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Mongo BetiPerpetua and the habit of unhappiness (1978)
Beti’s integrity as an unflagging opponent of the subjugation of decent people by African dictators and their European predecessors or backers (in Cameroon especially, but also elsewhere on the continent) is widely recognised. What has earned him his reputation in the field of literary art, however, are such qualities as the elegance and subtlety of his writing, its deeply penetrating insights into the intertwinements of psychological, social and political conditions, and the vividness of its characterisation and scene-setting. Perpetua is an excellent “representative” of Beti’s considerable oeuvre and has lost none of its bite as a commentary on African failures, problems and possibilities. As Perpetua opens we share the gaze — wondering yet sharply observant — of the novel’s chief “centre of consciousness”, Essola. He has been released only recently from six years of harsh imprisonment and torture for his political activities: organising and activating resistance to the dictatorial yet contemptible head of state, Baba Tura. We soon learn that Essola had forsworn his former political commitments and undertaken to do political work for the corrupt regime in order to be released from the life imprisonment to which he had been sentenced, and to return to employment (as a teacher). Now, for the first time, he is revisiting the village in which he was born, where his mother and brother still live. With him in the bus are “poor peasants ... broken down by labour and by the barrenness of their lives”, from whose “soiled cotton clothes” come “stale smells, acrid and yet, at the same time, almost delicious” (1), and this description signposts the unillusioned social vision of Essola, and of this novel in its entirety. Gradually the reader discovers that Essola is on a type of detective’s quest to lay bare the complex causes of an unpunished crime — the death in childbirth of his favourite younger sister, Perpetua (barely in her twenties at the time), during the time of his own imprisonment. Essola begins by acting on his strongest hunch: that it was their mother who, as soon as he himself was out of the way, had transgressed Essola’s injunction that Perpetua, at least, should never be married off in exchange for a “bride-price”. Maria (the mother) simply screams denials in response to Essola’s accusations, leaving him all the more determined to get to the bottom of the case. It needs to be emphasised that Beti (or his narrator) does not hold up Essola as an unblemished hero. Not only is he referred to in a detached and decidedly acerbic manner as a political “sell-out” (34), but Essola himself acknowledges (concerning Perpetua) that he “never really saw her” (34, emphasis added). His surviving sister directly accuses him of having “abandoned” his siblings by being totally absorbed in political resistance work (60). At times the reader is even made to wonder whether Essola’s “family problem” is not in turn being used to help him evade his political responsibilities (56), or might not be mere sentimental indulgence. Indeed, besides the numerous references to the assassinated national leader Ruben-(with whom Essola had worked ten years earlier) as a figure worthy of reverence, the novel gradually reveals the true heroism, dignity and political insight of Perpetua herself. Even though only in her late teens, when (as soon as her protector Essola was safely out of the way) her monstrous mother literally dragged her out of convent school into an arranged marriage, it did not take Perpetua, the village girl, long to analyse urban decay among the supposedly superior city-dwellers of her society: their “slovenliness”, “drunkenness” and (worst) “swaggering subservience” (87) — like her (petty official) husband’s. Predictably, however, it was her blatant intellectual and moral superiority (97) that made her husband hate and abuse her. He eventually even prostituted her to a superior in order to get a better job! It is Perpetua who articulates the distinction between two kinds of Cameroonians: her husband’s kind, cynical and full of selfish, “vile realism” (152), and those (like Ruben and her brother and herself) who think it better to be a person “who cares” (128), despite the cost. One begins to see that Beti wants us to recognise in the dynamic of the (corrupt) family a miniaturised image of the state and society at large. Essola and Perpetua’s mother Maria, in having “sold” her daughter to an unsuitable and cruel husband, acted like the corrupt rulers who, for huge personal bribes from the Western powers, betray their people and compromise their welfare — reducing them to “foreigners” in [their] own country” (50). Despite a few trappings of democracy they “rig the elections like a trap” (53) — much like Perpetua’s “acceptance” of the vicious husband chosen for her by her mother. The bad family, bad state parallel is pointed out early on to Essola by one of Perpetua’s friends in the city: “[T]he Government with their swarms of police”, he tells Essola, are “really expert … when it comes to killing nationalists”, but “when it comes to ... protecting a young mother, ... they couldn’t care less” (48). Perpetua’s death, he believes, “is a direct result of the assassination of ... Ruben” (48). The cynical exploitation of the nation’s daughters by greedy mothers like Maria is echoed in the sexual greed and abuse of the dictator, Papa Baba (the parody of a nation’s father) who “would have half a dozen of [very young girls] served up each evening, like oysters on a plate” (108), in the narrator’s aptly gross image. Similarly, Perpetua’s husband Edward, who rises rapidly in the police force through forcing his wife to take a senior officer as a lover, is “precisely the Zombotown replica of Baba Tura” (179), the nation’s dictatorial ruler, abusing her, yet refusing to allow her to join the man who really loves her. Uncovering as he does the concentric circles of blameworthiness for the death of his sister, Essola keeps coming back to the actual, corrupt family as the primary cause of social as well as political disease; feeding and pampering its worst at the expense of its worthiest members. In a central quotation near the end of the novel Essola tells his mother: “You killed Ruben or anyway you accepted the crime so that your favourite sons, whom you spoil until they become totally irresponsible, can go on making money with their sisters’ ransom, in a way feeding on the blood of those wretched women like cannibals. You wanted Ruben’s death so that justice could be banished and her sword would not cut through the dense routine of your savage customs.” (212) Maria, we are told, had “hardly bothered to hide her feeling of triumph” (66) when Essola was “conveniently” imprisoned, leaving Perpetua at her mercy. She emotionally blackmailed her innocent and idealistic daughter by denouncing her (“You’re no woman!” — 70) when she was reluctant to accept a husband — just before completing her schooling, thwarting her dreams of studying medicine. As a sympathetic neighbour tells the despairing Perpetua on the eve of her marriage: “Your mother has trapped you. We are always trapped, and it is our own family that traps us” (76). Essola concludes that “under the pretext of marrying Perpetua” his mother had “hand[ed] over a child bound hand and foot to her torturer” (62). His older sister confirms this: “Mother has always smashed anyone who stood up to her” (60). The novel has a shocking dénouement, when Essola entices Martin — the brother for whom Maria had wanted Perpetua’s huge bride-price (who had himself refused to lend Perpetua any assistance when she had begged him for it shortly before her death) — to drink himself into a fatal stupor, leaving him to his death. In doing so, he is punishing both his mother and Martin, and aligning himself with the one person who did devotedly love Perpetua. This is the young man (Zeyang) who had sworn to Essola, when the latter had seemed to flag in his quest, that “We will avenge Ruben, we will avenge Perpetua” (56). Zeyang, too, has since been killed by the representatives of the dictator. For in a society like this, as Essola realises at the end of the novel, “they don’t love their sons any more than their daughters” (218). |
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This novel, with its intriguing title, first appeared in 1974 (in French) as Perpétue et l’habitude du malheur. The Cameroonian author, Mongo Beti, is one of the foremost writers of the African Europhone tradition, and has been publishing novels and non-fictional analyses of the Cameroonian situation since 1953; his most recent novel appeared in 1994.