Rene Maran's Batouala

“You smell the smells of the village, you eat its food, you see the white man as the black man sees him, and after you have lived in the village you die there. That is all there is to the story, but when you have read it, you have seen Batouala, and that means that it is a great novel.”–Ernest Hemingway

Rene Maran, the first black writer to win the Prix Goncourt back in 1921, was a French Caribbean born to parents from French Guiana who spent years in French Equatorial Africa during the zenith of European imperialism. His father served in the French colonial administration, which he also did. However, Maran sought to ameliorate some of the worst abuses of the colonial regime in French Equatorial Africa (Gabon, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Cameroon are the modern states that once comprised France's vast empire in Central Africa).

Reading Batouala from a 21st century lens, the novel hardly seems anti-colonial or radical at all. Indeed, the novel's main characters, a community of Bantu-speaking peoples of what is now the Central African Republic, carry on their old traditions, rituals, and beliefs in spite of their colonial overlords, who are depicted as cruel alcoholics who use excessive force. The Africans, such as their chief Batouala, however, are portrayed as happy 'savages' who resist the change that comes with modernity, preferring long days of idleness and not too interested in attaining literacy or the technological advances made by the Europeans. Batouala retains his power and influence as chief of their small community, but his authority and the authority of all African leaders prior to the arrival of the white man is under siege and threatened by blacks and whites in the region.

Surprisingly, Maran does succeed in establishing the worldview of the community he describes. The short novel is full of songs, folktales, rituals, and perspectives on the natural world from the Africans' point of view. Moreover, this portrayal is neither wholly negative or positive, so all the flawed aspects of Batouala and his community are shown as well as their strengths, including their rules for murder, polygamy, slavery, and their circumcision/fertility rites. Animals, such as Baoutala's pet dog, the panther, and others, also appear as strong characters due to their symbolic role in folklore and hunting, or for providing another lens through which one discovers the world of Batouala and the extreme suffering that results from their way of life, not that dogs were much better off in France or the West.

Perhaps because he so vividly depicted the world of Africa from an African perspective, Maran was scorned and rebuked in France for decades after the publication of Batouala. The simple act of giving Africans humanity at a time when all Africans were conceived of as untutored children and savages in need of Europe's saving grace was inevitably going to spark anger and opposition from French whites. Hemingway, however, immediately understood the novel's power and agreed with the message, hence his aforementioned accolades for Batouala.