Widely acclaimed when first published in French in 1994, Mongo Beti's tenth novel, L'histoire du fou, continues the author's humorous yet fierce criticism of the colonial system in Africa and its legacy of governmental corruption.

Translated here as The Story of the Madman, the novel gives the English-speaking world Beti's comic satire of the fictional Chief Zoaeteleu and his favorite sons Zoaetoa and Narcisse. In a modern fable that Beti uses to illustrate the problems of a people's disintegrating values in a postcolonial state, Chief Zoaeteleu, a puppet under two dictatorial...