ABSTRACT
The first French novel written about Africa by a black author was published in 1921 by René Maran (1887–1960), who hailed from Martinique. A “véritable roman nègre” (as the subtitle puts it), Batouala, was immediately praised by Ernest Hemingway in the Toronto Star Weekly of March 25, 1922: “You smell the smells of the village, you eat its food, you see the white man as the black man sees him, and after you have lived in this village you die there. That is all there is to the story, but when you have read it, you have been Batouala, and that means that it is a great novel.” The most striking aspect of the novel is indeed Maran’s precise, droll, or sensual description of the daily life of Batouala, the chief of a tribe of Bandas in the region of Ubangui-Shari (today, the Central African Republic). Maran succeeds in ushering us into Batouala’s world because he conjures up all the specific details of his daily routines, notably scratching:
