Recommendations
Books Like Mission to Kala by Mongo Beti
Anti-colonial Cameroonian coming of age
If you were charmed by Beti's satirical account of Jean-Marie's impossible position — the educated failure received as a sage in the village he cannot fully enter — these books offer comparable depth in francophone African fiction, the literature of colonial education and its deracinating effects, and the Cameroonian anti-colonial tradition.
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Buy on AmazonThe Poor Christ of Bomba
by Mongo Beti
Beti's preceding novel — a French Catholic missionary in Cameroon satirically exposed; the companion in Beti's anti-colonial project, from a different angle (the missionary vs. the educated student).
- 2
Buy on AmazonHouseboy
by Ferdinand Oyono
Oyono's Cameroonian anti-colonial novel — the companion from the same Cameroonian tradition; the colonial system exposed from below (a houseboy's diary) rather than from the educated class's perspective.
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Buy on AmazonNervous Conditions
by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Dangarembga's Zimbabwean feminist novel — the same colonial education system's deracinating effects explored from a woman's perspective and with more anguish.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThings Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
Achebe's foundational novel — the anglophone African parallel; the same clash between colonial values and African traditional culture in Igboland.
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Buy on AmazonNo Longer at Ease
by Chinua Achebe
Achebe's Lagos novel — the educated African caught between colonial and traditional worlds; the anglophone Nigerian companion to Jean-Marie's position.
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Buy on AmazonXala
by Ousmane Sembène
Sembène's Senegalese satire — the francophone companion; the class that Mission to Kala is satirizing in its formation, in its full post-independence corruption.
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Buy on AmazonCandide
by Voltaire
Voltaire's satirical adventure — the structural ancestor of Mission to Kala; the naive young man's journey through a world that fails to match his received ideas.
- 8Buy on Amazon
Season of Migration to the North
by Tayeb Salih
Salih's Sudanese novel — the Arabic-language African exploration of the educated African's impossible position between Western modernity and African tradition.
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