Mongo Beti, un intellectuel inorganique

Authors

Mohamed Aït-Aarab, Université de La Réunion

Abstract

Few African intellectuals left their mark on their century more than Mongo Beti. His work built up a form of progressive thinking which found its raison d’être and its consistency in the fight for subalterns. Today, it is important to understand the ideals which motivated the citizen, the writer, the teacher, committed in the most Sartrean way. But what matters just as much is to question his political and aesthetic reflection which started in 1953. Was Mongo Beti an « out-of-the-system » intellectual ? His forthrightness, his opposition to any political, union or membership organisation, which might want to discipline any form of dissidence, plead for a positive answer. However, his conception and his practice of a protean political action should encourage us to experience a new reading of his work in the light of the political philosophy developed by Antonio Gramsci, not in the name of some shared critical Marxism, but in the will, common to both men, to associate thought and action, and to escape from the « prison of ideologies ».

Recommended Citation

Aït-Aarab, Mohamed (2022) "Mongo Beti, un intellectuel inorganique," Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature: Vol. 99: No. 1, Article 9.
Available at: https://crossworks.holycross.edu/pf/vol99/iss1/9