Reading regional mobilities, Boko Haram and African urban youth in Max Lobe’s Loin de Douala and Hemley Boum’s Les Jours viennent et passent

Abstract

Two novels by Cameroonian writers came out within a few months of each other, each portraying a cross-country journey from the city of Douala in the South to the troubled region of the Far North of Cameroon. Max Lobe’s Loin de Douala (2018) and Hemley Boum’s Les Jours viennent et passent (2019) differ in many ways, but the common journey North in a context of widespread attacks by the terrorist group Boko Haram in the region in the mid-2010s shows a need for a literary imaginary that includes regional mobilities and current societal issues in Cameroon. I argue that the fictional regional journeys undertaken by the characters uncover not only a different kind of embodied mobility, but also questions of religious extremism and opportunities for the youth by transporting the characters to the locations where these issues are most pressing, and perhaps least publicly discussed. Spatial proximity becomes a way to change the themes the writers’ fiction embrace, to “get closer” as it were to some of the key questions of the region writ large.

Keywords:

• Cameroonian literature
• terrorism
• spatiality
• intra-African mobility
• border

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I borrow from Mahmood Mamdani, who distinguishes terrorism from other forms of violence by its civilian targets and the fact that collateral damage is the “very point” (770) of terrorism. By that definition, the word befits Boko Haram as it appears in the novels.

2 The question of whether Boko Haram became more of a regional movement over time, or whether it always was one can be posed, as Abdul Raufu Mustapha shows that the North of Cameroon was always implicated in the historical development of Boko Haram, as early as 2003 or 2004.

3 Both novels were published in English translation by indie presses, Two Lines Press for Boum and HopeRoad Publishing in the UK and Other Press in the US for Lobe. If we take into consideration the infamous number that literature in translation only accounts for 3% of all books published in the US, it is interesting to note that these two novels were Lobe and Boum’s first novels translated into English, which points not only to their growing influence in the world of Francophone African literature, but also perhaps at a global thematic interest. Of note in English, several books and novels that tackle the question of Boko Haram, including Irish writer Edna O’Brien’s Girl (2019) and Helon Habila’s non-fiction essay The Chibok Girls (2016) came out around the same time at Lobe and Boum’s novels. Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday (2016) evokes a Boko-Haram like insurgency (McCain and Kendhammer 171), written by a writer from the region. In French and more recently, Djaïli Amadou Amal’s 2022 novel Coeur du Sahel also takes place in Maroua in the Far North region of Cameroon and discusses the consequences of Boko Haram’s presence in the region.

4 In 2015, the magazine Jeune Afrique reported that the Nationale III was officially named one of the most dangerous roads in the world by the UN. Boum’s earlier novel Si d’aimer also featured the deadly highway.

5 By 2016, there were 200,000 internally displaced people from the Far North region of Cameroon, the wide majority of whom fled their homes because of Boko Haram, according to a report by the International Organization for Migration.

6 McCain and Kendhammer confirm that global media attention and outrage has done little to provide concrete support to local victims of Boko Haram (21).

7 A February 2023 report published by the UN Development Programme has found that only 17% of the respondents cited “the religious ideas of the group at the time of joining” as a primary reason to join a violent extremist group. Even though those groups, such as Boko Haram, heavily levy religion in their propaganda and to justify their actions, religion is only third as a reason to join such groups. By contrast, the first two reasons cited by respondents were first employment opportunities (25%) and then joining with a family or friend (22%).

8 All translations of Tcheuyap and Tchumkam’s work are my own unless otherwise noted.

9 For more on the controversial use of a concept so rooted in nineteenthth and early twentiethth-century Europe in the context of African literature, see Ralph A. Austen’s article “Struggling with the African Bildungsroman.” Austen makes a case of a contextualized use of the concept for African narratives of self-formation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marion Tricoire

Marion Tricoire is Assistant Professor of French at Grinnell College, where she specializes in Sub-Saharan African Literature in French. Her research interests also include urban humanities, in particular urban novels and literary cities, migration and diaspora studies, queerness in literature and processes of translation.