ABSTRACT
Drinking scenes in Cruel City provide a gauge of the protagonist’s relationship to tradition, to the present, and to an imagined future beyond the boundaries of the narrative where the relationship with the colonizer will somehow be resolved. Between presentations of precolonial palm-wine, beer, whiskey and champagne, alcohol consumption has been ubiquitous in African literature from its earliest decades. In the Anglophone African tradition Amos Tutuola’s inaugural 1952 novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard is, as the title suggests, almost exclusively about imbibing. This chapter discusses the recurrence in the Francophone African novel by examining two exemplary cases set half a century apart: Cruel City by Cameroonian author Eza, and Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83. Despite the prevalence of drink in Francophone African fiction, and despite its mediating function in the (post)colonial worlds that fiction depicts, literary critics have overlooked this key device in the French-language African novel.
