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POSTCOLONIAL WRITERS IN GERMANY DUALLA MISIPO AND KUMA NDUMBE III Sara Lennox

In a 2006 article published in the journal Modernism/Modernity, postcolonial scholar Simon Gikandi argues that African writers often gave imaginative shape to their encounter with Europe by drawing on the forms of European modernism. Indeed, Gikandi maintains: It is my contention that it was primarilyI am tempted to say solelyin the language and structure of modernism that a postcolonial experience came to be articulated and imagined in literary form. Debates about modernism, he continues, are marked by a double paradox. On the one hand, modernism represents perhaps the most intense and unprecedented site of encounter between the institutions of European cultural production and the cultural practices of colonized peoples: one recalls how frequently the modern European self is represented vis--vis its cultural encounters with others. On the other hand, Gikandi observes: For almost fifty years postcolonial critics and scholars have treated modernism with suspicion, . . . the site of Eurocentric danger, a threat to the assumed authenticity of the cultural and literary traditions of postcolonial politics (2006: 421). And that was of course because the mission of European colonialism was to spread Enlightenment to the benighted other parts of the world: as Gikandi puts it: Colonial subjects were avid consumers of the canon, but within the colonial institutions of interpretation, they were taught that this canon represented the values of an innate Englishness [and, we might want to say, Germanness as well], one that was anterior to their own sense of self, as lesser subjects of empire (2006: 422). But, he asserts: It was when modernism was introduced into the canon, sometimes reluctantly, that postcolonial creativity bloomed (2006: 422). Gikandi is of Kenyan origin, and the texts he references are Anglophone, both in the case of European high modernism and of postcolonial literary production. Here I would like to investigate the relevance of his arguments for postcolonial writing in the German language. To be sure, that project is complicated by the fact that Anglophone and Germanophone literary history has not proceeded along entirely parallel lines. On the one hand, no precise equivalent of Englishlanguage high modernism, generally thought to have occurred between 1885 and 1945, exists in

German: Viennese modernism (die Moderne) ended much earlier; Germanys politicized avantgarde had no counterpart in Britain; and after 1933 National Socialism drove many German writers into exile. On the other hand, since Germany lost its colonies after World War I, no large group of writers from formerly colonized countries writes in the German language. Instead, and faute de mieux, postcolonial cultural analysis in Germany has focused mainly either on texts by white German authors that address the non-Western world or on writing by migrant authors. Scholars seemed to assume that Germany, so often belated with regard to developments in other Western European countries, in this case entirely lacked postcolonial authors from its former colonies writing in the language of their former colonizers. But this essay will revise that conclusion by focusing on texts by two writers from Germanys former colony Cameroon. A member of Cameroons colonial elite sent to school in Germany a year before the outbreak of World War I, Dualla Misipo probably completed Der Junge aus Duala: Ein Regierungschler erzhlt around 1960 and published his second book Korrongo: Das Lied der Waganna in 1961. Kuma Ndumbe III, hereditary ruler of Dualas Bell family, also educated in Germany in the years after Cameroonian independence, wrote four German-language plays from 1968 to 1970. As my essay will show, these texts of Germanys first two postcolonial writers, though written at different times and in much different ways, also draw on modernism, as Gikandi argued, so as both to challenge Eurocentrism and to represent their own relationship to their Cameroonian present and past. Why modernism? Gikandis book on modernism and postcoloniality has not yet appeared, so we will have to wait a while for his answer, but I can make some suggestions by drawing on a 1990 essay entitled Modernism and Imperialism by Fredric Jameson. It is Jamesons assertion that the rupture that constitutes European modernism as an aesthetic movement coincides with the Berlin conference of 1884, when the European powers divided up Africa among themselves. Modernists seldom addressed imperialism thematically, but they lived and wrote within the framework of the new context. (The Austro-Hungarian empire may represent an earlier analogue to Western European imperialism, which could account for why die Moderne came to Vienna first; indeed, Carl Schorske makes a similar argument in his classic study Fin-de-sicle Vienna.) Borrowing somewhat from Georg Lukcs, Jameson maintains : [C]olonialism means that a significant structural element of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside of the daily life and existential

experience of the home country, in colonies over the water whose own life experience and life worldvery different from that of the imperial powerremain unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of the imperial power, whatever social class they may belong to. Such spatial disjunction has as its immediate consequence the inability to grasp the way the system functions as a whole. . . . [D]aily life and existential experience in the metropolis--which is necessarily the very content of the national literature itself, can no longer be grasped immanently; it no longer has its meaning, its deeper reason for being, within itself. . . . This new and historically original problem in what is itself a new kind of content now constitutes the situation and the problem and the dilemma, the formal contradiction, that modernism seeks to solve; or, better still, it is only that new kind of art which reflexively perceives this problem and lives this formal dilemma that can be called modernism in the first place (50-51). Jameson thus maintains that the aesthetic form of bourgeois realism must be abandoned, and a fresh and unprecedented aesthetic response is demanded (50); this is the formal dilemma that modernism tries to solve. One solution is arguably a withdrawal into increased subjectification and introspection because that which is necessary to understand the lives of subjects in the metropole is that which cant be represented, and, as I will show here, that is in part Dualla Misipos strategy. Another, which seemed probable for a time, was that chosen by the aesthetic avantgarde and by Brecht and his cohort, to use the realm of art to transform reality. That, I will argue, was for a time the strategy of Kuma Ndumbe III, though one he abandoned when real life possibilities for political transformation waned with the cooptation of newly-decolonized countries by their own elites and the decline of the First World movements for liberation in sixties in which he himself participated. At the same time, I want to show that what Dualla Misipo and Kuma Ndumbe III add to their texts is what European writers couldnt represent. That is the experience of the colonized, and it is what makes their writing postcolonial. I do not want to make too great a claim for these two writers, but I find Gikandis postulations suggestive. So long as Europeans still maintained that only a single omniscient European perspective sufficed to understand reality, as is the case in European realism, there was no possible room for African writers to draw upon European literary forms in order to elaborate their own views. But once the Gods eye view of the European Enlightenment and the literary forms that depended on it were drawn into question by the complications of colonial modernity, postcolonial writers could seize the opportunity to fill

those forms with exactly the content that could not be perceived from the vantage point of Europe itself. It is possible to maintain that both Dualla Misipos life and his literary production contend with precisely these problems. Born in 1901 in the Germany colony of Cameroon, Misipo graduated from the government school in Douala in 1913 and was sent to Germany for further education, attending school in Herborn in Hessen and then becoming an assistant to the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius at the University of Frankfurt after completing his medical studies in the late twenties. According to Robbie Aitken, who is researching Misipos later life, in 1922 Misipo formed a group called the Verband Deutscher Neger to protest the Black Horror on the Rhine campaign launched against the occupation of the Rhineland by French colonial troopsa group that apparently consisted only of Misipo and a German-American named Sachs. In 1931 Misipo left Germany for France because of the growing Nazi threat and remained in France after World War II, contributing to several German journals to express his dissatisfaction with the concept of ngritude (Joseph 154-55). Scandalously, Misipos novel Der Junge aus Duala: Ein Regierungsschler erzhlt was never really published and is available only as the 1973 reprint of a badly-typed manuscript. Though several sources list the composition date of the novel as 1930, since the manuscript begins with a prefatory note that alludes to Cameroons independence in 1960 and since it contains several deliberate anachronisms, including the mention of television, atomic energy, and jet planes and a discussion of South African apartheid and the U.S. Civil Rights sit-ins, it is more likely that the final version of the text was completed later. His second book, Korrongo: Das Lied der Waganna, published in 1961, retells Cameroonian epics for a German public, probably derived from the research of Frobenius, whom in an article published in 1961 in Prsence africaine Misipo called The Tacitus of Africa. Misipos date of death is not known, but in 2001 his son Ekwe Misipo also published an autobiographical novel called Mtissages contemporaines with the publishing house Prsence africaine that tells the familys story after they left Germany. What is probably most modernist about Misipos very competent first novel is its complex and sophisticated treatment of time, somewhat recalling Virginia Woolf, a carefully-plotted non-linear narrative that seems to progress only by free association but is able to recount the successes of the protagonist, Ekwe Njembele, his struggles through a colonial education system to arrive at the present day of Germany in the nineteen-twenties, and his increasingly humiliating encounters with

German racism. In the present tense, the novel tells a story that begins with a footrace in the city of Darmstadt where the protagonist meets a charming young white German woman, Marianne, and progresses through the details of their romance to a welcome proposal of marriage in the last section. Inserted into that present-time narrative are the protagonists recollections, recalled in the past tense but as fully-elaborated narratives and always justified by some narrative device. After the footrace, for example, the protagonist tells the reporter from a sport journal about his arrival in Germany on a ship of the Woermann Line and first experiences in the metropole of Frankfurt, his opinions about the racial prejudices of Europeans, and his German schooling and boyhood pranks in Duala. An invitation to dine with Mariannes prominent family provides the occasion to tell several Cameroonian folk tales (of which more below). In his student apartment a melancholy examination of a photograph of his parents allows him to tell how the pupils of his Cameroonian school class were given the honor of singing German folk songs at the dedication of Cameroons northern railway line and how he was welcomed to Germany by his loving Hessian foster family. That narrative progresses into a fascinating social history of how the First World War was experienced in a small German village, then mutating into what the protagonist calls the Krieg gegen die Neger. Returning to the present, the protagonist goes on a picnic in the country with Marianne in her smart automobile and tells her a long and somewhat bawdy Cameroonian folk tale. At the end of the picnic the first kissesand perhaps more, since the author discretely does not tell us precisely how their love is expressed--are exchanged. After the detailed account of another sporting event told in present time, the author recounts his increasing difficulty of appearing in public with Marianne and his visit to a rather disreputable jazz club, but ends the novel with his visit, dressed in a tuxedo, to Mariannes family, where he asks for and happily receives permission to marry her. The very sophisticated representation of subjectivity might also be considered an expression of modernism in this text. The text initially seems to be formulated as conventional bourgeois realism narrated from an omniscient perspective, but by the second page the I-narrator emerges: Der Schwarze bin ich (1973: 18 ). The texts focus on the protagonists subjectivity is quite remarkable. It is not clear with how much irony we are to read the first-person responses and recollections of the protagonist or to what degree we are to reach conclusions that the protagonist himself doesnt draw. Certainly we are called upon to judge the colonial education that punishes German pupils by brutal canings and teaches them to hold forth authoritatively on Germanic tribes,

to describe a European winter landscape in perfect Germana hill is not schief but steil--, and to conjugate the German verb tun and the English verb to via the phrase We have done our duty that then becomes a recurring leitmotiv in the novel. Nonetheless, this protagonist excels at everything he undertakes, not exactly Bhabhas mimic man, but rather the superior of the Europeans whose lessons he has learned so well. This protagonist surpasses the Germans he meets in every way; indeed the novel begins with a sporting event in Darmstadt attended by almost all of its population including the Grand Duke of Hessen and his retinue in which the protagonist not only wins the one-hundred-meter race (recalling Jesse Owens) but sets a new record. By the time of his graduation Njembele has mastered the colonizers languages, speaking German, Latin, French, and English. Indeed, he is told by Germans that his own German is not only flawless, but very distinguished, in contrast to the deep Hessian dialect of his lovingly-rendered foster parents. He has also mastered the colonizers canons, in later years still able to recite parts of Caesars bellum gallicum in Latin, Victor Hugos poem LExpiation in Franch, and Sophocles Antigone and Goethes Iphigenie in German, and during a visit to Mariannes cultured German family he is able effortlessly to perform Mozarts Don Juan impromptu on the violin. It is no wonder that as a medical student the protagonists idol is the nineteenth-century German anthropologist Rudolf Virchow, whose studies of craniometry led him to conclude that all peoples of Europe were of mixed race and that no race was superior to any other, opinions the protagonist elsewhere in the novel claims as his own. At the same time, the protagonist also, perhaps ironically as well, frequently reports on his subjective uncertainty, even physical responses: when, as a ten-year-old he for the first time sees large African animals at the Frankfurt Zoo and faints; when he finally encounters winter in Hessen and discovers ice-skating is not as easy as it looks, when his heart pounds as he looks forward to the footraces that he wins with ease, when his heart pounds as he wonders if he dares to propose to Marianne. The narrators frequent polemics about the alleged inferiority of Africans are answered in the novel by a protagonist who constitutes the postcolonial subject as more than capable of everything Europeans can do. To the protagonists encounter with Europe belongs also a confrontation with European modernity, which is presented with some irony from the beginning of the novel but about which the protagonist also changes his mind in the course of the story. The Cameroonian school boys who sing Das Wandern ist des Mllers Lust, Deutschland, Deutschland ber alles, and Die Wacht am Rhein to inaugurate the Cameroonian Northern Railway (clearly interpretable as the

locomotive of history) while German official betrink themselves, are left behind when their railway car derails on the return trip to Douala. Undaunted, the young boys organize themselves and march through the night together back along the railway track until they are met by the protagonists father. Cameroonians do not need Germans to rescue them; they can do it for themselves. As the boy travels to Germany, he is fascinated by the steam ship, the massive train station, the automobiles, the newspapers, and the masses of the metropole. But even in Cameroon he had been puzzled by the heated struggles between the Catholic Church and his own Protestant Church directed by the Basler Mission, which both claimed to be Christian yet so readily defamed each other. The outbreak of World War I lends credence to his skepticism about the activities of Europeans who purport to be Christians. Pascal Grosse has argued in Eugenik, brgerliche Gesellschaft und Kolonialismus, that, because the French and Germans used colonial troops on European soil, Germans conceived that their enemies has declared race war on them, and clearly Misipo perceives a connection between the First World War and the war on the Negroes. This all, the protagonist asks despairingly, as expression of honor, freedom, fatherland and brotherly love? (1973: 156). Though, somewhat improbably, no single individual the protagonist encounters treats him with less than dignity and respect, groups of Germans increasingly jostle and harass him in public, and he delivers long discourses on the ignorance of Europeans about Africa and on humiliations suffered as a consequence of the campaign against the Black Horror and by people of African descent elsewhere, including in the southern U.S. (which arguably provided the model for many German racial policies). By the end of the novel the protagonist can respond to an ignorant German inquiry about wild men in Africa by contrasting to it the ridiculous gyrations of German shimmy-boys in a jazz club called Spleen: a modern and civilized dance of highest perfection! he remarks scornfully. Modernity has not delivered on its promises for people of African descent. The trope that very frequently nonetheless expresses the possibility of understanding and community between white and Black in postcolonial texts is that of love between a white and a Black partner: indeed, this protagonist declares: The marriage of love, the enormous NEVERTHELESS of man and wife, their will to the impossible, in spite of the difficulties, pain, and suffering of living together, to become and remain nevertheless one can be prevented or prohibited by no man on earth (1973: 198). Marianne may be regarded as a tennis-playing, motor-car driving modern girl of the nineteen-twenties, but in her erotic forwardness and passion

she also somewhat recalls the noble heroines of the Cameroonian epics the protagonist tells, who take upon themselves the authority to seek their own partners. It is interesting that, in the drawings that accompany the text, it is not possible to tell whether the dapper young man and the fashionable young woman are depicted as Black or white. Marianne decides for herself that she wishes the protagonist as her lover. European convention of course demands that he ask her parents for her hand, and it is only at this point that the novel becomes disappointing. It is Mariannes mother the Medizinrtin, earlier portrayed as ignorant about Africa and somewhat racist (and very unflatteringly sketched), who discovers the couple in passionate embrace, so it is to her the protagonist must appeal. African people are likewise of noble blood and Gods magnificent creatures (1973: 197), he proclaims, and astonishingly, the Medizinrtin concurs. Hopefully but not very convincingly the narrator concludes: Racism as ideological system is a special product of European civilization, but the true marriage of love is one of the pillars of eternal truth that finds an echo in every corner of our little planet (1973: 199). Where Misipos heart really lies is probably better identified with his protagonists deep rootedness in Cameroonian traditional culture, instilled in him by his non-German speaking grandmother (who is contrasted to his Europeanized parents) to insure that his European education does not estrange him from his African home, and it is tales of mighty African princes or horro once told by bards or korrongo of Waganna, another word for Cameroon, that the protagonist recounts to his German auditors. One might regard Misipos attraction to heroic pre-bourgeois tradition as another quality that links him to modernists like Yeats, Faulkner, or George. Here Misipos ambivalence about even African modernity comes clearly into view: Cameroonian horro, the narrator tells us, no longer break a lance for their beloved, but have now become salesmen who wrangle in trains over money matters. The tale that conquers Mariannes heart is that of a horro who woos and wins a kings daughter to become ruler himself, and despite his facility in things European, Misipos protagonist obviously models his own masculinity on that of the horro he so admires. Misipos subsequent publication, Korrongo: Das Lied der Waganna repeats, sometimes word-for-word, and further elaborates the traditional Cameroonian elements of his first novel. The text derives from a Cameroonian epic that relates events from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries: in a cycle of four narratives, the four destructions of Falaka, the capital of the Waganna, are recalled. In an introduction, the author explicitly compares his text to medieval European literatures tales of knights, troubadours, and Minnesang. But again these traditional stories are

placed within a fallen world, where heroes are no more, where korrongo now tell tales only in European bars, and where only the very old recall the heroic tales by the fire at night. The observation that Simon Gikandi made of early Anglophone East African literature might also apply to this text: it is a vague and tentative attempt, by an isolated colonial elite, to recuperate a precolonial African tradition in literary discourse (2004: 429). In the autobiographical novel written by Misipos son in 2001, the protagonist recounts that his father had found his hero in a bard by the name of Korrongo, seeking his refuge, his secret garden, in a sort of epic poem. . . . If the true poet is one who stirs and touches the soul, as Voltaire says, in the world of today he is also one who flirts unhappily with utopia (45). Beyond a doubt, Duala Misipo is able to use the literary strategies of modernism to elaborate new possibilities of postcolonial subjectivity. But his encounter with Europe and his own politics confront him with dilemmas for which it is impossible to find a satisfactory literary solution. Though Kuma Ndume III derives from a social background similar to Misipos and wrote his German plays less than a decade later than Misipos two texts, he speaks in a different literary form for a different African generation and also of consequences of an encounter between Europeans and Africans that are not so easily resolved, in literature or in life. The hereditary leader of the Bell family to which Misipo also belonged, Prince Kums Ndumbe III was born in Duala in 1946 and at the age of fifteen sent to Europe to be educated, attending high school in Munich and then completing his doctorate at the University of Lyons in 1975 with a dissertation entitled Que voulait Hitler en lAfrique: les plans secrets pour une Afrique fasciste 1944 1945. From 1979 to 1987 he taught German studies at the University of Yaound, then returned to the Otto Suhr Institut of the Free University of Berlin, where in 1989 he completed a Habilitation in politial science entitled Was will Bonn in Afrika? Zur Afrikapolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (What does Bonn want in Africa? On the Africa policies of the Federal Republic of Germany). With short interruptions Kuma Ndumbe III taught at the Otto Suhr Institut from 19902001, when, despite vigorous protests by students, the OSI (the biggest political science department in Europe) determined that budget constraints demanded the elimination of all instruction about Africa. Since 2002 he has lived in Douala. Kuma Ndumbe III has written no more creative literature after the early seventies, confining his very prolific writing to texts on policy and politics.

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Literarily the plays of Kuma Ndumbe III also embody the paradoxical encounter of African writers with European forms. His remarks on African literature in Was will Bonn in Afrika? suggest why his own writing aligns him with other anticolonial writers: African literature has an aggressive and uncomfortable effect on Europeans. It demands a confession of guilt and a change of behavior (1992: 352). The plays of Kuma Ndumbe III accordingly aim at provoking a reassessment of colonialist and neocolonialist assumptions and promoting a commitment to changing oppressive structures, often expressed via a celebration at the end of the play that expresses a new collective vision. His writing is also post- and anti-realist but indebted to other kinds of modernist antecedents. To my knowledge he is the only Germanophone African writer of plays, directing his writing to a collective audience, though it is not entirely clear of whom the members of the audience consist and what response he is seeking for them. (And indeed, the texts were not published until 2005.) On the one hand, his plays, like those of his German playwriting contemporaries Peter Weiss or Hans Magnus Enzensberger, obviously reveal the influence of Brecht in their use of projections and intertitles and their appeal to an audience who is not at all to be emotionally engaged in the plays developing plot. Songs and dance often interrupt the action, and very often his characters drop out of their roles to address the audience and each other. As in Brechts Lehrstcke, the audience can even be solicited for their own ideas about how the play should continue. In his use of allegorical types as figures and the often rambunctious action on the stage, the plays also recall Expressionism and Theater of the Absurd. In the manner for which Fredric Jameson argued, the plays of Kuma Ndumbe III are premised on the assumption that realism no longer suffices to comprehend the relationship of Europe to its colonies. As well, again somewhat like Brecht, Kuma Ndumbe III seems at times to turn to pre-bourgeois European forms like Grand Guignol or even Punch and Judy shows, as his figures vigorously insult or even assault each other. At the same time, Richard Bjornson, who interviewed Kuma Ndumbe III among many others for his erudite study of Cameroonian literature, maintains that the breaking of dramatic illusion, jokes on the stage, and audience contributions to staged events are both typical of traditional Cameroonian theater and are traits that can be found in the francophone Cameroonian plays written by playwrights who were contemporaries of Kums Ndumbe III. Probably closest to the thematic concerns of bourgeois realism is the last of the four German plays, Das Fest der Liebe: Die Chance der Jugend, written in March 1970, dedicated to Yvette Revellin, the French woman whom Kuma Ndumbe III loved during the revolutionary French

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events of 1968, and concerned with the relationship of love and politics. Nonetheless, of all the plays, bourgeois identity is here most fully drawn into question. Only two of the characters are identified at all, das Mdchen, and ein Schwarzer. The other three players have no specific names, and scene for scene roles revolve among all five, including the actors who play the girl and the Black man (all other players are white). Kuma Ndumbe III says in the stage directions, The identity is rather that of the whole group (2005b: 6). The play begins with ten to fifteen minutes of dancing by players and audience to music by Otis Redding, voices from the hall frequently interrupt the action, and by the end, as Kuma Ndumbe III directs, the entire hall becomes a stage, as audience members come to the stage to dance and actors mix with the spectators. Despite protests from their political group that they are wasting time, the girl and the Black man refuse to construct a clear dividing between public and private life and insist on the importance of their love, the other great revolutionary force of 1968. Yet, as accords with the resolutions of other plays by Kuma Ndumbe III, these utopian lovers also finally opt for politics, the girl leaving to fight for oppressed people in Greece and the African student joining a different but related struggle in South Africa. Most evidently an indictment of neocolonial European involvement in Africa is the play Kafra Biatanga: Tragdie Afrikas , written in January 1970. The title of the play obviously alludes to two tragic efforts at secession in Africa, the Belgian-supported secession of Katanga from the Congo in 1960 (resulting in the execution of Patrice Lumumba by the secessionist regime in 1961) and Biafras secession from Nigeria in 1967, as the authors transition of syllables in the countries names and Expressionist-inspired deployment of allegorical types reveals his commitment to a structural and widely generalizable understanding of political violence in Africa. Represented as types of their profession, a Petroleum Agent and a Uranium Agent persuade the President of an Industrial Nation that the secession of the Biatanga region from the nation of Kafra could loosen the economic hold of Kafras former colonizers and permit its own profitable exploitation of Biatangas natural resources. Peace is restored in Kafra only when the Industrial Nation installs a compromise cabinetall of whose ministers are in the hands of the Industrial Nation. In the last scene, all actors appear dancing on stage to recite the plays Brechtian moral: We learned one thing/The poor get poor/The rich get rich/Thats what we learned (2006a: 71). Ach Kamerun! Unsere alte deutsche Kolonie . . . , completed in January 1970, is directed more obviously at Germans alone. Subtitled a documentary play, the text begins with a

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German firms successful effort in 1868 to convince the Duala King Bell to grant a trade concession, the first step towards German colonization of Cameroon. In scenes that sometimes verge on slapstick, German administrators determine to expropriate the Cameroonians by moving them away from their hereditary homes on the river, claiming their presence imperils German health and cleanliness. When Duala Manga (i.e. Rudolph Duala Manga Bell, Cameroons colonial martyr) demands the right to represent their claims in Berlin, the answer is resounding laughter from a loudspeaker (2005a: 41). Duala Manga calls for rebellion, and in the plays last passage he and his secretary are sentenced to immediate death by hanging. Appended colonial documents substantiate the historical events depicted in the play. Here I would like to analyze the first of the plays of Kuma Ndumbe III, Lumumba 11., written in July 1968, at somewhat greater length, since the formal qualities manifest in all the plays are evident here and Kuma Ndumbe III very presciently addresses the course of African history most from colonialism to the present. The title figure draws upon the biography of the Congolese patriot assassinated shortly after independence to create the type of the African leader of anti-colonialist struggle but also explores the subsequent political course pursued by such leaders after their countries independence. Very ironically, the plays motto is drawn from Patrice Lumumbas own words: La Verit finira toujours par triompher (2006b: 5). Kuma Ndumbe III makes no concessions to European colonialism: in the first scene of this play, a European Governor praises Europa for sending her sons to rescue Africa from darkness and barbarism, as a projection reads: 1884: Berlin Conference. The European powers divide the African continent private property of the white man among themselves anew (2006b: 13). Mother Africa tries to rescue her son Lumumba, a figure initially representing the imprisoned African freedom fighter, by appealing to the Governors assistant, Schwarzweiss, who is willing to accept bribes but cannot override the will of the Governor, who demands the arrest of Mother Africa for bribery. At the end of the second scene the projection appears: Dear spectators: how could this scene continue? Examples from everyday life (2006b: 21). Speaking from prison under a projection that recalls National Socialism in maintaining Das Maul halten macht frei (2006b: 22), Lumumba appeals to the European values of libertas equalitas fraternitas, but, la Aim Csaires Discours sur le colonialisme, his African guards instead don white masks to debate how many Jews they are willing to trade for trucks.

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Upon his release from prison, Lumumba is visited by two friends, the Communist and the Capitalist. The Communist proclaims, Comrade, we must set to work immediately (2006b: 28) to build communism, but Lumumba protests that first his people must be asked what they want. The Capitalist maintains that Commodities must be sold somehow and also doesnt care to inquire what Lumumbas people themselves want. Lumumba understands: The business people come to squeeze money from us, the idealists come to impose their ideas. . . . Nobody comes for us. . . . Your world is corrupt (2006b: 35). Though Lumumba proclaims that truth will nonetheless prevail, a voice from a loudspeaker declaims: Lumumba, lets bet. Corruption will win in the end (2006b: 36). The next several scenes prove that extra-diegetic voice correct. Herr Profitler, assumes control of the Presidents palace and bargains for government support and sexual favors in return for medical care, credit, scholarships, and jobs, and Lumumba succumbs to corruption as well. But though he has played the role of the corrupt leader, in the last scene he undertakes a putsch in his country to reinstall truth and justice. Yet the loudspeaker proclaims that the Secretariat of International Corruption has already bribed the Putsch Committee to do away with Lumumba. A female figure maintains: You wont be hanged in the theater. No, dear spectators, were not that gruesome. We dont want to spoil your evening (2006b: 71). But, though the plays frequently jolly praise of corruption recalls The Three Penny Opera, an ironic resolution like the messenger from the king who appears at the end of Brechts play to pardon Mackie Messer is not granted to Lumumba. Instead, beweaponed soldiers suddenly flood the stage, and the General declares: The world is not a theater. Shoot him! (2006b: 71). Kuma Ndumbe III may possibly find more satisfactory literary forms to formulate his critique of the consequences of Europes encounter with Africa, but reality is such that a literary happy end is not possible. As Brecht put it in The Three Penny Opera, Die Verhltnisse, die sind nicht so (431). In a survey of postcolonial literature in Germany that I wrote for the Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, I determined. that most authors from formerly-colonized countries writing in German today (of whom there are many more than earlier scholars had assumed) still borrow their representational strategies from a rather unimaginative realism, not yet even rising to the level of creative innovation apparent in the texts of Duala Misipo and Kuma Ndumbe III (with whose texts it is unlikely they are familiaran archive of postcolonial literature does not yet exist

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in the German language). However, these postcolonial authors have for the first time ruptured what had seemed to be a necessary connection between the German language and the German nation. For the first time, to my knowledge, such authors regard German simply as a world language, at their disposal like English and French, using it to write about subjects that may have nothing to do with Germany at all. It may be possible that, by retrieving the writing of Dualla Misipo and Kuma Ndumbe III, we can begin to elaborate a transnational tradition of German writing that could also make it possible to imagine a heterogeneous Germanness beyond the limitations of jus sanguinis and the nation-state. Quite often modernism has been seen as the art form of an alienated postcolonial cultural elite, eager to master European forms at the expense of local traditions of writing and thus placed at odds with the political project of decolonization. But, as we have seen, with Duala Misipo and Kuma Ndumbe III, that is precisely not the case, and their texts succeed in combining European modernuist forms and African tradition to bring into being new possibilities of literary expression. As Gikandi concludes: [M]odernism, having freed the European subject from the tutelage of tradition, also opened the space in which the other could become a self-reflective subject (2006: 423).

WORKS CITED

Aitken, Robbie (2009). E-mails to author, 24 and 30 April. Bjornson, Richard (1991). The African Quest for Freedom and Identity: Cameroonian Writing and the National Experience. Bloomington, Indiana. Brecht, Bertolt (1967). Die Dreigrosschen Oper. In: Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt am Main. Vol. 2, 393-497. Csaire, Aim (1955). Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris.

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Simon Gikandi (2004). East African literature in English. In: F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi (eds.). Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge, vol. 2, 425-444. ----- (2006). Preface: Modernism in the World. In: Modernism/Modernity 13.3, 419-424. Grosse, Pascal (2000). Eugenik, brgerliche Gesellschaft und Kolonialismus in Deutschland 18501918. Frankfurt am Main. Jameson, Fredric (1990). Modernism and Imperialism. In: Nationalism, Colonialism, Literature: Eagleton, Jameson, Said. Minneapolis, Minnesota, 43-65. Joseph, George (1986). Cameroon. In: Albert Grard (ed.). European-Language Writing in SubSaharan Africa. Budapest, 151-158. Kuma Ndumbe III (2005a). Ach Kamerun! Unsere alte deutsche Kolonie . . . Berlin. ----- (2005b). Das Fest der Liebe: Die Chance der Jugend. Berlin. ----- (2006a). Kafra-Biatanga: Tragdie Afrikas: Ein Stck in elf Szenen. Berlin.

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----- (1961a). Leo Frobenius, the Tacitus of Africa. In: Prsence africaine 37.2, 39-44.

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Professor Sara Lennox German and Scandinavian Studies University of Massachusetts Amherst Amherst, Massachusetts 01003 USA