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

PLOT SUMMARY

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.

These women stay several months at the sixa and provide free labor for various workshops, plantations, and an elementary school. In contrast, the Tala villagers in the forest, who have become familiar with Drumont’s evangelism over the past twenty years, not to mention the German missionaries before him, have remained largely resistant to his faith, despite his practice of soliciting conversions through fear and misery. While nominally accepting Christianity, the Talas have done so only to the extent that the European faith has provided access to what the Talas regard as the secret power of colonialism: money.

Ironically, converted Talas have left their villages for those such as Bomba which are scattered along the new colonial roads; motivated by cash rather than Christ, these Talas staff the mission, serving as counterparts to the forest people, who live by essentially traditional customs, integrally bound to the forest’s natural cycles and resources.

Drumont’s tour results from the Talas’ negligence in paying their church dues. Having been absent for three years, Drumont decides that he has “punished” them long enough by withholding his spiritual guidance. As Denis duly echoes Drumont’s bombastic language, the reader soon realizes that the narrator’s voice consists of sustained comic irony.

In village after village, chapels have decayed to ruins and the forest people listen obediently but uncomprehendingly to Father Drumont’s sermons, which are composed of alien—to the Africans—biblical rhetoric and anecdotes. Polygamy and “pagan” dances continue, even while Drumont rails against them on his one-day visits to village after village. Zacharia, meanwhile, is joined by Catherine, his mistress from the sixa, and continues his illicit affair with her just as he had done in Bomba. Night after night, Drumont sleeps obliviously next door to Zacharia and Catherine.

Drumont’s aloof blindness to his failure to convert the Talas cannot continue. Stern and stubborn, he struggles to maintain his delusion of successful evangelism, but too much to the contrary confronts him. In a parody of baptism, Drumont is nearly drowned while crossing a river. Catherine seduces Denis, who confesses his sin, and his pleasure, to Drumont. Clementine, Zacharia’s wife, arrives to expose his adultery and beats Catherine to demonstrate her belief in monogamy. Catherine’s fiance arrives and soundly beats Zacharia.

The greatest blow comes to Drumont’s confidence as Clementine reveals that Catherine belongs to the sixa. Vidal, the administrator in the region, visits Drumont in the effort to recruit laborers from among the fruits of Drumont’s new evangelical harvest. When Vidal finds that the father superior is failing, he urges the father to stay, threatening to impose a blatant condition of slavery on the Talas if Drumont returns to France as he contemplates doing. Over the course of only two weeks, Drumont’s twenty-year delusions of the spiritual achievements of Christianity in Tala country have utterly collapsed.

For two years Father Drumont has ignored the Talas-the most populous and most resistant to Christian conversion of the six tribes-depriving them of his spiritual nourishment, in hope that his starved “flock” would rush back upon his return. The novel begins at the end of his two-year moratorium, and it is an account of his two-week reflective tour of the Tala tribe. Father Drumont is shocked to discover that converts throughout the villages of Tala have not missed him. It becomes obvious to the reader that Father Drumont does not know his parishioners as he thought, the simple reason being he has never cared about them as people. His relationship with Denis, for example, is impersonally focused only on the chores that the lad performs in his house and church. It is not a holistic, father-son relationship that Denis assumes and seeks. Father Drumont’s paternalism is consistent with the master-slave relationship and typifies the unequal nature of colonizer-colonized relationships. After living with the priest for two years, Denis does not know anything about Father Drumont’s family or his homeland. His paternalistic view is also reflective of his relationship with converts throughout the Bomba Mission, which equally reflects France’s view of the colonies. His only interest is in turning his parishioners away from their native traditions, converting them to Christianity, and collecting all kinds of membership dues for his church coffers.

As Father Drumont, who is also called Jesus Christ, makes his way through the Tala tribe, he finds out that almost all the churches he helped build (using forced labor) have fallen into disrepair. He grows pensively disturbed by the lack of “progress” in this region, and he learns from one of his own catechists, in the village of Timbo, an unsettling truth that has eluded him for twenty years; that is, the Talas have only half-heartedly accepted him and his Catholic religion because they felt, from the outset, that the path to the white man’s secret power (money) is hidden in his church and school. Father Drumont asks his catechist: “Why is it, do you think that so many backslide from the true religion? Why did they come to mass in the first place?” (Beti 29). Accosted by Father Drumont, the catechist tells him what he doesn’t want to hear: “My Father, at that time we were poor. Well, doesn’t the kingdom of Heaven belong to the poor? So there is nothing surprising in many of them running to the true God. But nowadays, as you know yourself, Father, they are making pots of money by selling their cocoa to the Greeks” (Beti 29). Then Zacharia, Father Drumont’s cook adds, “I will tell you just as it is, Father. The first of us who ran to religion, to your religion, came to it as a sort of […] revelation. Yes, that’s it, a revelation; a school where they could learn your secret, the secret of your power, of your aeroplanes and railways […] in a word, the secret of your mystery. Instead of that, you began talking to them of God, of the soul, of eternal life, and so forth. Do you really suppose they didn’t know those things already, long before you came? So of course, they decided that you were hiding something” (Beti 30). At every village during his tour of Tala, Father Drumont’s obsession with Christian conversion is paramount. He wants to know if 1) church followers are paying their church dues, 2) the men have stopped marrying more wives, 3) babies are being born out of wedlock, and 4) Christians are refraining from traditional customs. Someone points out to him that the white settlers and administrators are not good Catholics either, and they don’t see him imposing the same rules of restraint on them. As a result, they now see Father Drumont as one more white man standing in their way, with whom they must work as a matter of necessity.

Pushed by these self-effacing revelations, Father Drumont reflects on his role as a missionary, and the tour of the Tala tribe turns into a self-reflective journey to explore and discover his inner self. It is also clear that he is not happy to be criticized by his converts, whom he has always seen as mindless and incapable of complex thought. Obstinately disillusioned with the reality that these people can actually think and, above all, actualize their thoughts, Father Drumont sees himself as a failure. Acknowledging his feeling of defeat to Vidal, a colonial administrator, Father Drumont says that his defeat has been immanent: “I hadn’t understood that my defeat was already pronounced, like a young man who refuses to admit that the girl of his dreams has scorned him” (154). Consistent with the hero motif and the Victorian ideal to “explore” and “conquer” the mysteries that Africa symbolized, his disillusionment is more with the disruption of his hero quest. He is unhappy that he has not “conquered”; after all, he is not here to discover the hearts and minds of these people. His mission was exogenously decided-to replace the cultures of his converts with Christianity, and French education and civilization. In spite of the unfolding illumination that results from the rebellious response of his parishioners, Father Drumont does not learn that the Talas have been turned away because of his self-centered, colonial vision that does not include them in any realistic way. He simply cannot bring himself to learn from “inferior” beings. Father Drumont would like to set his work apart from what he characterizes as the brutality of colonial administrators, which he condemns, tongue-in-cheek. But, the colonial administrator, Vidal, reminds him that his Bomba mission and his sixa use the same brutal tactics of exploitation that the French Empire is notoriously guilty of.

Father Drumont’s actions betray a conscious or unconscious assumption of his “superiority” over the natives. He sees his work in Cameroon as a failure, only in the sense that his parishioners have failed to utilize his beneficence for their own betterment. He shares this self-assessment with Vidal: “I wish you good luck here, my dear Vidal! I am a failure, a sacred failure. I doubt if anyone has ever fallen deeper into defeat” (Beti 150). His sarcasm comes across as he continues: “These good people worshipped God without our help. What matter if they worshipped after their own fashion-by eating one another, or by dancing in the moonlight, or by wearing bark charms around their necks? Why do we insist on imposing our customs upon them?” (Beti 150-1) By suggesting that his parishioners are barbarians who eat one another, Father Drumont reinforces the French colonial assumption about Africans and their “inferior” culture. His abhorrence of “inferior” indigenous cultures is steered by his stoic adherence to the “superior” French culture he is seeking to implant.

Assumptions about culture, Homi Bhabha explains, problematize culture: “It is only when we understand that all cultural statements and systems are constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation, that we begin to understand why hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or ‘purity’ of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empirical historical instances that demonstrate their hybridity” (208). Infirmed about the fluidity of culture, Father Drumont fails to make adjustments dictated by cultural ‘difference’. An example is his sixa program that will not work in southern Cameroon just as the xylophone dance he disrupts may not work in Paris, but Father Drumont will not see it that way because he sees cultures as hierarchical and static objects that can be imposed or disposed of.

As an anti-colonial novel, The Poor Christ of Bomba assumes agency for revealing the hypocrisy of imperialism as symbolized by the complicity of Father Drumont’s Church. Denis confesses his sexual sin/loss of innocence (105), an act that parodies Father Drumont coming to terms with the fall of his Bomba mission. Denis places all blame of his sexual sin on Catherine, the “Eve” figure-“she made me do it,” he says, even though we have seen him lusting for her. Similarly, Father Drumont blames his parishioners for his fall, even though they never sought his help in the first place. Central to this decolonizing discourse of Father Drumont’s fall is the sixa, the place where girls are sexually exploited by Father Drumont’s hired hands, and he allows the perpetrators to escape without any form of punishment. Instead, he equips his cook with a horsewhip and supervises his beatings of some of the girls. The sixa exposes him as just another beguiling French imperialist and symbolically provides an epistemology for reading and understanding imperialist ideology. Commenting on the progress of decolonizing impulses, Edward Said notes that the colonized “bear their past within them–as scars of humiliating wounds, as instigation for different practices, as potentially revised visions of the past tending toward a new future, as urgently reinterpretable and re-deployable experiences, in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory taken back from the empire” (Said 31). Father Drumont’s Bomba mission is symbolic of the French Empire because it orchestrates the exploitation and wounding of the natives.

For twenty years, Father Drumont has extracted forced labor from his converts, whipped them as slaves, treated them as juveniles, connived with colonial administrators to further exploit them, and “imprisoned” their wives in his sixa, indirectly turning them into sex slaves for his staff. In light of this unequal relationship, the apparent docility of his parishioners wears out and they engage in an intellectual agitation against his continuing, imperialist oppression. By raising intelligent questions and presenting reasoned arguments against these routine acts of enslavement and exploitation, Father Drumont’s parishioners prove not to be the ignoramuses he has mistaken them for twenty years. Having comfortably asserted himself as the paramount “Jesus Christ” of Bomba, he is suddenly outwitted as his parishioners now prove to be intellectually agile, exposing him as the one who should be the recipient of enlightenment and conversion-a poor Christ of Bomba, indeed. As Achebe has observed,

To the colonialisf s mind it was always of the utmost importance to be able to say: “I know my natives”, a claim which implied two things at once: (a) that the native was really quite simple and (b) that understanding him and controlling him went hand in hand-understanding being a pre-condition for control and control constituting adequate proof of understanding” (Achebe, “Colonial Criticism” 58).

Faced with mounting resistance to his self-serving, hypocritical Christian conversion project, Father Drumont tries to paint the French colonial administrator (Vidal) as the evil one. After all, it is the administrator that is about to start a road project in the region that will require forced labor, and Father Drumont-acting as the good priest-compares that kind of forced labor to the “methods of the Congo rubber companies,” an allusion to King Leopold’s reign of terror in Congo (Beti 35). He reminisces about the suffering endured by villagers who were forced to work on another road project in southern Cameroon: “men working all roped together and with soldiers watching them. If one fell, they flogged him where he lay until he staggered up again” (37). Father Drumont’s own cook, Zacharia, raises a critical question that goes to the heart of his complicity: “But, Father you must be very happy about this, no? Isn’t it just what you longed for? They will be treated like beasts and in their misery they’ll run to you, saying: ‘Father, you alone are kind. You are truly our Father.'[…] Why not admit it? Isn’t it true they will return to you now?” (Beti 41). Father Drumont is unable to respond to Zacharia and his silence confirms what the natives already know, that the church is an agent of empire.

The situational irony here is that Father Drumont is quick to see the infirmities of French colonialism, and he fails to realize that he is a colonizer. His complicity is emphasized by the plurality of his mirroring of the colonial administration. First, Father Drumont forcefully converts indigenous people to Christianity, through fear and intimidation, just like the colonial administration is forcing a foreign government on Cameroon tribes and the historic foundation of traditional chieftains is being dismantled. Second, Father Drumont imposes all kinds of dues on his church members and enforces collection of these dues through a feudal system of church catechists, similar to the taxation of natives by the colonial government. Third, Father Drumont and his catechists extract forced labor from the converts, and the most noted ones are the sixa girls who are forced to labor for ten hours a day on Bomba mission projects in the same way the colonial government forces the people to construct farm to market roads to transport cocoa to commercial centers for shipment to Europe. Fourth, both the church and the colonial administration work hand in hand to eradicate indigenous traditions and cultures, such as marriage rituals. Fifth, both train indigenes, whom they use to facilitate their exploitation of fellow Africans and further their respective missions. Sixth, both Father Drumont and Vidal are merciless in carrying out their missions. Vidal uses foul epithets to describe the natives whom he does not see as fully human; Father Drumont disagrees with Vidal about the appropriateness of such epithets but his treatment of Christian converts, however, indicates that he sees them in the same light. For example, Father Drumont’s response is one of rage, not compassion, when he is forced to acknowledge the pattern of sexual exploitation the sixa girls have suffered at the hands of his staff. Although Doctor Arnaud’s report indicates that most of the girls have been infected with syphilis, Father Drumont refuses to authorize treatment that is recommended. Shocked by the response, Doctor Arnaud tells the priest: “Then, Father, you have only to write to me with your decision. But if you will permit me to advise you, you’d better decide quick” (Beti 202). Instead of providing the girls treatment, Father Drumont closes down the sixa for good and sends the girls away. In effect, his institution that was supposed to prepare the girls for monogamous marriages has raped and disposed of them. One girl shares her sense of agony and loss: “I have no family now and no homestead to return to. The only home I have is the mission” (Beti 206), but her wailing is to no avail as Father Drumont closes down the Bomba mission in preparation for his return to France.

His treatment of the sixa simply as a project is symbolic of his missionary philosophy. By asserting himself as one who has an ordained right to convert all indigenous Cameroonians to Christianity, Father Drumont assumes the right to decide the fates of his parishioners until the very end. Césaire reminds us that the dispensation of power between colonizer and colonized is always unequal; there is “no human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production” (6). Father Drumont plays all of these roles and sees his parishioners only as “instruments of production.” He typifies the cronyism of the French colonial government which is driven by a devastatingly alienating ideology that Gerard Pigeon explains this way: “The French, according to their law, were more inclined to adopt a policy of integration that, when put into practice, was more theoretical than real, bearing a strong resemblance to indoctrination. [.] Where the English only alienated socially, the French colonization resulted in both personal and social alienation for the African” (Pigeon 170). As Father Drumont has shown, imperialism has nothing to do with enlightenment; it has everything to do with subjugation and enslavement.

By masquerading himself as “beneficent” and the “bearer of enlightenment,” the imperialist takes focus away from the colonized, whom he has wounded, disfigured, raped, and enslaved. What Mongo Beti has done in The Poor Christ of Bomba is to unveil the masked face of the colonizer, showing him as the one who has inflicted disfiguring wounds of alienation and dislocation on the colonized-in this case, the Cameroonian in particular and the African in general. Beti’s “implied” reader is both the European who needs to see in realistic terms the face of imperialism and judge for himself or herself, and the pre-independence Cameroonian who needs to foster a national culture that decolonizes and revalorizes. For post-independent readers, Beti’s tacit message about a requisite national culture rings true. In the absence of a national culture that can secure and sustain the gains of independence, imperialism, which is both amoebic and insidious, would simply renew its face and find new ways to disfigure and maim.

CHARACTERS/CHARACTERISATION

Father Drumont

Father Drumont, a bearded, middle-aged, archetypal Catholic missionary who founded and for twenty years nurtured the mission at Bomba. A stern but not humorless man, he is obsessed with sex and disillusioned by his failure to persuade Africans to follow church teachings on chastity and monogamy. Frustrated by the persistence of the traditional African social and religious practices that he sees on his tour of the Tala villages, he concludes eventually that he cannot successfully Christianize the Africans. At the end of the tour, he decides to return to France. By then, he is a wiser man but is dejected because he realizes that his work has functioned to soften and prepare the Africans for an exploitative and brutal colonial system.

Drumont’s understanding does not seem to improve his behavior, however. When he finally figures out that something terrible is happening on his watch, he summons over 50 women who live on the compound to tell him what is going on. Predictably, they are afraid to talk – they have already been repeatedly victimized and fear reprisals. So Drumont has them beaten until they give in. But when they finally tell him what has been going on, he sends them away, even if they have nowhere to go. Knowing that many of them are ill, he provides no medical care. They are at the bottom of the food chain, and it seems not to occur to Father Drumont that his whole approach to evangelization has created a truly hellish situation for his most faithful followers.

Denis

Denis, the fourteen-year-old narrator and Drumont’s houseboy. He naïvely and ironically identifies with the Christian and European values of the missionary. Accompanying Drumont on a pastoral tour of the bush, he records, but rarely comprehends, the conversations and activities of the entourage and the villagers. Loving and admiring the priest more than his own father, Denis criticizes his fellow Africans for their failure to adhere to Christian principles and their lack of respect for Drumont. He is a sensitive and sweet adolescent who matures quickly as a result of the tour and his mentor’s realizations about the brutality of the colonial mission.

Zacharia

Zacharia, Drumont’s fun-loving, irreverent African cook. A realist, he uses his position to acquire wealth and sexual conquests. Indifferent to Christianity, he explicitly opposes Drumont’s views and explains the “reality” of colonialism and African traditions to Denis and the missionary. He is a wily and independent man, unwilling to modify his behavior to please either his wife or the priest. After his wife exposes his affair with Catherine and the latter’s fiancé soundly thrashes him, he flogs his wife and moves his mistress into his home. Rather than answer charges of mistreatment brought to Drumont’s attention by his wife, he packs his bags and leaves the Bomba mission.

Vidal

Vidal, the young, enthusiastic French colonial administrator of the region who uses forced African labor, floggings, and other brutal methods to build roads. Without training and a proper education, he feels that his best opportunities are in the colonies. Fond of Drumont for his essential “Frenchness,” he tries to persuade the priest to remain at Bomba, believing that the French colonial mission is correct. Parroting colonial paternalistic arguments, he fails to persuade Drumont that Africans, if left to their own devices, would succumb to Bolshevism.

Catherine

Catherine, a beautiful and playful villager who is a sexually desirable member of the sixa, a work camp at Bomba for the prenuptial training of young women to encourage monogamy among the traditionally polygamous Tala people. As Zacharia’s mistress, she secretly accompanies the pastoral tour, spending nights with him, often in the same house as the unsuspecting Drumont. One night, she seduces Denis, who quickly falls in love with her. Before the tour’s end, she is assaulted by Zacharia’s wife, the opening event in Drumont’s uncovering of the true nature of the sixa, which functions as a brothel.

Clementine

Clementine, a practicing Catholic and the jealous young wife of Zacharia. In spite of having just given birth to their child, she is suspicious of her husband’s activities with the sixa. When she discovers that one of the girls, Catherine, disappeared at the same time as Drumont’s entourage departed, she follows them to catch her husband with his mistress. An angry and self-righteous Christian, she expects Father Drumont to solve her marital problem.

Raphael

Raphael, a catechist and the mission assistant in charge of the sixa. He arranges liaisons between sixa women and local men. A cowardly bully who coerces the women into sexual relations by assigning brutal work to those.

Only the catechist Raphaël comes across as totally corrupt, and he is African – though, to be sure, an African who works for white missionaries. Evil lies not so much in the individuals as in the way power is allocated and used in colonial Cameroon. And in the end, the women suffer more than anyone else.

THEMES

1. Colonialism
2. Disillusionment
3. Culture versus Catholicism/religion
4. Immorality /Guilt

Although Beti’s novel debunks the relevance of Christianity to traditional Africa with wit and comedy, the larger and more serious charge against Christianity is that it paves the road of colonialism with a spiritual chaos that softens the resistance to colonial exploitation. In the metaphor of Christianity as a venereal disease that spreads quietly through the countryside, the Talas lose their capacity for not only resistance but also self-determination.

Implicitly, Beti argues the negritude movement’s position that sensuality is superior to rationality, that emotion determines human relationships much more powerfully than does reason. Left without a coherent set of emotional principles for guidance, the Talas are deprived of the basis of their identity with a larger community. Drumont preaches constantly against sexuality not simply because he represents a theology that espouses sexual repression but also because to forbid sex among traditional Tala practices is to undermine a crucial element of Tala morality.

Socially, the destruction of polygamy, the superficial imposition of alien ritual, and the absence of young men and women from the traditional family (a result of Christian education and the introduction of technology into village life) all combine to divide the Talas between those who pursue a European commercial life-style along the roads and those who cling to a pastoral, agrarian life-style in the forest. Consequently, a nascent class system built on sexual practices, values, and race begins to characterize a previously complex kinship system of social organization.

Without either African traditions or viable Christian values to sustain a united community, the Talas are left without the power of wealth, leadership, or numbers to resist the intrusion of Vidal and his soldiers into their midst. To the colonial administrator, the modernized Africans mean only an underemployed service sector of society that can be counted on to perpetuate the paternalistic, benevolent image of the colonial state, precisely because they are dependent on French revenue for their material survival.

Even if they emigrate to large towns, as Denis plans to do, and work for other Europeans, such as the Greek merchants, they will still be second-class citizens in their own country. The forest Talas, without European technology and weaponry, cannot resist being herded into road gangs that will only open more of the forest to colonial expansion, thereby providing even greater wealth for the colonizers. Vidal, then, under the guise of the biblical curse on Ham, is more than happy to trot out the racist argument that God ordained white men to rule black Africans. When Vidal encourages Drumont to stay, he is fully aware that the mission’s presence makes his conquest that much easier.

Not even the emerging class structure is lost upon Vidal. When Drumont rejects Vidal’s argument based on the sons of Ham, Vidal turns to the Communist threat as a pretense for colonial rule: “According to our informers, there are already certain subversive groups in the towns who follow

NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES/STYLE

Characterisation;
the sixa girls, The priests( M. Vidal, Fr. Drumont), Catechists, Zacharia, Catherine,
Denis
2. The naïve narrator ( Denis)
3. The setting , various parishes visited throught the journey.
4. Use of contrast, character contrast, setting, Africans vs Whites
5. Symbolism

CLICK TO READ STYLE USED