The Cameroonian writer Patrice Nganang looms large, both in life and on the page. A tall, formidable figure who hasn’t shied away from criticizing Cameroon’s decades-long regime (Africa’s longest-ruling dictatorship), his work radiates an unquenchable fascination with his country’s fraught past and present. He writes on a big, sprawling canvas, yet focuses in on the small, telling details. His monumental trilogy—“Mount Pleasant” (2016), “When the Plums Are Ripe” (2019), and “A Trail of Crab Tracks” (2022), all translated from the French by Amy B. Reid—span Cameroon’s past century, from colonial rule through independence and civil war. In 2017, Nganang was detained while home on a research trip and was permenently exiled to the U.S.
His stature, however, has only grown in the years since, as both an academic—he’s Chair of the Africana Studies Department at Stony Brook University—and novelist. His popular social media posts (under the moniker “Caretaker of the Republic”), have also turned him into a booming, international voice of Cameroonian resistance. It is no stretch to liken his intellectual heft to that of Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, who has been a model for generations of African writers, including Nganang.
But Nganang, admittedly, has his own modus operandi, outlined in the opening epitaph to “The Plums Are Ripe”: “The whole word is my country, Cameroon my subject, and Yaoundé my field of definition.” Nowhere is this more evident than in his new memoir, “Scale Boy: An African Childhood” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), in which he explores his personal and literary awakening amidst the fervor of 1970s and 80s Yaoundé, the nation’s capital. “African childhood is a blissful gamble with a matchbox,” Nganang warns—and, sure enough, he finds it no easy feat to navigate the ethnic, regional, and political tensions of modern Cameroon, still plagued by the “divide and conquer” strategies of its colonial powers. (German, French, and British forces all vied for control of the country and its lucrative natural resources.)
How does he see himself when he looks back on those formative years? He is a dreamy, joyful child, he writes, a “drifting eyeball” easily absorbed by the daily dramas—and kitchen smells—of the various tenants who occupy his family’s compound. Even in the telling, he can’t help being overwhelmed as sensations wash over him. “But now I am wiping my tears,” he pauses at one point. “My mouth salivates like a cat’s, activated by my realization that my taste is a museum of childhood.”
As a boy, Nganang is even more moved by the books he discovers in his father’s library. He throws himself into the study of his country’s past, devouring the stories of Yaoundé’s different communities and neighborhoods—especially its beating heart, Ongola, with its central marketplace. “To me, Cameroon’s history was a novel, my first true novel,” Nganang writes. And later, extolling the wonders of Ongola, he rhapsodizes that it “became a fixture in my mind and never left; it is still the main character in all my books, Ongola! Ongola!”
Another important prompt for Nganang’s “oceanic archive” of remembrances is the German-made scale that he lugs around Yaoundé as a “scale boy,” earning loose change weighing passersby. His experiences with the scale immerse him in the mysteries of the polyglot city, and the book’s language reflects this diversity. “Like Cameroon, my hidden memory is multilingual,” he insists. “I carried this memoir of my childhood inside my closed eyes like a distant serenade on my mother’s tongue, a hyena’s whistle: ngangum, u nyake kate u ke yun mbwo shu!”
Here are a few other unforgettable memoirs by major African writers—and one Francophone Caribbean author—to relish alongside Nganang’s “Scale Boy”:
Wole Soyinka, “Aké: The Years of Childhood” (Random House, 1982)
The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, is perhaps the towering figure of post-independence African writing. And at 91, he is still vital: In 2020, he published “Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth,” his first novel in decades; recently, he blasted American anti-immigration policies after his visa was revoked. Of course, he has a long history of speaking out, even from prison. (A passage from his prison diary, “The Man Died,” adorns the entrance to City of Asylum’s “Winged House” on Sampsonia Way.)
Soyinka’s memoir “Aké: The Years of Childhood,” however, strikes a brighter note, as he relives his youthful frolics in the bucolic village of Aké. “What if V.S. Naipaul were a happy man? What if V.S. Pritchett had loved his parents? What if Vladimir Nabokov had grown up in a small town in western Nigeria and decided that politics were not unworthy of him?” the critic John Leonard famously asked. “Wole Soyinka … belongs in their company. It is a company of children who grow up without forgetting anything, children who grow up in a garden of too many cultures.”
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir” (Pantheon, 2010), “In the House of the Interpreter” (Pantheon, 2012), and “Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening” (The New Press, 2016)
Along with Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o completes the great triumvirate of African postcolonial literature. Ngugi, who died last year at 87, has been canonized in his own right: Early novels such as “A Grain of Weat” and “Weep Not, Child” have been reborn as Penguin Classics (with introductions by Abdulrazak Gurnah and Ben Okri); while his critical essays, most notably “Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature,” have been groundbreaking and helped revolutionize postcolonial theory.
But equally invaluable are his set of memoirs, charting his course from rural Kenya in the 1940s to the hotbed of Makerere University in Uganda, with World War II and the Mau Mau uprising serving as riveting backdrops: “Dreams in a Time of War,” “In the House of the Interpreter,” and “Birth of a Dream Weaver.” Ngugi’s literary and political consciousness as a young student remained undimmed throughout a lifetime of prolific output—as a novelist, playwright, essayist, and pioneering global thinker.
Binyavanga Wainaina, “One Day I Will Write About This Place” (Graywolf Press, 2011)
Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, who died in 2019 at 48, was a hurricane of activity in his short life, a tireless promoter of African writers and a catalyst for a wave of DIY African publications. He was a writer, publisher, provocateur, and founding editor of Kwani?, a literary magazine and movement based in Nairobi. His withering, cliché-bashing 2005 essay, “How to Write About Africa,” became one of Granta’s most read pieces ever.
And yet, though he produced an extensive body of work (stories, travel articles, personal essays, and satirical pieces), Wainaina published just one book in his lifetime, the memoir “One Day I Will Write About This Place.” The book, written with his characteristic style and brio, traces his journey from Kenya to South Africa, Uganda and back in an attempt to find his true path and voice. Ngugi himself lavished praise on the memoir’s unique and thrilling language. “Binyavanga Wainaina is a singer and painter in words. He makes you smell, hear, touch, see, above all, feel the drama and vibrations of life,” Ngugi wrote. “The memoir bursts with life and laughter and pathos in every line.”
Patrick Chamoiseau, “School Days” (University of Nebraska Press, 1997; translated by Linda Coverdale) and “Childhood” (University of Nebraska Press, 1999; translated by Carol Volk)
The Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau has done for his country what Nganang has for Cameroon: His 1992 Prix Goncourt–winning novel, “Texaco,” is a masterwork following Martinique’s social and political transformations over the past century. It is also a celebration of the hybridity of the island’s people and languages—Chamoiseau co-founded a literary movemement called “Creolité” that emphasizes the island’s shared heritages and heterogeneity. (“Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Créoles.”) Chamoiseau’s writing, like Nganang’s, bursts with a linguistic freshness and exuberance. It is imbued with the spirit of folktales and oral storytelling, and embodies the combination of influences that have shaped the distinct cultural map of the Antilles.
Chamoiseau’s companion volumes of memoirs chronicle his boyhood adventures in 1960s Martinique—in classrooms, schoolyards, shantytowns and alleyways—and features a mix of wonder and joy, longing and melancholy. Like Nganang, Chamoiseau evokes a vanished time and place with a playful, inventive language all his own, heeding the powerful call of Nabokov’s own memoir: “speak, memory.”
Patrice Nganang will appear in conversation with Anderson Tepper as part of City of Asylum’s world literature series rescheduled for Tuesday, February 17 at 7pm.
