Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote
Ahmadou Kourouma (William Heinemann)
First published five years ago in his native French, Ahmadou Kourouma’s third novel has since sold a sensational 100 000 copies in France. When he was a guest of Durban’s Time of the Writer Festival in 2000, it had not yet been translated into English, so it was hard for this gentle giant — the septuagenarian from Côte d’Ivoire — to make the impact his astonishing work surely merited.
But in 2001, when he launched the Italian version at Mantua’s Festivaletteratura, I witnessed how this shambling truth-teller, served by the sharpest of translators, could bring an audience of disaffected European youths to their feet. They lapped up his theme: political corruption, the same in Africa as in their land, only, of course, much more so. They fell for his weapon of resistance: that old kind of humour Voltaire used to denounce the perverters of power, only sharper and blunter. The more he licked into his own continent, the more his audience applauded with recognition.
Now that Kourouma’s astounding Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is available in an elegant and pointed English translation (by Frank Wynne), we of the Anglophone sector down South may at last partake of an extraordinary phenomenon in African literature. Here is a work that does not do the usual pussyfooting around. Rather it just cuts through all the bullshit to tell it like it really is, and was, and presumably always will be.
Kourouma’s subject is a dire African dictator in training, who tours the region for lessons from all the other dictators in how to keep and enlarge his hold on power. While villainous neocolonial puppeteers, from General de Gaulle to François Mitterand, lurk scurvily in the background, all an African ruler needs apparently is (a) to wrestle and (b) to hunt. He need not actually read, as his marabouts or sorcerors will do that for him. Nor will he ever learn to love, as his venerable mother will fix him with serial rapes and a primary school to cater for the results.
Forget age-old tribal wisdom to guide him: Kourouma’s book has hilarious lashings of inept folkloric blather, and anyway chiefs always set the example in being exploitative, didn’t they? (And in running the slave trade, not so?) Forget the hopes of dewy-eyed democrats: all that counts is the bullet, never the flower.
Here are a few handy tips. Make the prison governor Number Two of your domain, so that your closest allies may rot in his charge, when necessary. When travelling abroad, take the national treasury with you: this minimises the chance of a coup d’état in your absence. Then if, after all that, your people still will not vote for you, under United Nations supervision, remember your wild beasts will oblige. Hence the extraordinary conclusion of this vast, virtuoso panoramic comedy: all the African animals trooping along to make their crosses for their leader. The brutes know only one thing of him, that he is their killer.
So Kourouma’s work is a hearty satire of an Africa mired in ignorance, poverty, disease, greed and all that but mostly, it appears, in dumb stupidity. Currently he is involved in a West African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which will probably bring out more dirt, if he has any influence on it, for his courage is exemplary. And the news is his next novel is about child soldiers. If Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is anything to go by, it should be not only another formidable challenge, but truly hair-raising.