Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s “A Nose for Money”
Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s A Nose for Money (EAPH, 2006) is a uniquely detailed presentation of the causes and consequences of political instability in Mimboland (Cameroonian) society since Re-Unification. The society that is depicted is one that can only breed diseased and demented leaders. Reviewed by Bate Besong.
In his message to the youths of Africa, Fanon states that, “the future will have no pity for those of us who, possessing the exceptional ability to speak words of truth to the oppressor, have instead taken refuge in an attitude of passitivity, mute indifference and sometimes of cold complicity.”
Nyamnjoh exposes his sharp and resolute concern for the fate of Mimbolanders groaning under a tottering but oppressive socio-political structure. Captured in a farcical and even absurdist style, A Nose for Money is a serious study of social maladjustment and political power.
Ontological and political problems, poverty, sexuality, alcoholism as well as motivation of characters, at one level, are eloquently presented to render coherence to plot and plausibility to architectonics and symmetry:
Creative practice and the artistic individuality of the Cameroonian writer are dependent on socio-historical stimuli and tendencies. Mimboland (Cameroonian) reality is projected through the eyes of an omniscient third-person narrator.
The novel suggests that the African leaders’ goal is to debase human beings to the level of animals. Rapacious greed, necrophilia, corruption, immorality and the misuse of power are the norm, where “civil servants and officials found it less illegal owning businesses and diverting public funds to their private endeavours”.
In A Nose for Money, Nyamnjoh is, therefore, fully alive to his Mimbolander (Cameroonian) experience and its needs, his quick prophetic response to a Cameroonian “White Collar Delinquent’s” class syndrome fulfilling the goals of imperialism.
A Nose for Money is a celebration of hybridity and difference by a sociological scholar who has established an international reputation as a Head of Publication and Dissemination with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Dakar, Senegal.
Nyamnjoh’s individual talent, his high seriousness of purpose, his association with many of the leading intellectual and cultural Brahmins of the epoch such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Adebayo Olukoshi, Thandika Mkandawire, Ali Mazrui, Ngugi wa Thiong’O, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Amina Mama, Hannington Ochwada, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Mahmood Mamdhami etc. have brought intellectual prestige to the Cameroonian intellectual worker in the Diaspora.
Nyamnjoh, in A Nose for Money, therefore, seeks; to establish the solidity of his vision, the complexity of his artistry, the appropriateness of his fictional iconography and his unquestionable commitment to the cause of socio-political amelioration.
The novel is written in English but it incorporates French and Bum mythology, regional dialects and vernacular slang. Language, itself, as we have so often seen, is an area of concern of the doubled, culturally polyvalent, hybrid as well unstable nature of the post colonial writer.
The work of the creative imagination is, therefore, conceived as the unfettered development of man’s most valuable individual abilities for his victory.
Nyamnjoh’s novel depicts historical, social and political themes, arising mostly from the contact between East (francophone) and West (Anglophone) Mimboland.
The reader is compelled to understand the impact of abusive obesity on the level of the programmed promoting of collective amnesia, alienation and internal exile of Mimbolanders. It boldly foregrounds the whole wide-ranging and complex structure of decadent social and political institutions.
A Nose for Money is more aggressively revolutionary in terms of form and content. The plot revolves around the semi-literate, Prospere, whose two wives, Charlotte and Chantal ” preferred to make children with outsiders rather than see their marriages sacrificed.”
When Prospere’s dead wife, Monique, had appeared to threaten their secret “both women decided to become pregnant as though she was actually to blame”. Chapter 20 is the point of anagnorisis and, therefore, the fulcrum on which the novel turns.
It ends on an Achebean tapestry wherein, Prospere, like a modern day Okonkwo, in Things Fall Apart (1958) is, found ” On the floor, buried in his own blood with a gun in his hand…He had blown…his brains out”.
A Nose for Money is fiction that balances absorbing aesthetic principles with a sense of conscience. Nyamnjoh’s art runs through the whole gamut of Mimboland experience, past, present and future.
There has been a concerted effort, in this novel, then, to break away from the great Leavisite, Euro-centric bourgeois aesthetic values and ideologies in pursuit of more authentically, indigenous models, world view and cultural icons, and to replace imported structures of privilege with more democratic and populist forms of consciousness
In providing a documentary and fictional gestalt of the politico-economic phenomena that proliferate every day under a tropical Gaullist neo-colonial regime, Nyamnjoh, provides a barely disguised autobiographical account on why scholars of international prestige like himself seek refuge abroad.
His irreverently iconoclastic essays that are marked with sensitivity and intelligence are harsh and uncompromising indictments of the Ahidjo-Biya regime and the Francophile blindness to the world outside.
Nyamnjoh’s scholarship is a useful index of a nation’s difficult process for becoming. He is perhaps foremost as a brilliant sociologist and exploiter of archaeological and historical artifacts for politico-satiric purposes.
His novels proffer eloquent examples of the structures of power under a world of oppressive authoritarianism as an allegory of how images are constructed, invented and given permanence in protean visions, in the main, in a State doomed to suffocate the intellect and validate its ogres and predators.
First published on http://www.nyamnjoh.com
August 1st, 2007 at 12:49 pm
I would like to know Tazanu Primus’ contribution to this work.