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Le Temps de Tamango
Au XXIe siècle, des intellectuels africains tentent une reconstitution des révoltes estudiantines et ouvrières des années 1970 dans leur pays. A travers ce roman de politique-fiction, Boubacar Boris Diop fait un bilan des années Senghor ; celles de deux décennies de fausse indépendance du Sénégal. La multiplicité des temps et des points de vue narratifs nous offre la vision à facettes d'une société en décomposition. Une critique habile d'une pernicieuse domination, culturelle et linguistique, à la façon des romanciers sud-américains...
- GenresSenegal
192 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published September 18, 2002
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June 5, 2022
After having earlier this year read one of Boubacar Boris Diop's more recent (2006) novels, Kaveena, I went back a quarter of a century to his first novel, Le temps de Tamango. This is a complex, many-layered postmodernist novel, influenced by Garcia Marquez, and one of the first really experimental novels of that type by an African author. It is not an easy book to understand. It takes place in an unidentified (within the novel) African country; clearly it is meant to be Sénégal under Léopold Sédar Senghor, but while it is definitely that I think Diop is also intending it to be much more broadly applicable, about neocolonialism in all the formerly French colonies. It opens with a scene where the president is addressing his cabinet, and my first reaction was, "Oh no, not another dictator novel!" I'm getting tired of starting every review with "A dictator of an unnamed country. . ." but it wasn't that sort of book after all; it is about a group of revolutionaries and in particular one character, N'Dongo Thiam.
The premise of the book as far as I can follow it is that an unnamed Narrator (although we might suspect who he is near the end) some time in the 1980s, that is not much later than when the (real) novel was written, had begun to research and write a historical novel about N'Dongo and his activities in the two decades of neocolonial rule since Independence from France, but never finished it. Sometime in the 1990s (that is a decade after the date that Diop's novel was written) there is a "socialist" revolution which is obviously very Stalinist, the documents of the preceding time have been suppressed and an ideological and largely mythical official history has made the revolutionaries of the 1970s into precursors of "our glorious communist party". At the same time, another very different history has been written by reactionary supporters of the ousted neocolonialist regime in exile. Both histories are of course totally unreliable, and Diop's caricature of their language is quite humorous. At some point before his death about 2060, the Narrator has produced notes related to the book, whether for completing it or to explain it. In 2063, in what is now a free socialist country (at least to the extent that history can be written without external constraint) the unfinished novel (which may be called Le temps de Tamango) and the "historical" notes for writing it have been rediscovered and a group of historians is publishing it as a rare document from the past, with notes which try to use it to reconstruct what actually happened in the 1970s. That is supposedly the present book. At least, this is what I think is going on, but except for the two endpoints, the events in the late 60s and 70s and the final book in 2063, the timeline is unclear and various secondary articles online seem to assume different dates, some of which might perhaps be derived from the author's explanations.
If we leave aside the notes, the fragments of the "novel" itself are fairly understandable. There is a strike of bank employees which becomes a general strike by the Central Union Federation, accompanied by large-scale demonstrations, which are crushed by the government. There is a French sergeant named Navarro who is sent to the country as an advisor and who claims to be a general, whose actual role is unclear and disputed by the "historians". A group of possibly anarchist militants called by the acronym M.A.R.S. and led by Kaba Dialo and N'Dongo tries to forge ties with part of the union leadership but the meeting is raided by the police. N'Dongo escapes but Kaba is arrested and killed in prison. N'Dongo under the party-name Tamango (supposedly the name of an escaped slave who led a rebellion in the eighteenth century) gets a job as a domestic servant in the home of General Navarro with the assignment of executing him for the murder of Kaba. General Navarro is ultimately killed by someone else, who may be the lover of his wife (but the notes call this into question). N'Dongo appears to become insane, perhaps because of torture by the General although this is not shown in the "novel" but only suggested in the notes.
From there, it gets complicated. The "novel" leaves much unexplained, and ends in a very strange way. It is obviously fiction, and we have no idea how much of it is "true" and how much made up. The Narrator presents himself as a friend of N'Dongo but at times seems to know no more about him than we do. Near the end, the N'Dongo of the novel comments negatively on the Narrator and his biography of him (the book he is a character in), saying that the the title Le temps de Tamango is meaningless and the Narrator is no Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The "notes" of the Narrator also seem to become very strange, when he begins talking about Tamango as a historical figure, with obvious anachronisms. (The only references to Tamango I could locate on the internet are to the nineteenth-century novel by Prosper Merimée (which I now need to add to my unending TBR list) and the 1958 film based on it (not allowed by the censorship to be shown in the French colonies or the United States) which differ somewhat from the version in the "notes".) Perhaps the story of Tamango, since it provides the title of the novel, also serves as a mythological or allegorical summary of the entire novel; the slaves have revolted and taken control of the ship (of state) but are drifting, not knowing how to reach their goal of actual independence. . .
Through all of this, Diop manages to give a psychological account of the after-effects of colonialism on various layers of the population. In focusing on trying to sort out the events, I have perhaps left out what is of more importance, the many allusions and discussions of politics and literature. I generally thought it was a good novel, although I think he made the same points more clearly and effectively in Kaveena.
At one point in the "novel", one of the characters proposes making a film of a play by N'Dongo called Thiaroye. An actual play of that name was written by Diop himself, and is published here along with the novel. (In other words, the play is related to the novel in the same way that Peter Pan is related to The Little White Bird.) It was also proposed to make the real play into a film, but the project fell through; shortly afterward, Sembène Ousmane, the best-known Sénégalese author from the generation before Diop, did in fact make a film based on the massacre.
Unlike the events of the novel, the massacre at Thiaroye is a historical fact. The French recruited Black soldiers to fight in World War II; many of them were taken prisoner when France fell to Hitler. They were known as the "Tirailleurs Sénégaleses" ("Sénégalese Sharpshooters") although they actually came from all the French colonies in Africa. After the war, they were sent back to Africa, many to a camp called Thiaroye in Sénégal, to be demobilized. They refused to demobilize until the French gave them their back pay and pensions; the regular French army then machine-gunned them. According to the French accounts, 35 (or 70) were killed; according to the Sénégalese, over 300. Diop's play imagines the conversations of the fighters and exposes the irony of their situation.
The premise of the book as far as I can follow it is that an unnamed Narrator (although we might suspect who he is near the end) some time in the 1980s, that is not much later than when the (real) novel was written, had begun to research and write a historical novel about N'Dongo and his activities in the two decades of neocolonial rule since Independence from France, but never finished it. Sometime in the 1990s (that is a decade after the date that Diop's novel was written) there is a "socialist" revolution which is obviously very Stalinist, the documents of the preceding time have been suppressed and an ideological and largely mythical official history has made the revolutionaries of the 1970s into precursors of "our glorious communist party". At the same time, another very different history has been written by reactionary supporters of the ousted neocolonialist regime in exile. Both histories are of course totally unreliable, and Diop's caricature of their language is quite humorous. At some point before his death about 2060, the Narrator has produced notes related to the book, whether for completing it or to explain it. In 2063, in what is now a free socialist country (at least to the extent that history can be written without external constraint) the unfinished novel (which may be called Le temps de Tamango) and the "historical" notes for writing it have been rediscovered and a group of historians is publishing it as a rare document from the past, with notes which try to use it to reconstruct what actually happened in the 1970s. That is supposedly the present book. At least, this is what I think is going on, but except for the two endpoints, the events in the late 60s and 70s and the final book in 2063, the timeline is unclear and various secondary articles online seem to assume different dates, some of which might perhaps be derived from the author's explanations.
If we leave aside the notes, the fragments of the "novel" itself are fairly understandable. There is a strike of bank employees which becomes a general strike by the Central Union Federation, accompanied by large-scale demonstrations, which are crushed by the government. There is a French sergeant named Navarro who is sent to the country as an advisor and who claims to be a general, whose actual role is unclear and disputed by the "historians". A group of possibly anarchist militants called by the acronym M.A.R.S. and led by Kaba Dialo and N'Dongo tries to forge ties with part of the union leadership but the meeting is raided by the police. N'Dongo escapes but Kaba is arrested and killed in prison. N'Dongo under the party-name Tamango (supposedly the name of an escaped slave who led a rebellion in the eighteenth century) gets a job as a domestic servant in the home of General Navarro with the assignment of executing him for the murder of Kaba. General Navarro is ultimately killed by someone else, who may be the lover of his wife (but the notes call this into question). N'Dongo appears to become insane, perhaps because of torture by the General although this is not shown in the "novel" but only suggested in the notes.
From there, it gets complicated. The "novel" leaves much unexplained, and ends in a very strange way. It is obviously fiction, and we have no idea how much of it is "true" and how much made up. The Narrator presents himself as a friend of N'Dongo but at times seems to know no more about him than we do. Near the end, the N'Dongo of the novel comments negatively on the Narrator and his biography of him (the book he is a character in), saying that the the title Le temps de Tamango is meaningless and the Narrator is no Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The "notes" of the Narrator also seem to become very strange, when he begins talking about Tamango as a historical figure, with obvious anachronisms. (The only references to Tamango I could locate on the internet are to the nineteenth-century novel by Prosper Merimée (which I now need to add to my unending TBR list) and the 1958 film based on it (not allowed by the censorship to be shown in the French colonies or the United States) which differ somewhat from the version in the "notes".) Perhaps the story of Tamango, since it provides the title of the novel, also serves as a mythological or allegorical summary of the entire novel; the slaves have revolted and taken control of the ship (of state) but are drifting, not knowing how to reach their goal of actual independence. . .
Through all of this, Diop manages to give a psychological account of the after-effects of colonialism on various layers of the population. In focusing on trying to sort out the events, I have perhaps left out what is of more importance, the many allusions and discussions of politics and literature. I generally thought it was a good novel, although I think he made the same points more clearly and effectively in Kaveena.
At one point in the "novel", one of the characters proposes making a film of a play by N'Dongo called Thiaroye. An actual play of that name was written by Diop himself, and is published here along with the novel. (In other words, the play is related to the novel in the same way that Peter Pan is related to The Little White Bird.) It was also proposed to make the real play into a film, but the project fell through; shortly afterward, Sembène Ousmane, the best-known Sénégalese author from the generation before Diop, did in fact make a film based on the massacre.
Unlike the events of the novel, the massacre at Thiaroye is a historical fact. The French recruited Black soldiers to fight in World War II; many of them were taken prisoner when France fell to Hitler. They were known as the "Tirailleurs Sénégaleses" ("Sénégalese Sharpshooters") although they actually came from all the French colonies in Africa. After the war, they were sent back to Africa, many to a camp called Thiaroye in Sénégal, to be demobilized. They refused to demobilize until the French gave them their back pay and pensions; the regular French army then machine-gunned them. According to the French accounts, 35 (or 70) were killed; according to the Sénégalese, over 300. Diop's play imagines the conversations of the fighters and exposes the irony of their situation.
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