Makombo Bambote and the Search for a New Discourse

Abstract

In her remarks on Makombo Bambote's novel in the Dictionnaire des oeuvres litteraires negro-africaines de languefrancaise, des origines a 1978 (1983), and going back to opinions already expressed in her African Literature in French (1976), Dorothy Blair points out that “ Princesse Mandapu reveals a disquieting, hermetic, and at times oneiric action, which advances by fits and starts, on the strength of a jerky, elliptical, half-familiar and half-poetic style. It's up to the reader to fill in the gaps, to find out transitions and to interpret silences” (1983: 468). This essay proposes a possible way of “filling in the gaps” and “interpreting silences” after having made what I, as a Centrafrican reader and also a student of African literatures, have to assume are correct guesses about transitions in Bambote's novel.