The latest addition to my website is Georges Ngal‘s Giambatista Viko ou Le Viol du discours africain [Giambatista Viko or the Rape of African Discourse]. Ngal’s first novel is about the struggle of writing that first novel. Giambatista Viko teaches at an institute of higher learning in what was then Zaïre. He and his colleagues discuss endlessly the nature of literature and, in particular, African writing versus Western (particularly French) writing. African writing is essentially fable writing, set neither in any particular time nor place and using elements such as magic and fantasy and with plenty of bloodshed and betrayal. In the second part, Viko is hauled before a strange court, possibly in the afterlife, where he is on trial for betraying African literature by being too Western. It is all quite clever but it does not really work for me.