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Mission to Kala

Mongo Beti · 1957 CE · Novel · Central African · Contemporary

Jean-Marie Medza comes home to his village at sixteen having failed the baccalauréat, and before he can admit it the elders dispatch him to distant Kala to retrieve a kinsman's runaway wife. Kala takes him for a scholar and feasts him for weeks, while his cousin Zambo's friends teach him the dancing, drinking and courtship his French schooling had left no room for. Beti's comedy of an education that qualifies its holder for nothing in his own country, written from exile in France under a name that hid him from the colonial administration.

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