The poor christ of bomba

Mongo Beti's greatest work, The Poor Christ of Bomba (1956), examines the impact of French colonialism on the Cameroonian environment and psychology. The narrative follows Father Superior Drumont, a Catholic priest deployed to the rainforest region of Cameroon in the 1930s. His stated mission is to convert the natives of a six-tribe territory to Catholicism. Father Drumont's apparent piety belies his true character. He is driven by the French colonial philosophy of assimilation and is determined to force his Christian recruits to abandon their African traditions and cultural practices in exchange for Christianity. The sixa is Father Drumont's signature accomplishment during his twenty-year stint at the Bomba Mission. In practice, however, the sixa is a complete mockery of Catholicism and a subversion of African traditional marriages.

Father Drumont's increasingly rebellious converts become fully aware of his involvement with French colonial rulers such as Vidal. A disillusioned Father Drumont returns to France after failing to regain a strong foothold in a recalcitrant parish. The story shows the emergence of a burgeoning "national" consciousness, analogous to the Harlem Renaissance that occurred in the United States in the early 1900s. Just as slave narratives showed the brutality of slavery in order to promote abolition, this essay investigates The Poor Christ of Bomba, a fictional slave narrative that exposes French imperialism by developing a vocabulary of resistance that is bound to serve as a path to decolonization.