Reading Order
Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote Reading Order
Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote (En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, 1998) by Ahmadou Kourouma is one of the great satirical novels of post-independence Africa — a biting, carnivalesque account of the fictional African dictator Koyaga, ruler of the Republic of the Gulf, told through the form of the donsomana (the Malinka praise-song of hunters) by a griot named Bingo who is simultaneously celebrating and exposing Koyaga's crimes. The novel catalogues the rise of Koyaga — from his origins as the greatest hunter in the hills of the Palaka people, through his participation in French colonial wars, to his brutal seizure of power and his three-decade rule — while also presenting, through the story of Koyaga's five African dictator contemporaries (Bossouma of Sahel, Fricassa Santos of the Bay Republic, Toumani of the Democratic Republic of the Ebony, Tiekoroni of the Savannah, and Nkoutigui Fomba of the Mountains of the Moon), a comprehensive satirical account of the mechanisms of African dictatorship in the post-independence era. Kourouma's method is double-voiced: the griot's traditional praise-song form celebrates Koyaga as a great warrior and hunter, but the content of the celebration is the record of his crimes — the murders, tortures, and betrayals that constitute his political career. The reader holds both registers simultaneously: the formal celebration and the substantive indictment. The five dictator-portraits (each based on real West African leaders of the period — Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, Mobutu Sese Seko, Sékou Touré, and others) are both historically specific and universally recognizable. Kourouma, who spent years in exile from Côte d'Ivoire (which he had satirized in his earlier novel The Suns of Independence), brings to the novel a combination of insider knowledge, exile anger, and formal inventiveness that makes it one of the essential documents of francophone African literature.
Where to start
Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote — the Frank Wynne English translation is the standard. The novel is best read with some knowledge of post-independence West African political history; a few minutes with Wikipedia on the five dictator-models makes the portraits richer.
Complete Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote Book List
- 1Buy
Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote
Ahmadou Kourouma·1998·The novel — Koyaga's donsomana, the five dictator portraits, and the griot Bingo's double-voiced praise-song indictment of African dictatorship. - 2Buy
The Suns of Independence
Ahmadou Kourouma·1968·Kourouma's first novel — Fama's fall from a chief's dignity in post-independence Côte d'Ivoire; the predecessor that established Kourouma's satirical project. - 3Buy
Allah Is Not Obliged
Ahmadou Kourouma·2000·Kourouma's final complete novel — a child soldier's account of the West African civil wars; the companion to Waiting for the Wild Beasts in its anatomy of the dictatorships that produced such wars. - 4Buy
Devil on the Cross
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o·1982·Ngũgĩ's political satire of neo-colonial capitalism — the East African parallel in satirical political allegory; a different formal mode (grotesque fable vs. Kourouma's griot form) applied to the same problem. - 5Buy
Anthills of the Savannah
Chinua Achebe·1987·Achebe's final novel of African political crisis — a West African military dictatorship; the Anglophone African literary companion to Kourouma's francophone account of the same phenomenon. - 6Buy
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Ayi Kwei Armah·1968·Armah's Ghanaian novel of post-independence corruption — published the same year as Kourouma's first novel; the same diagnosis in a different national and linguistic tradition. - 7Buy
I Served the King of England
Bohumil Hrabal·1971·Hrabal's Czech novel of a waiter who serves through historical catastrophe — a comparable use of an unreliable servant-narrator to expose the crimes of those he serves; the Central European parallel to Kourouma's griot form. - 8Buy
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez·1967·García Márquez's masterpiece — the magical realist approach to Latin American political history that Kourouma is in dialogue with; the African dictator novel's Latin American ancestor.
Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote about?
Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote follows Koyaga, the dictator-president of the fictional Republic of the Gulf, through a ritual donsomana (a praise-song performance by a griot) conducted by Bingo and his apprentice Tiécoura. The donsomana has four watches or 'evenings,' each covering a phase of Koyaga's life: his origins as a great hunter in the Palaka hills; his military career in French colonial wars (Indochina, Algeria); his seizure of power and consolidation of his dictatorship; and his survival against multiple coup attempts. Between the episodes of Koyaga's story, Bingo delivers five 'purification' passages in which he catalogues the careers of five other African dictators — Kourouma's thinly disguised portraits of real historical figures — whose reigns parallel and contextualise Koyaga's. The novel ends with Koyaga's survival, but the donsomana itself is a form of accountability: the griot's task is to praise and to reveal simultaneously.
What is the donsomana and how does Kourouma use it?
The donsomana is a Malinka praise-song performed for hunters — a ritual form in which a hunter's achievements are celebrated by a griot (oral historian and praise-singer) before his peers. Kourouma uses this form to narrate Koyaga's story because it is structurally double: the griot is obligated to praise his subject (and Koyaga, as a great hunter, deserves praise within that tradition), but the form also requires the griot to speak truth — the praise-song is also a form of accounting. By choosing the donsomana, Kourouma creates a narrative voice that is simultaneously celebrating and exposing: the formal celebration of Koyaga's 'achievements' as a political leader is also the record of his murders, tortures, and betrayals. The reader holds both registers at once, which is how the irony works: the griot praises what the content reveals as criminal.
Who are the five dictators in the novel based on?
The five African dictators Kourouma portrays in the 'purification' passages between Koyaga's story are thinly disguised versions of real historical figures: Bossouma of the Sahel Republic is Sékou Touré of Guinea; Fricassa Santos of the Bay Republic is based on Francisco Macías Nguema of Equatorial Guinea; Toumani of the Democratic Republic of the Ebony is Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire; Tiekoroni of the Savannah is Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d'Ivoire; and Nkoutigui Fomba of the Mountains of the Moon is Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo. The combination of fictional distance and historical specificity allows Kourouma to catalogue the actual mechanisms of these real dictatorships while maintaining plausible deniability — and while making clear to any informed reader exactly who is being described.
How does the novel relate to real African political history?
Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is a work of historical fiction about the actual post-independence African political catastrophe — the one-party states, the personality cults, the dependence on French patronage (la Françafrique), the Cold War proxy dynamics that allowed African dictators to trade political alignment for external support and immunity from accountability. Kourouma was a survivor of this system: he spent years in exile from Côte d'Ivoire (where Houphouët-Boigny, one of the five dictators he portrays, ruled until his death in 1993). The novel is both a fictional account and a form of historical testimony — the griot's function is exactly this: to preserve the truth of what happened so that the community cannot forget it.
What should I read after Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote?
After Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, Kourouma's Allah Is Not Obliged (2000) and The Suns of Independence (1968, his first novel) are essential. For francophone African literature more broadly, Ousmane Sembène's Xala (1973), Mongo Beti's Mission to Kala (1957), and Alain Mabanckou's Memoirs of a Porcupine (2006) are important. For Anglophone African companions, Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah and Ngũgĩ's Devil on the Cross address similar political realities. For scholarly work, Eileen Julien's African Novels and the Question of Orality (1992) is the key critical study of the oral tradition dimension.
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