That’s What Little Boys Are Made Of

Early in Emmanuel Dongala’s Little Boys Come from the Stars, Matapari, the young Congolese protagonist, confides, “Honestly, I was almost never born. Maman left the hospital with me still in her womb.” As the youngest of triplets, baby Matapari, whose name means “trouble,” is an anomaly in his village. The midwife and local amateur mystic suspects he is a vengeful ancestor reincarnate, while the town priest stages an exorcism on the baby.

Yet life in Matapari’s small Congolese village is not all traditional African magicians and self-important Catholic missionaries, characters that have become almost standard in African post-colonial fiction since Chinua Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart. Set in the 1980s and 1990s amid political turbulence in the Congo Republic, Matapari’s childhood is one where government upheavals are played out on television, where Coca-Cola infiltrates local grocery markets and where Dragonball Z and Terminator movies have as much clout as provincial folklore. As in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and, more locally, the Nigerian novel Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, Matapari’s childhood, from his “miraculous” birth in 1980 through the beginnings of Congo’s 1997 civil war, mirrors the nation’s own coming-of-age.

Perhaps the most miraculous thing about Little Boys Come from the Stars, however, is not the unlikely birth of its hero, but the birth of the novel itself. In 1997, civil war erupted in the Congo between the supporters of rival presidential candidates (derisively referred to in the novel as “Professor P-75,” the pseudo-scientist and “Tata Tollah,” the maniacal religious demagogue). The author, then a professor of chemistry at the University of Brazzaville in the Congo, rushed back to the Congo from a sojourn in Connecticut to search for his 14-year-old daughter. Soon, Dongala himself was stranded in a remote village, scavenging the forest for food.

It was then that a group of international writers, among them Phillip Roth, came to the rescue of Dongala. Roth had met the author in 1980 during one of his visits to the U.S. and the two formed a lasting friendship. Although Dongala was in town for business related to his work as a chemist, he was writing extensively, and his first book, Un Fusil dans le Main, Une Poeme dans la Poche (A Gun in the Hand, a Poem in the Pocket) had already won him prizes for the best French novel written by a non-Frenchman. When Roth heard Dongala was trapped in war-torn Congo, he drew on the lobbying power of Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and writer William Styron, among others, to send him the all-important visas that would allow him and his family to evacuate. Roth also secured a professorship for Dongala at Simon’s Rock College of the Bard in the Berkshires in Massachusetts where he now teaches chemistry.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Dongala’s Little Boys Come from the Stars (translated from the French Les Petits Garcons Naissent Aussi des Etoiles), his first book out of exile, reads as a political satire. Through the eyes of 15-year-old Matapari, we get a naïve, Candide-like account of Congolese politics, especially from Matapari’s impressions of his Uncle Boula Boula, the lapdog extraordinaire of the regime-of-the-moment. During a visit from the “President” (actually a Communist dictator) and his officials, Matapari remarks, “What struck me most during the visit of these ambassadors of the Man-Always-Proven-Right-by-History was Uncle Boula Boula’s activism. He never told me he was a Party member, and yet, presto, there he was with a medallion in his buttonhole…It was only then that I understood how modest my Uncle Boula Boula had been, since he had concealed from me all these things he was now telling this high government official, for example, the fact that he had done serious university studies.” The best parts of the novel are like this, bubbling with youthful perceptiveness and humor. Dongala’s evocation of Matapari’s early teenage years, with its agonizing mixture of hero-worship and romantic political musings, is occasionally dead-on.

However, much of the novel slips into narrative that resembles a young teenager’s voice a little too closely. Each of the chapters reads as an isolated episode, and together they are a jumble of modestly-interesting anecdotes, with little attempt at a flowing plot. Matapari’s voice can go from the ingenuously naïve to the foolishly simplistic, occasionally succumbing to predictable sermons on the merits of democracy and education. Uncle Boula Boula eventually finds himself on the wrong side of the political carousel and is imprisoned after a mock court case. After leading a revolt for democracy, Matapari’s father is also thrown in jail. During a rally to free his father, Matapari asks, “Why were men making other men suffer? These people who only wanted to express themselves and who were merely asking for Papa’s release? But actually, weren’t these people really asking for democracy?…And suddenly I had a revelation, a moment of enlightenment: We were fighting for freedom, we were fighting for democracy.” Matapari’s teary-eyed enlightenment is so obviously trite and staged, one can only hope that it sounded more sophisticated in the French original.

Matapari is a likable narrator, however, and the antics of Uncle Boula Boula steal the show. If you can ignore the political flag-waving, the book makes for light and lively reading. But those looking for an insightful look at contemporary Africa will likely be disappointed: Little Boys Come from the Stars is more a charming story of boyhood interspersed with political satire, than vice versa.

Little Boys Come From the Stars

by Emmanuel Dongala

translated by Joel Rejouis, Val Vinokurov

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

246 pp., $22