A writer and journalist, Trevor Noah; the winner of the Goncourt, Gaël Faye, and two renowned writers in French and Portuguese, Alain Mabanckou and Isabela Figueiredo, have made childhood the protagonist of their novels. Although it may seem like it, it is not a child’s question.
Isabela Figueiredo tells herself, daughter of a family of Portuguese settlers in Mozambique, in Colonial memories notebook. «I was not an adult. I didn’t feel like being one. He observed the world he lived in, listening to the words, hungry to comprehend and understand. “I watched him to learn the mechanics of people.”
Children of fiction or reality, the children who appear in African literature also explain how the people who inhabit the continent live and dream, grieve and enjoy. The gaze of the little ones stops at the daily routine, but also at events that mark the future of history, such as the end of the apartheid. Trevor Noah was almost six years old when Mandela was released from prison. In Forbidden to be born, That child was carried away by the current of collective euphoria: «I remember seeing it on television and everyone was happy. I didn’t know why we were so happy; I just knew we were. I was aware that there was a thing called apartheid “That it was over and that it was very important, but I didn’t understand the ins and outs of it.” For the South African, what the elders talked so much about was just a matter of options: “During the apartheidif you were a black man you worked on a farm, a factory or a mine. “If you were a black woman, you worked in a factory or as a domestic worker.”
The son of a white father and a black mother, Noah was a fruit prohibited based on the immorality law, signed in 1927, which prohibited relations between Europeans and natives in South Africa. Also the son of a mixed marriage is a 10-year-old Burundian boy, Gabriel. The protagonist of small country, Gaël Faye’s coming-of-age novel does not understand very well the animosity between Hutus and Tutsis in his country and in neighboring Rwanda. That’s why he decides to ask his father:
«–Is the war between the Tutsis and the Hutus because they do not have the same territory?
»–No, it’s not that, they are in the same country.
»–So… you don’t speak the same language?
»–No, the language they speak is the same.
»–So, is it because they don’t have the same god?
»–Yes, they do have the same god.
»–Then… why are they at war?
«–Because they don’t have the same nose.
»The conversation stopped there. That matter was really very strange. I think dad didn’t understand it very well either.
Storks are immortal, by the Congolese Alain Mabanckou, is set almost 20 years earlier, in March 1977, when everything in the Republic of Congo revolved around the assassination of Marien-Ngouabi. Through Michel, a clueless, forgetful and innocent 13-year-old boy, he tells us what is happening in Pointe-Noire, where he lives, but also in other corners of the continent thanks to a Grundig radio that his father listens to under a baobab that They have it in the backyard. There, through the radio station The Voice of the Congolese Revolution, you also learn about what is happening in Biafra or the influence of the former metropolises. And Michel speaks, of course, about France and the White Wizard, an unnamed character who, however, points to Jacques Foccard, one of the strong and dark men of General De Gaulle’s African politics: «The majority of black presidents He must talk to “the white magician” so that France is happy. “This man decides who will be the president of the Republic of this or that country that France colonized.”
On the other side of the continent, the Portuguese were beginning to abandon Mozambique. Figueiredo was just a girl who, like Faye’s Gabriel, didn’t really understand why that was. However, through his life white supremacy in Mozambique is understood. To this end, the author and protagonist of the Notebook It takes us to the school yard and an offense of unknown origin: «It was premeditated. I had it in mind before, if she irritated me again, I would hit her. He could hit her perfectly and with impunity. She was mulatto. (…) I told him, you’ve earned it, and then I walked away towards the back of the patio, completely aware of the infamy I had committed, that exercise of power that I didn’t understand, and with which I didn’t agree. Not because of the slap itself, but because he had given it to Marília. “Marília was an easy prey.”
Isabel, Trevor, Michel and Gabriel. Children’s things. Or not so much.
Photography: Getty
