Waiting For The Wild Beasts To Vote - Softcover

Ahmadou Kourouma; Frank Wynne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099283824 ISBN 13: 9780099283829

Publisher: Vintage, 2004

Synopsis

Ahmadou Kourouma's remarkable novel is narrated by Bingo, a West African sora - storyteller and king's fool. Over the course of five nights he tells the life story of Koyaga, President and Dictator of the Gulf Coast. Orphaned at the age of seven, Koyaga grows up to be a terrible hunter; he fights mythical beasts, and is a shape-shifter, capable of changing himself into beasts and birds. He fights in the French colonial armies, in Vietnam and Algeria, but on his return he mounts a coup and becomes ruler and dictator of the Gulf Coast. For thirty years he runs a corrupt but 'clean' state, surviving repeated assassination attempts and gaining support and investment from abroad. But when the 'First World' decides it no longer want to support dictatorships and call for democracy, he needs another ruse to maintain himself in power...

Part magic, part history, part savage satire, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is nothing less than a history of post-colonial Africa itself.

About this title

Review:

"This is a tour de force - original, irreverent, brutal, funny, poetic - in which history and myth are brilliantly evoked" (Margaret Busby Independent)

"A brilliant, often hilarious, political satire" (Daily Telegraph)

"A thoroughgoing indictment of the African way of leadership" (Guardian)

"Witty and wholly authentic chronicle of black African atrocity... Spellbinding" (Spectator)

"One of the most powerful, funniest and richest novels written in French this decade" (Le Nouvel Observateur)

From the Publisher:

A magical, blackly funny tapestry of a book, which, through the rise and fall of its central character, the dictator of a small imaginary former French African colony, tells the story, bitter, painful and beautiful, of modern Africa.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0099283824
• ISBN 13: 9780099283829
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464