Cameroonian literature is predominantly Francophone, although the first attempts at using local tongues for literary creation appeared early; Jean-Louis Njemba Medu (1902-1966) published a science-fiction novel Nnanga Kon in Bulu (one of the Bantu languages) as early as 1932. Nonetheless, the classical postcolonial writers associated with this country, Mongo Beti (1932-2001) and Ferdinand Oyono (1929-2010), wrote in French.
The most acclaimed recent writer from Cameroon is Imbolo Mbue; nonetheless, her English-speaking novel Behold the Dreamers (2016) may be associated with the United States rather than with Cameroon. She thematises the encounter of a Cameroonian immigrant Jende and a Lehman Brothers executive Clark Edwards during the financial crisis of 2008. The former becomes the driver of the latter having crossed the "Black Atlantic", the ancient ocean of slave trade, dreaming of the happy, prosperous, and racially-neutral United States of Barack Obama. The financial crisis brings about (also) the collapse of the American dream of the humble immigrant couple of Jende and his wife Neni. They soon discover how to avoid the police, whose task is to protect the white people against the black ones in a country that is neither a "melting pot" nor a "salad bowl" from the good old multicultural utopia. Finally, the second crossing of the "Black Atlantic", on their way back to Cameroon, takes on almost a mystical value. Jende, Neni, and their children arrive at their village of Limbé at night, waiting for the symbolic dawn that epitomises their new hope.
Contemporary Cameroonian literature is predominantly Francophone, although the first attempts at using local tongues for literary creation appeared early; Jean-Louis Njemba Medu (1902-1966) published a science-fiction novel Nnanga Kon in Bulu (one of the Bantu languages) as early as 1932. Nonetheless, the classical postcolonial writers associated with this country, Mongo Beti (1932-2001) and Ferdinand Oyono (1929-2010), wrote in French.
The most acclaimed recent writer from Cameroon is Imbolo Mbue; nonetheless, her English-speaking novel Behold the Dreamers (2016) may be associated with the United States rather than with Cameroon. She thematises the encounter of a Cameroonian immigrant Jende and a Lehman Brothers executive Clark Edwards during the financial crisis of 2008. The former becomes the driver of the latter having crossed the "Black Atlantic", the ancient ocean of slave trade, dreaming of the happy, prosperous, and racially-neutral United States of Barack Obama. The financial crisis brings about (also) the collapse of the American dream of the humble immigrant couple of Jende and his wife Neni. They soon discover how to avoid the police, whose task is to protect the white people against the black ones in a country that is neither a "melting pot" nor a "salad bowl" from the good old multicultural utopia. Finally, the second crossing of the "Black Atlantic", on their way back to Cameroon, takes on almost a mystical value. Jende, Neni, and their children arrive at their village of Limbé at night, waiting for the symbolic dawn that epitomises their new hope.
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