Gregoire Nakobomayo, the protagonist in Alain Mabanckou’s African Psycho (Jacana), simply describes himself as a “picked-up child”. He ran away from his foster family and pitched up in a neighbourhood called He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-an-Idiot, a suburb whose shenanigans are reported in a newspaper called The Street Is Dying.
All of this rather weird stuff is preceded by a nerve-tingling declaration at the beginning of the book: “I have decided to kill Germaine on December 29 …”
The French-speaking world has had this clever psychotic thriller since 2003; the English translation under review is by Christine Schwartz Hartley.
Mabanckou — a previous winner of the Sub-Saharan Africa Literary Prize and the Prix Renaudot — has been hailed by a French journal as a writer to watch out for in this century. And not without reason, for introductions to tales don’t usually come as shocking as this. But then again, this is coming from a denizen of a neighbourhood that shamelessly denounces teetotallers. Here they hold drinking competitions and the population swears by beer and wine.
It’s a society so sad that not even the dead are allowed to fade away into quiet oblivion; they are interred in a cemetery called The-Dead-Who-Are-Not-Allowed-to-Sleep. So when the narrator turns 18, he attends trials that feature “blood and loss of life”.
He feels these court sessions are like the theatre. “I wanted to familiarise myself with the faces of the criminals in our urban area. I wanted to know what was special about them, whether I could recognise myself in the acts they had perpetrated.” Vicariously, he feels like one of the defendants. He sees this as part of his apprenticeship – so that he can “shit on society”, as his idol the Great Master Angoualima (a 12-fingered monster serial killer) has done, and is ominously wont to declare.
Gregoire is an orphan: he never knew his biological father and mother and, for lack of role models, adopts the mythical Great Master as his idol. The Great Master is more famous than the president of the republic and the hordes of rhumba-singing and gyrating musicians. The Angoualima legend breathes from the pores of every conceivable thing in the land. It is present under the ground, at the bottom of the sea, on treetops because the bird is his totem, and even in cemeteries — from which, it is thought, he draws supernatural strength. It’s no surprise then when Gregoire sighs wistfully that “my crime will be more beautiful than those of my idol …”.
I am trying very hard not to give away the ludicrous tidbits of information that make this tale gripping, the petty xenophobia perpetrated against people from the “country over there”. Gregoire has a grand plan that has the whiff of the final solution about it — intended to clean up his district after leaving a bar that recalls the Eucharist ritual and named, rather laboriously, Take and Drink, This Is the Cup of My Blood.
What follows is elaborate planning, botched plots, sexual cock-ups (sometimes literally), and quite a bit of creepy stuff whose high-octane feel is sustained by an elaborate stream-of-consciousness technique that keeps the tension of African Psycho very taut.
This is a clever book that uses the diseased rot of the narrator to mirror the rot of his society, all in an oblique and undidactic way. African Psycho is often riveting and surreal, alternating between nauseating and ghoulish, perhaps a tad self-indulgent and at times all over the place.
But it remains a bewilderingly entertaining read that achieves a peculiar redemption. As one goes through the book, one is always aware of the book’s epigraph from Herman Ungar’s Boys & Murders, which puzzlingly asks: “… am I truly a murderer? I have killed a human being, but it seems to me I haven’t done it myself …”