Georges Simenon was a Belgian writer best known for his detective stories. He wrote literary novels, too, like this one published in 1933. It’s about a young French man, Joseph Timar, who goes to Gabon to take a position with a French company operating there. He finds himself in a world where there are three sets of rules: the official guidelines for the French colonists; the way the expatriates manage to get things done; and the norms of the native people. Timar gets himself into a situation where all three come into conflict.
Naturally, the treatment of the locals at the hands of the colonists is despicable, and Simenon wants to make sure the readers see that.
Much of this story is about the damage that the colonists do to the land – and how it ends up damaging them as people in the process. There’s a great passage: “He wasn’t even a real settler, since he didn’t speak the local tongue and hadn’t shot down the ducks flying over the canoe. He’d given away cigarettes. He hadn’t hit anyone. He hadn’t pointed out the places to stop at. He was an amateur, a mere passerby.”
It is hard to learn about a place when you have not been immersed in it, and that’s hard, too. The colonial experiment was mostly successful in Canada, the United States, and Mexico, but it failed miserably in Africa. This, despite the fact that it was the same people, the French and the English and the Spanish, who did the colonizing. Why are we here in North America so rich while they are so poor?
Gabon has been independent of France since 1960 is wealthier than the average nation in West Africa, with a per-capita income of $19,200, although inequality is great. The country produces oil, timber, and manganese. It has a stable government of questionable democratic status.
It’s a good place for multinationals in extraction industries. It was not a good place for Joseph Timar.
