The writer is unknown. And what's more, rumor has it that he's black! A first for the famous literary prize. René Maran, aged 34, was born in Martinique to Guyanese parents. But the astonishment of the literary event was quickly followed by the political scandal.
This astonishing novel that tells the fictional life of the African warrior chief Batouala, is preceded by a vitriolic preface, in which René Maran, the first, bluntly denounces the reality of French colonization in Africa, which, in the name of good, kills its inhabitants and plunders its riches.
“Batouala” published by Albin Michel.
The first Negro novel written by a Negro, in whom Léopold Sédar Senghor saw a "precursor of Negritude", a story of extraordinary violence and modernity, here is the lament of Batouala, great tribal chief, valiant hunter and excellent walker.
It is 1921. At that time, no one dared to doubt the validity of colonialism, the bearer of civilization and peace. However, one voice was raised, that of René Maran, a West Indian author (1887-1960), then a civil servant at the Ministry of Colonies, who denounced, in this novel preceded by a terrible preface, the abuses of the administration in Africa-EFrench equatorial judiciary and the misdeeds of imperialism.
His comments triggered a real scandal which culminated in the Goncourt Prize being awarded to him the same year.
Doesn't René Maran dare to write:
"If we could know the baseness of colonial life, we would no longer talk about it. It degrades little by little. Few colonials, even among civil servants, cultivate their minds. They lack the strength to resist the atmosphere, the alcohol... These excesses and other ignoble ones lead those who excel in them to the most abject cowardice. This cowardice can only be worrying for those who have been entrusted with representing France."