Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou

 

Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Brazzaville, Congo, but moved at a young age to Pointe-Noire. He was the only child to an illiterate mother and an adoptive father, yet through their belief in the power of education Alain graduated from the Lycée Karl Marx and won a scholarship to study in France.

He has since written many novels and won numerous awards, being known in French literary circles as the Samuel Beckett of Africa. He currently based at the University of California Los Angeles.

Black Moses was Mabanckou's 11th novel, originally published as Petit Piment in 2015 and translated into English two years later by Helen Stevenson. It follows the life of the extravagantly named Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko from an orphanage to a life of crime as a homeless delinquent to the assistant of a madam and finally a madman.

Mabanckou in 2018

Mabanckou has a decidedly Dickensian style, going off on great divergences into the background of any character he finds interesting. And it hard not to draw comparisons between Moses and Oliver Twist, falling in with bad crowds and being taken advantage of.

However, Moses never really developed the kind of moral code of which Dickens was so fond. He neither riles against the life of crime he finds himself in, nor embraces it. In fact Moses never really makes any choice, for good or evil - he simply floats along he life taking a course dictated by others. I suspect this was a deliberate choice on Macanckou's part - the story illustrating how powerless the poor are in the determination of their own lives. The trouble is I just couldn't bring myself to really care about a protagonist that never developed a personality - that never grew a pair and actually made a decision for himself.

The green stands for verdant growth,
the yellow nobility, but no one has ever explained
what the red is for.

Mabanckou has a fluid and very readable style, the world he creates - or recreates - is believable, vivid and interesting. The characters - the side characters - jump off the page. And yet ultimately the book was unsatisfying due Moses' incredible apathy. You could literally take Moses out of the story altogether and it would be very little different.

★★★☆☆