Le Vieux Negre et la Medaille

This is the first novel I've read from Ferdinand Oyono, which was first published in 1956. In this fiction story, readers follow Meka, an old African, who after giving away his lands to the Church and losing his 2 sons to WWII receives a Medal of Friendship from the White French Occupier. Prior to receving his medal, he's all excited about it and is his entire extended family and tribe, but during and after receiving the medal, he slowly realizes that this is all a mascarade, that he lost everything for nothing, but he's too old to do anything about it.

I suppose that when the book was first published in 1956, it would have been a major African literature event that emphasizes anti-colonial sentiment among Africans. However, when looking at it from a 2019 perspective, there are other novels better than this one. Still, the novel may still be good from an anthropoligcal view because there are so many outdated expressions no longer used nowadays and the novel describes also how Africans lived during the first half of the 20th century.

I guess this was a good novel, which cannot survive time that had passed.