Abstract
A Nobel Prize winner in 1947, Gide was a prolific French writer and literary critic. His influence was felt by many French writers, such as Albert Camus, Andre Malraux and Jean-Paul Sartre. For Gide, writing and travel were interrelated. His journeys to Africa and Russia1 served thereby as an immediate source of inspiration in his fiction. Voyage au Congo is based on his travels with his lover Marc Allegret across French Equatorial Africa from July 1925 to May 1926. In 1925, Gide asked the French colonial government for an official ‘free’ mission to Equatorial Africa expressing the wish to undertake some detailed ethnographic study of the populations living in those areas. Soon after the approval of his mission, he was allowed to call on French colonial administrators for accommodation, transportation and native carriers (Putnam 2001, 96). He went successively to the Middle Congo (renamed the Republic of the Congo in 1958), to Oubangui-Chari (the Central African Republic), and then briefly to Chad and Cameroon.2
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