The Oppressive Boot
is not Black or White
Ramonu Sanusi
Burkina Faso, a francophone West African country, is perhaps better known in film production than literary creation. Every year, FESPACO (Festival Panafricain du Cinéma à Ouagadougou), Africa’s largest and most prestigious film event, takes place in Ouagadougou, the country’s capital. Filmmakers from around the world as well as the global movie punditry attend the event. Little, however, is ever heard of literary works produced in that country. This literary “silence” is not, however, synonymous with absence. Literature from Burkina Faso has simply not enjoyed the canonical status that texts produced say in Cameroon, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Congo, to mention a few, have enjoyed for decades. Yet, Burkina Faso has a number of good writers such as Bernadette Sanou Dao, Simporé Simone Campaore, Sandra Pierre Kanzie, Sarah Bouyain, Zarra Guiro, Sophie Heidi Kam, Gaél Koné, Honorine Mare, Adiza Sanoussi, Angèle Bassolé-Ouédraogo, Mathias Kyelem, and, lastly, 
Patrick Ilboudo, whose remarkable novel, Les Vertiges du trône, deserves a space in the critical output on Francophone Africa’s “dictatorship novels” otherwise referred to as “the power durée novels” by Pius Adesanmi, borrowing from Achille Mbembe, in another context .
Francophone African writing has, in the main, been a combative oeuvre. Despite thematic and aesthetic mutations that have characterized the evolution of this body of work, especially in the so-called postcolonial dispensation, the idea of the writer as écrivain engagé remains prevalent. Patrick Ilboudo’s Les Vertiges du trône brings to mind the postcolonial banality of power that has been the most confounding albatross of Francophone African countries since independence. Ilboudo, like Mongo Beti, Ibrahima Ly or Sembene Ousmane, examines the political problems plaguing the African scene. His novel tells the story of Benoît Wedraogo, the President of the Republic of Bogya, a fictional setting whose capital Titao is the center of activities. The very first lines of the work are instructive: a presumed madman (Gom Nada) errs in the forbidden place (the Presidential palace); he is quickly brutalized and dehumanized by the men in uniform. This character becomes omnipresent in the novel: is he a storyteller, a poet, a philosopher, a prophet, a spokesperson of the oppressed? The figure of the madman is, of course, not a rarity in African fiction. From Chinua Achebe’s short story, “The Madman” to Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’aventure ambigue, African fiction has on occasion deployed the trope of madness as a paradoxical window into the unfolding of the tragedy at the center of the narrative and Les vertiges du trone is no exception.
As a hilarious character laughing at everything surrounding him, people presume that Gom Nada is mad. As the novel progresses, Benoît Wedraogo is portrayed as a typical African tyrant: the commonplace type we find in such famous Francophone novels as Sony Labou Tansi’s La vie et demie, Henri Lopes’s Le pleurer-rire, Ahmadou Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des betes sauvages, and Alioum Fantoure’s Le cercle des tropiques. First, the unavoidable megalomania: an announcement is made on state television about his wife giving birth to a male child (heir apparent?). This results in a decreed national celebration. Second, his cohorts burn down Le Républicain, the people’s newspaper. Third, the president gives orders to his uniformed men to crack down on the opposition. All these aberrations are common in countries ruled with iron fist and Benoît Wedraogo, as a leader, is no exception. The president is surrounded by sycophants: (Ting Bougoum, a funny character who views the President as his God; he is ready to do anything for him), army chiefs, and his ministers – all live in opulence: a sort of artificial paradise while the people they govern are nothing but the “wretched of the earth.” Pushed to the wall by the oppressive regime, the people decide to take their destiny in their own hands and fight back. The first protest comes from the students. Led by Ahmadou Touré, they defy the authorities and refuse to negotiate with the government. They thus become prey of this system, which does not tolerate any opposition. Like a wild fire, a group labeled by the regime as Marxists or communists, joined by the populace, engages itself in a fierce fight to destabilize Benoît Wedraogo’s regime. The once-powerful and feared leader becomes a laughing stock as he is deserted by his military and police; he eventually falls from power. The author’s genius lies in his storytelling skill and the way he creates characters that represent beautifully the role he assigns to each of them. Like some of his compatriots, Ilboudo’s literary contribution to the African literary space is one further step in bringing Burkina Faso out her literary invisibility.
Les Vertiges du trône is a worthy child of the protest tradition in Francophone African fiction, going back to French African precursors like Mongo Beti in ThePoor Christ ofBomba. On another day, in another world Rene Maran’s prize-winning and irreverent novel, Batouala (1921) foreshadowed the flowering of postcolonial French African protest novel. Although Maran was French Guyanese, his literary achievement in the ambience of an anti-colonial and resurgent black counter-modernity within black internationalism foreshadowed a activism that is now deployed in the contest of a postcolonial state as oppressive as the colonial regime was. Francophone African postcolonial novels like Ilboudo’s seem to be saying, with Soyinka, that the oppressive boot is the same irrespective of “the colour of the foot that wears it.”