It’s a page-turner for lovers of African literature. After six editions, the Orange Foundation is putting an end to the Orange Book Prize in Africa (Pola), which rewarded authors and their publishers on the continent. In six years, the Pola had become a reference. Furthermore, the foundation is also abandoning its French prize, created in 2009. This withdrawal from the literary sphere risks causing a stir.
Both in form and in substance, the decision of the Orange Foundation surprised the members of the jury of the Orange Book Prize in Africa (Pola).
The prize disappears without the foundation having taken the trouble to inform the members of the jury in advance, criticizes one of them, and even less so the multiple local committees which, in French-speaking African countries, carried out the essential work of selecting the works. It took outraged email exchanges between the jury, chaired by the Ivorian Véronique Tadjo, and the new General Delegate of the Orange Foundation, Hafida Genfound, for the latter to take up her pen to justify her decision. The foundation now wishes to refocus on education in schools through associations.
The end of the only African prize with a decolonial spirit
It’s her choice, but she abandons the only African prize with a decolonial spirit, since it rewarded, since 2019, an author and a publishing house from the continent. A prize that has become, in just a few years, as essential as its French version, which also disappears after 16 editions.
The Pola had notably highlighted the Cameroonian author Djaïli Amadou Amal, who subsequently won the Goncourt for high school students in France.
Dibakana Mankessi, last winner
On May 18 in Rabat, it was the Congolese Dibakana Mankessi who received the 6th Pola for his novel The Psychoanalyst of Brazzaville. Dibakana Mankessi’s third novel, the work evokes the life of Dr Kaya in Brazzaville in 1960, where he received in his psychoanalysis office all the country’s intellectual, political, military and religious elites. The Congolese are independent and this independence leads to behaviors and anxieties that are difficult to admit, except in the privacy of the cabinet imagined by Dibakana Mankessi.
“What interested me was to understand what was going on in their heads, and I thought that the psychoanalyst, at least his couch, was the best place allowing the freedom of speech,” explains the laureate. . Independence and its psychological shock to understanding today’s Africa is what appealed to the jury of the Orange Book Prize in Africa, and its president, the Ivorian novelist Véronique Tadjo. “It’s a very ambitious book, a fresco of funny or interesting characters, fictional or real, and it’s quite a wonderful work that we really liked.” It is less a question of madness and medicine in this choral fresco than of liberated speech. Learn to confess, in short, to understand yourself better and move forward better.
Rfi
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