Censorship of the Creator and His Creation: a Postcolonial Reading of Mongo Beti’s Perpetua

Abstract

The liberty to express one’s self either in speech or in writing, since antiquity, has always been curbed by repressive governments. Even leaders of the nations who boast of freedom of expression for their citizens today were once bastions of gruelling repression against anyone who dared criticize any of their actions. African nations have not been spared from this very negative phenomenon most especially when one considers the aftermath of the quest for and gain of independence that manifested in the early nineteen sixties. In this paper we delved into a postcolonial analysis from two perspectives: censorship of the creator and his creation. The creator in this case, Mongo Beti, suffered greatly under the yoke of censorship which eventually led to self-exile from his home country, Cameroon. In one of his literary works, Perpetua and the Habit of Unhappiness chosen for this analysis, we examined how Beti uses symbolism, fictional characters and setting to surreptitiously depict real individuals and places in Cameroon thus attempting, though unsuccessfully, to escape the censor’s eagle eyes. In order to effectively drive home our point, we depended on post colonialism as a literary theory.