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(Based on conversations with Sony Labou Tansi)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
I'll say first why I write. It intrigues me, I wonder why I write. How it is that I write and why it's so important. I take this as an act of life. One thing that scares me as a writer is a Lari song “ndombi ku ndombi sadidi mukanda komanda diandi Matsoua Ndele.” That can be translated as “even a black can write, hey, things are progressing. “ In the beginning going to school was considered an enormous act, it was civilization, it was the very center of civilization, and writing a letter for a black person, a poor black, was a grandiose thing. It was in Matsoua's time, in the forties, that people sang this song in the pool to make rubber.
* Sony Labou Tansi, L'autre monde, écrits inédits, “Postface parlée” (Paris, © Éditions Revue Noire, 1997). Posthumous publication. All the texts reproduced here come from this work (pages 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147; 9; 21, 22).
1. Translator's note: There is a witty but alas untranslatable pun here on the words cent (hundred) and sans (without), which are pronounced the same way in French. Tansi's point is that the reason he was so bad at French dicta tion when he started school was that he wrote phonetically and so failed to distinguish between words like cent and sans.
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