Mongo Beti and Liberty: A Study of His and Other Names in his Fiction
The primary concern of this paper is to argue that Mongo Beti is very political in his search for liberty in the choice of his pseudonyms, the names of some of his major characters and, consequently, his fiction. Before he discovered the hypocrisy in the practice of assimilation, Alexandre Biyidi Awala did not see himself as different from the real Frenchman. When the dawn of realization came, withdrawal syndrome showed. Thus, the French intellectual still lurking in the Cameroonian Biyidi, informed him to adopt a pseudo-identity to be able to express his disgust with a system that enslaved him for a long time. This search for a second, concealed personality yielded a set of symbolically charged names: Eza Boto means “the alienated people” or people without any “authenticity or autonomy”. Mongo Beti, “the son of soil, the child of Beti land. These names tell us what Biyidi thinks of the system he represents in his fiction. This view is highlighted in this paper by examining Beti’s fiction, paying particular attention to the symbolic significance of the names of some of his major characters. This is done with a view to corroborating Es’Kia Mphahlele’s contention in his The African Image that every creative writer must be committed to something beyond his art, to a statement of value not purely aesthetic, but to a criticism of life geared towards liberating a people (VI). This paper therefore, opines that literature, in its critical realist tradition, contributes immensely to the freedom (liberty) of man.
