Tanga: litterary imagology of a African city

Abstract

From a multi-disciplinary approach of Mongo Beti's Ville Cruelle, the urban morphology of a colonial Africa indicates a comparative analysis between its ethno-historic and sociologic aspects and the "imagotypes" of a fictional city. Based on the literary imagology of Tanga, this paper discusses how contributions from cultural studies and literary criticism may dialog with social science theories contemporary to Beti's novel, published in 1954. Methodologically, the research evoked the "imago-types" of Tanga's urban society to analyze them according to the mid-twentieth-century Western imaginary and African context. Scholarly works of ethnology (Leiris, 1951), sociology (Balandier, 1951), and psychology (Mannoni, 1950) were essential for approaching mid-century African literature and French social sciences and noticing the early murmur of an anti-colonial glance in both fictional and scientific discourse.