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Chicago punk band Houseboy performing live at the Double Door in Chicago, IL early 1997. Ace Cowden - Vox/GuitarBrett "Freese" Friesen - DrumsNolan Mcguire -...
- 20 min
- 40
- Fross B Freese
REDCAT and The Broad present the international debut of artist William Kentridge’s durational performance Houseboy. Based on the 1956 novel by Cameroonian diplomat Ferdinand Oyono, the performance explores themes of historical participation, archival memory, and post-colonial identity. This performance uses the protagonist’s diary and ...
Nov 17, 2022 · November 17, 2022 @ 8:30 pm - 10:00 pm - REDCAT and The Broad present the international debut of artist William Kentridge’s durational performance Houseboy. Based on the 1956 novel by Cameroonian diplomat Ferdinand Oyono, the performance explores themes of historical participation, archival memory, and post-colonial identity. This performance uses the protagonist’s diary and personal ...
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Cameroon after World War II
Houseboy takes place after World War II, during the final phase of French rule, shortly before today’s Cameroon won independence on January 1, 1960. During the nineteenth century, Britain and France had competed for control over most of West Africa. Germany, eager to establish itself as a colonial power too, staked out Cameroonian territory. In 1844, after signing treaties with local rulers, the Germans claimed an area as the colony of Kamerun. Germany’s control would persist into the twentie...
BRINGING “CIVILIZATION” TO THE CAMEROONIANS
Houseboy turns mid-1900s perceptions inside out, casting European civilization as confused and seemingly senseless. The novel achieves this through subtle irony, as in the following revelation about a chief, whose family fell under the control of first the Germans, then the French. His family is dragged through two world wars by so-called civilized European nations, which, from the African point of view evinced by the narrative, appear to be something less than civilized: “When the Germans ma...
Missionaries in Cameroon
Preceded by Presbyterian and Baptist missions, the first Catholic mission to be established in Cameroon appeared in Marienberg in 1889 under the auspices of German missionaries, the Pallotin Fathers. By 1913 the Pallotiner Mission counted 19 European missionaries and over 12,000 students in its schools. Unlike the Muslims of northern Cameroon, who wielded no state power in the colonial period, Christian missionaries worked closely with the colonial authorities. Representatives of the Catholic...
Plot summary
The novel opens with a preface in which a narrator describes his last night of a holiday in Spanish Guinea before he is to return to his home in Cameroon. After the customary meal of fish and cassava, he settles in for an evening of storytelling and music with his host. Suddenly they hear drums in the distance, announcing the impending death of a “Frenchman” (their term for the French-speaking Gabonese and Cameroonians) in the neighboring village. The narrator, compelled by pity, decides to g...
CITY LAYOUTS IN FRENCH WEST AFRICA
In most towns in French West Africa, the Europeans lived in their own quarter, with running water, electricity, and spacious homes located near the government offices. The blacks who served them lived in an African quarter, in small, densely built homes without running water. Their restriction to an identifiable zone enabled the police and colonial administrators to keep the African population under surveillance. In the novel, Toundi’s diary gives this scenario a telling twist: “In Dangan the...
Two faces of “savagery.”
Literary scholar Chris Dunton describes Oyono’s African protagonists as “wrapped in a dream of assimilation” and “driven by the desire to become a ’somebody’ under the colonial regime” (Dunton in Cox, p. 643). In Toundi’s case, the dream of assimilation becomes a nightmare, which ends only with his death. The novel exposes the hypocrisy of the French colonizers as well as the gullibility of the Africans foolish enough to buy into the assimilationist myth. Literary scholar Leonard Kibera conte...
Cox, D. Brian, ed. African Writers. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997. Eyongetah Mgbuagbaw, Tambi, Robert Brain, and Robin Palmer. A History of the Cameroon. Essex: Longman Group, 1974. John, Elerius Edet. The Rise of the Camerounian Novel in French. Topics in African Literature. Vol. 2. Lagos: Paico, 1986. Jones, Eldred Durosimi, ed....
Aug 11, 2021 · Introduction: A Cameroonian writer and diplomat, Ferdinand Oyono lived between 1929 and 2010. He is best known for his first novel, Houseboy, originally written in French and published in 1956. The novel has as its background the colonial experience in francophone Africa. Its narrative punctures the ideals of the French assimilation policy and exposes the
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Developed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, South Africa, and directed by William Kentridge, Houseboy is based on the 1956 novel by Cameroonian diplomat Ferdinand Oyono. Told through the diary of the protagonist Toundi Ondoua, Houseboy makes use of an ensemble cast to explore themes of narrative history, archival memory, and ...
