The Chadian Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry explores in his new novel, There is no rainbow in Heaven, the difficult subject of trans-Saharan slavery. Combining the breath of great epic tales and the wisdom of tales, the book recounts the horrors of the Arab-Muslim slave trade, which continues to this day. Winner of the RFI short story prize, Noël Ndjékéry flirted with the theater for a time before establishing himself as one of the important African novelists of his generation.
In the 1960s, when he was growing up in his native village in southern Chad, the novelist recalls Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry, the adults said and said again to the children who were impatient to go and play in the bush, to watch out for wild animals, snakes and especially slavers. The parents feared that their offspring would be kidnapped by slave traders, taken to the Arabian Peninsula, and then sold at auction like cattle.
Human trafficking is an ancestral practice in this region of the wooded savannah of Chad which has long been, the writer recalls, “a slave attic “. According to Noël Ndjékéry, this practice never really stopped and continues today, as we could see in November 2017, on unsustainable images from CNN showing the auction of black slaves in Libya.
On an epic scale
Haunted by the painful story of the trans-Saharan slave trade which has been raging in his country since the dawn of time, the Chadian novelist has made it the subject of his new novel with the ironic title There is no rainbow in heaven, recently published. On an epic scale, the novel revisits the slave trade from the 19th century to the present day, passing through colonization, independence and the advent of the jihadist group Boko Haram, openly slavery.
We will read with interest this masterful story of centuries of enslavement, carried out at full speed, mixing history, myths and legends. The novelist recounts seven generations of the slave trade, starting in the last quarter of the 19th century and the flight of the main protagonists – two men and a woman – escaping from the slave caravans that sow death and devastation.
Why the 19th century?“This is a pivotal moment for modern Africa, answers the author. It’s time for the Berlin Conference, it is the moment of the apogee of trans-Saharan slavery. And there, we actually find three slaves who are on the run. A young teenager named Zeitoun and a runaway eunuch slave from Arabia named Tomasta. And this Tomasta took with him the favorite of the harem he was in charge of. Her name is Yasmina, she is of Yemeni origin, and has white skin. These three will return to the Chad basin and they will choose to settle on an island which is a floating island on Lake Chad. »
Together, and with only the Koran, the Bible and the Talmud as weapons, the trio will build an idealistic community on the island. The advent of this new world is reminiscent of the utopia of the Englishman Thomas More or Robinson Crusoe in his “treasure island” “. If the strict observance of community ideals by the founders allows them to build a ” Heaven on Earth Sheltered from the violence and brutality of the world, their successors hardly succeeded in preserving the utopia in the face of the vagaries of History, a History punctuated by wars, imperialist competition and religious and fundamentalist excesses. With in background, the resurgence of the phenomenon of the oriental slave trade.
“We tend to highlight the Atlantic slave trade which, paradoxically, lasted much less long, four centuries, while the so-called Arab-Muslim slave trade began in 652 AD and still continues today., highlights Noël Ndjékéry. I wanted to highlight this trans-Saharan slave trade and then go beyond it because the novel also talks about all the servitudes that result from this slave trade up to the present day. In addition to its main characters, the novel also evokes great historical figures. We are talking about Rabah Fadlallah, who was a slave sultan at the end of the 19th century. There is also talk of Hissène Habré who was in his own way, with a liability of some 40,000 dead, a slave trader. And the novel closes with Abubakar Shekau of Boko Haram who has never hidden his affiliation with historical slave traders. »
At the school of griots
Despite the years of investigation and research required to writeThere is no rainbow in heaven, it would be unfair to reduce this novel solely to its historical dimension. The author claims to belong to the school of griots who “combines legends and myths with the telling of factual history “. His work fits into this model, brilliantly alternating the tragedies of African history and fantastic tales embedded in the main plot. Thus, sirens and mamiwata coexist in these pages with bloodthirsty slave traders and luminous patriarchs. We are closer here to Thousand and one Night and of A hundred years of loneliness that of War and peace or Hussar under the roof. The charm of the novel also lies in its language full of flavor and full of poetry.
Born in 1956 in Moundou, Chad, Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry has lived in Switzerland since the early 1980s. , draws his inspiration from the fortunes and misfortunes of his continent and his country.
There is no rainbow in Heaven is Noël Ndjékéry’s fifth novel. The man had made himself known to the general public by publishing his first novel at the turn of the century Kola’s Blood in which, through the tragic fate of a fictional African village, he denounced the dictatorship of Hissène Habré and the cruelty of his regime. The abuses of power, the failures of independence, but also the horrors of the continent’s history are at the heart of the multidimensional work of this author who very early realized that the dominated Africa in which he grew up not say his last word.
” I grew up in a French military garrisonhe recalls. This allowed me to go to Western school very early. I even had the privilege of going to kindergarten and so I learned the French language very early on. As soon as I left the universe of the Western school, I fell in my home and in my family, my father spoke a kind of little nigger French and my mother did not speak French at all. I bathed both in a westernized world through school, and then in the family cocoon, it was eternal Africa that I found. And so I think I realized very, very early on that this Africa of villages that my parents passed on to me was in fact a world on borrowed time. I realized very early on that we had to try not to save this world which was dying, but to prolong it in some way through writing. I felt that this world of Africa, the village of deep Africa, had something to say to the rest of the world. »
It is to say this Africa on borrowed time that Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry writes, but also, as the latter recently confided to the microphone of RFI, to savor ” the privilege which is that of the novelist to live several lives in a single “.
There is no rainbow in Heaven, by Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry. Editions Hélice Hélas, 360 pages, 20 euros.