Houseboy
Toundi Ondoua runs from his father's beatings to the Catholic mission at Dangan, and on the priest's death passes to the French commandant's household as head boy, close enough to the family to see everything and counted as furniture. His notebooks, kept in Ewondo and filled in the evenings, set down what the commandant's body looks like, how the wife arrives from France, and how her afternoons come to be spent with the director of the prison. Oyono published it while Cameroonian nationalism was being put down by force, and it remains the sharpest first-person account of what colonial intimacy looked like from the servants' quarters.
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- 52% · 13 shared
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- 48% · 13 shared