Mongo Beti Biography

Alexandre Biyidi-Awala, better known under his pseudonym Mongo Beti, was a novelist and political essayist from Cameroon. His novels, which focus on the difficulties of maintaining African culture in post-colonial countries, often attacked French colonial policies or depicted the struggles of finding a sense of self in post-colonial Africa (a topic that has since gained popularity in African novels). Since he was born in Cameroon in a time when it was still a French colony, Beti was exposed to anti-colonial ideas from a young age, and often argued with his family and his peers over things like religion and politics, paving the way for his writings later in life. As a young man he became actively involved in colonial-politics in Paris, and eventually moved back to Cameroon to become involved in the independence movement there. But after being arrested, he returned to France as an exile. Although all of his novels focus heavily on the struggles of African people in colonial and post-colonial countries, Beti actually spent much of his life in France, where he first studied to gain a literature degree and later taught literature himself. However, his homeland always stayed close to his heart, and he eventually returned to Cameroon where he spent the last years of his life