Remenber Njoya, ou la force légitimante des archives dans le roman Mont Plaisant (2011) de Patrice Nganang


In his novel Mont Plaisant (2011), Patrice Nganang takes a theme he outlined in the virulent pamphlet of 2009 La République de l’imagination, while speaking of a cultural hero who is, first, a mean to access to a section of its own History. In the background, the court of the sultanate established by Njoya in Cameroon between 1885 and 1933 and the first anti-colonial struggles conducted, among others, by the opponent Joseph Ngono. The latter's daughter, Sara, seventy years later, tells a young Cameroonian who is studying in the United States her extraordinary history, and therefore the unrecognized history of the Bamum kingdom and of a cultural hero entering for the first time on the literary scene. Through the weaving of fascinating narratives and documents, this novel offers a reflection on the strength of archives in legitimizing the reconstruction not only of the colonial past, but also of a cultural and historical identity of the anonymous African citizen who is, in fact, the real hero of this story.