Deux series de manuels scolaires ont principalement programme la repulsion de soi et l'attraction par l'autre propres aux elites d'Afrique noire: les collections des Freres missionnaires Macaire et Grill comme Mamadou et Bineta d'Andre Davesne seul ou avec J. Gouin. Un siecle apres, pour rendre intelligible le type d'homme produit par l'Ecole etrangere en colonie, nous avons remonte l'itineraire parcouru a travers leurs lectures par des generations d'ecoliers pour savoir quelles sources avaient alimente leur imaginaire... Desaccorde aux codes de son univers natal, incapable de concretiser...

Ousmane Sembene started writing by 1952. The Black Docker, his first novel inspired by the Marseille experience was published in 1956 by Debresse. In 1957, Amiot Dumont published O Pays, mon beau Peuple, a caustic critic of the colonial plight. This second inaugural piece, clearly autobiographical and sentimental is followed up by a vast knowledge of the strike of the Dakar-Niger railway workers: God's Bits of Wood published in 1960 by Livre Contemporain. In 1961, Presence Africaine pulished his collection of short stories, Voltaique, in 1964 the first volume of l'Harmattan which is a replay...

This landmark volume brings together a very rich harvest of forty critical essays on Cameroon literature by Cameroon literary scholars. The book is the result of the Second Conference on Cameroon Literature which took place at the University of Buea in 1994. The Buea conference was motivated by a determination to look at Cameroon literature straight into its face and criticize it using literary criteria of the strictest kind. Gone were the times when the criticism was complacent because it was believed that a nascent literature could easily be stifled by application of rather strict cannons...