Textualisation of Sexual Harassment on the Cameroonian University Campus: Moone Nda’a’s La révolte de Mbazoua et autres nouvelles

Abstract

ABSTRACT Fictional representations of African university campuses offer a rather dismal image of a world intended to train the intellectual elite of a rapidly developing continent. This is reflected in a statement from the Cameroonian scholar Jean-Marie Wounfa, who asserted: “Writers, for a long time, have put forward a discourse on the university that praises and preserves the mythical character of this institution of which the representation is abundantly watered at the spring of the collective unconscious.” But such a position fails to win unanimous support. Some consider the university to be a depraved institution. While such discourse may find a fertile ground in the novel, it becomes an interesting scriptural paradigm when the analytical medium shifts to the short story, a brief but dense literary genre inspired by reality. Such an image of the Cameroonian university campus can be seen in La révolte de Mbazoua (Mbazoua’s Rebellion) by Moone Nda’a, which describes the campus as a Kafkaesque world haunted by intimidation, rape, threatening behaviour, sectarianism and other ills that students and teachers must suffer. It also highlights the role of the imaginary in the struggle against this form of censorship that shackles the harmonious development of the African university campus.