A00043 - Rene Philombe, Cameroonian Novelist, Poet, Playwright, and Journalist

 René Philombé (René Philombe), pen name of Philippe Louis Ombedé (b. November 13, 1930, Ngaoundere, Cameroon – d. October 25, 2001, Yaounde, Cameroon), born in the City of Ngaoundere, was a Cameroonian writer, journalist, poet, novelist, and playwright who mostly wrote in French. He was one of the founders of the Association of Cameroonian Poets and Writers (APEC) of which he was the secretary for 20 years. He received the Mottart Prize from the Academie Francaise and the Fonlon-Nichols prize from the African Literature Association.

René Philombe's father was Nkoulou, writer-performer, a descendant of the Nkoulou, Batschenga chiefs. His mother was Princess Berthe Manyan, granddaughter of Tidadi, king of the Babouté. His name received at birth was Yaka Nkoulou, but upon arrival of a white priest, his father renamed him to Philippe Louis Ombedé, whom the author transformed into a pen name René Philombe : rené (de renaître) Phi-L-Ombe, sometimes written in French with accent: René Philombé.

Philombe began high school in Yaounde in 1945. He became a Marxist there and was dismissed from the school in 1946. He continued as an autodidact and followed correspondence courses, among others at the school of arts and sciences in Paris. His first publications were from this time. His Araignée disgracie won a prize for the best tale from the Committee of Cultural Expression of France overseas. He also founded a cultural association in his father's village, where he then lived.

In 1949 or 1950, Philombe was admitted to the competitive examination for police secretary and became a police officer in Douala. Straddling two cultures, soaked in French literature and texts from the Negritude movement, he was both a nationalist and a Marxist, and he was secretly engaged in the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC). He attended, among other things, a pan-Cameroonian assembly in 1951. This earned him a disciplinary correction but did not prevent him from being in the first class of the Yaoundé police academy in 1952.

In 1955, struck by poliomyelitis which left his legs paralyzed for life, Philombe had to leave the police service. He then devoted himself to Cameroonian literature on which he began a documentation which would result years later, in 1984, in the publication of the monumental book, The Cameroonian book and its authors: a contribution to the literary history of the United Republic of Cameroon from 1895 to the present day with a bio-bibliographic record of the authors.

Philombe wrote Lettres de ma cambuse (published in 1964) in his first years as a paralytic.  In this book, Philombe provides observations of the life of his village, in the same vein as Lettres de mon moulin by Alphonse Daudet. In 1957, he created a French newspaper, The voice of the citizen, and a newspaper in Ewondo (the language of the forest people of Cameroon), Bebela ebug. He founded the Association of Cameroonian Poets and Writers (APEC) with some friends in 1960 and acted as its secretary from 1960 to 1981.

Cameroon became independent in 1960 under the first president Ahmadou Ahidjo of the Union Camerounais. Ahidjo considered the members of the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC) as masquisards or rebels. René Philombe was subjected to censorship, then he was put in prison for several months in 1961. There he wrote Choc anti-choc: a novel in poems which would not be accepted for publication until 1978. In 1963, Philombe was accused of having recreated the UPC and he returned to prison.

Philombe's first books were published by Éditions CLE in Yaoundé, created in 1963 with the help of Dutch and German Protestant churches. For greater freedom of publication, and for the sake of promoting Cameroonian literature, René Philombe created his own publishing house Semences Africaines in 1972, which allowed him to edit his own texts for a large part which had remained unpublished until then.

In 1965, Philombe received the Mottart Prize from the Academie Francaise for all of his work.

In 1993, he was the first, along with Mongo Beti, to receive the Fonlon-Nichols Prize from the African Literature Association.

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René Philombe (b. November 13, 1930, Ngaoundere, Cameroon — d. October 25, 2001, Yaoundé, Cameroon) was a Cameroonian novelist, poet, playwright, and journalist. The Cameroon Tribune called him “one of the most influential personalities in the new wave of creative writing in Cameroon.”

Philombe, a cultural and political activist from his teens, became a policeman in 1949. He unionized the police and became their union secretary in Douala. In the mid-1950s, after he was permanently crippled by spinal disease, he began writing seriously. His Lettres de ma cambuse (1964; Tales from My Hut, 1977), which he had written in 1957, won the Prix Mottard of the Academie Francaise. His other published works include Sola, ma chérie (1966; “Sola, My Darling”), a novel about seemingly unjust marriage customs; Un Sorcier blanc à Zangali (1970; “A White Sorcerer in Zangali”), a novel about the effect of a missionary’s clash with the colonial administration in a small village; Choc anti-choc (1978), “a novel made of poems”; and Africapolis (1978), a tragedy. The latter two are both thinly veiled allegories of life under a malevolent dictatorship.

In 1960 Philombe was a co-founder of the National Association of Cameroonian Poets and Writers, and he remained its general secretary until 1981. Many of his patriotic literary activities earned him long periods in prison, in spite of his infirmities. In 1981 he was once again released under house arrest, but all of his manuscripts were retained.