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Abstract
This article uses the Ndombolo dance reference and image to shed light on Bofane's first novel Mathématiques congolaises (2008) in which the sexy dance becomes a metaphor for political and social instability. Using Bob W. White's analysis of the Ndombolo dance, this paper envisions the main protagonist Célio (and ultimately Bofane himself) as an atalaku trickster. Devoured by hunger, Célio manages to find resilience and enter political spheres thanks to his manipulation in mathematics. The Ndombolo movement is also at the core of Bofane's characterization as well as in his heteroglossic and heterolingual writing revealing of an Afropean sensibility. This study highlights how Mathématiques congolaises cynically points to complex and circumvoluted forms of present-day resistance while it unveils the tragic history of the Congo and its inhabitants.
Key words
Congo, Afropean, Ndombolo dance, In Koli Jean Bofane, Congolese diaspora
Evoking the name of the Congo will for most people echo violence, struggle and hunger as representations of the country having been trapped for centuries in a Heart of Darkness paradigm. This image, exemplified in the words of Belgo-Congolese singer Baloji of "a stratego battleground," keeps associating the country with a colonial history of brutality, and the devastating ills of civil war. Although it constitutes part of its horrendous reality, this representation is limited, and has been given emphasis by the media and cultural memory since Joseph Conrad's novel or Mark Twain's political Leopold's Soliloquy. Both iconic works have been followed by the existing Congolese literature in English that has participated in fixing this image of the Congo as an alienating, dark and disorienting bloody place. In her analysis of Congolese writers' appropriation and contestation of the Conradian text, Susanne Gehrmann contends that "the fascination with the Congo as an imaginary space filled with overwhelming nature, unspeakable violence and human nature at its extreme, has continued to move European and American authors far beyond the colonial period" (Gehrmann, 2009, 11). Novels like Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, or travel narratives like Jeffrey Tayler's Facing the Congo, confirm this fascination while exposing the recurrence of a Heart of Darkness paradigm.
Most Belgian people, despite their alleged closeness to the Democratic Republic of Congo's history, still relate the country to an old-fashioned rural world. One example is...