LIT/A/3: POOR CHRIST OF BOMBA By Mongo Beti

Structured through the device of a young teenager’s daily journal, The Poor Christ of Bomba records the tour of a French Catholic missionary, Father Drumont, and his two assistants—Denis, Drumont’s “boy” and the narrator, and Zacharia, the cook—through a dozen tiny villages in the forest of the Tala region. Bomba, itself a small village surrounded by the forest, teems with activity, sustained primarily by the mission’s sixa, a home for the prenuptial training of young women to encourage monogamy among the traditionally polygamous Talas.