Writing the Wrongs of French Colonial Africa: Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad

Abstract

André Gide’s 1926–1927 Congo journey began as a pleasure jaunt into the exotic and the erotic: “Everything here seems to hold the promise of bliss, voluptuousness, and forgetting.”¹ It survives as a text, a travel narrative addressed primarily to a European readership about the author’s close encounter with the social and political reality of French colonial Africa. Gide’s very decision to publish his travel writings and to take a public position based on his personal observations reveals a political strategy that he will pursue over the subsequent decade. The epistemological shift necessary for him to engage in this public debate carries with it a fundamental assumption about the writer’s role in the social and political community. “What is at stake in writing is the very structure of authority itself,” affirms Barbara Johnson (48). Gide had made strategic use of writing as a way to self-knowledge and revelation throughout his career. He now had to turn to the revelation of a different kind of scene of compelling dramatic importance, one that only tangentially overlapped with his personal concerns: the colonial situation in French Equatorial Africa. Political discourse exerts its power in the public sphere when it becomes visibly and tangibly connected to the author’s presence. Gide’s maneuvering and positioning vis-à-vis the colonial power structure, while overtly dealing with abuses witnessed during his travels in French Equatorial Africa, have a more direct bearing on his own cultural politics. His strategic opposition to colonial practices and policies underscores his desire to establish his own authority in a public debate taking place not in the Congo but in Paris, intellectual, cultural, and political capital of France’s colonial empire. In a highly self-referential way, Gide inscribes his opposition to the very culture of French expansionism in which he gravitates and to which he addresses his critiques.