Capturing the Spirit of Central Africa: Five Defining Books
For #ReadingAfrica 2026, we’ve invited several writers to share guest posts featuring their “5 Must-Reads” from a specific region of Africa. Feel free to join us over on social media for the weeklong celebration of African writing in all its forms.
What are the five books to read from Central Africa? This is a question I have always asked myself. A tricky question, because the fortune of books changes rapidly, but also, books seem to lose their importance and will maybe wane away from the public space in the very near future. Answering the question can therefore not take popularity as the benchmark, particularly because the measurement of the popularity of an African book is not, and has never been, the bookshop, but its inscription in national school curricula. Not the best-seller list, but the Education Ministry decides what the most important books of the country and of a generation are. And because Central African countries were mostly colonized by France and Belgium, and thus are French-speaking countries, the unity of their school curricula since colonialism not only installed premier French or Belgian writers in people’s consciousness, it also enshrined a few Africans, particularly of the first generation after independence, in minds.
In all, school curricula always preferred books published in French, because literature was the tool through which the teaching of the French language was conducted. Therefore, short excerpts in high school language manuals transformed the poetry of Victor Hugo into manifestoes, as they would do with the poetry of Tchikaya u’Tamsi, or the prose of Mongo Beti and Ferdinand Oyono after independence. This is particularly important to underline because the arc of history presents us today with an increased importance given in the local public scene, not to French but to local languages—and even if people read books less and less, they read on their phones more and more; they interact with texts, and of course they write more than before. Choosing what are the most important books today will therefore require finding a balance between those written in Western languages and in local ones. As such, the criterion I would choose is the significance of the book in shaping people’s consciousness—be it their individual consciousness, or that of the country or region. Below are the books that I think had such an impact:
1) The Scriptures, translated into local languages, thus the many translations of the Bible. I take Ntshob Nsi, its translation into my mother tongue, Medumba (1926-1992), as my benchmark, because the translations are multiple, and each translation has its own mark that can be measured vertically inside the culture that absorbed it, and sometimes through the number of sects or churches it inspired. I have my own leather-bound Kàn Nswe (New Testament), passed to me by my now-deceased father, and read in it from time to time. There are very few books that codified local African languages like Bible translations did for African languages that were mostly spoken, and that is their first achievement: they carried mundane words, but also the most difficult concepts into local languages. As such, they made it possible for every language in which there is a translation (Kikongo, 1905; Tshiluba, 1927, etc.) to become a public tongue, which means to be read and written beyond ethnic enclosures, and for a few, as we see more and more, to become national, and even official languages. Today’s newspapers or internet pages carry the torch further.
2) The Christian songbook, and for Medumba, the Njobkwi Ben-Kristo. The first Medumba translation of Christian songbooks dates from 1926, and it has been in circulation since then, the latest edition that is sold on the Bangangte market having the date 2026 stamped on its unique, classically green cover. Next to it is the quizzical phrase, ‘Avec concordance internationale’. ‘With international correspondence.’ 2026, that is a hundred years of printed circulation. No other Cameroonian book can claim such printing history. Because those songbooks codified how local languages would be written (Latin script, few diacritic signs), they also, in effect, standardized most of them by choosing a specific dialect of a language (the Fioti dialect for Kikongo), and this, in place of states that remain paralyzed in front of the multiple tongues of the Central African region. To this day, the Christian songbooks are quite often the primary instrument for the learning of reading and writing in local languages; the first intellectuals, the first conscience advisors, remains the pastor or prophet in many places.
3) The Nsa’ngam, by Ibrahim Njoya: it is a 500-page history of the Bamum people, written between 1908 and 1933 in Fumban, the capital of the kingdom. The historical dimension of the document, for which there is so far only a French translation, remains to be measured, but its importance lies first in the fact that Njoya used a writing system of his own invention, the akauku, to write it, with the help of an array of scribes. There are many oral histories in Central Africa, but most of them are oral narrations that were told by bards, recorded, transcribed, and published in books written either in Western languages or with the Latin writing system, by intellectuals trained in Western universities. The uniqueness of Njoya’s book is that the writing system he invented to write it was banned by the French in 1920, as they introduced their language policy called assimilation, which we, in the Eastern part of the Central African region, still suffer from, thus making the Nsa’ngam confidential.
4) Indyohesha-Birahi (1949), a long poem in segments by Alexis Kagame, is one of the many books he wrote in Kinyarwanda, and the only one that is popularly available, with a French translation attached to it. It is important to tap into such fundamental work today, not only to understand the cultural depth of Rwanda, and of the whole Central African region (even if this would be an anthropological, colonial, generalizing gesture), but to frame the roots of the Western and Southern parts of the Central African region that, from the DRC to the Central African Republic, are highly comfortable in the public use of their national languages, be they Sango, Lingala, or Kiswahili.
5) Bantoe-filosofie / La Philosophie bantoue (1945) by Placide Tempels, a slim book first written in Dutch, published serially in Equatoria and Band, in book form in French translation done by Dr. A. Rubbens, by Lovania in today’s Lubumbashi, and then in English done by the Reverend Colin King (making it an international phenomenon). Generations of African intellectuals, Mudimbe, Towa, Eboussi, Mbembe, etc., have sharpened their minds on its quite transparent pages, while at the same time rejecting the paternalism of its author. And yet, the words and concepts he uses – the word ‘Bantu’, the word ‘Muntu’– have remained deeply inscribed in what still accounts for African philosophy, ethics, and even politics, to such an extent that when Desmond Tutu speaks of ‘Ubuntu’ as a way to overcome Apartheid, one barely remembers the Catholic priest who, in the depths of Belgian colonialism, first asserted that the Bantu languages bear a specific mode of thinking.
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