Black Moses
SynopsisPlot
Greeted with wildly enthusiastic reviews on publication, Alain Mabanckou's riotous novel begins in an orphanage in 1970s Congo-Brazzaville run by a malicious political stooge who makes the life of our hero, Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko―his name means "Let us thank God, the black Moses is born on the lands of the ancestors," but most people just call him Moses―very difficult. Moses is also terrorized by his two fellow orphans―the twins Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala―but after Moses exacts revenge on them by lacing their food with hot pepper, the twins take Moses under their wing, escape the orphanage, and move to the bustling port town of Pointe-Noire, where they form a gang that survives on petty theft.
Story
About this book
Black Moses follows a boy whose full name, Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko, translates roughly as a prayer of thanks for a Moses born on ancestral land. Everyone calls him Moses. He grows up in an orphanage in 1970s Congo-Brazzaville, overseen by Dieudonne Ngoulmoumako, a petty official who runs the place with spite rather than care. Moses is bullied by twin orphans named Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala until an act of hot-pepper revenge turns the three into unlikely allies.
The trio escapes the orphanage and relocates to Pointe-Noire, the port city on the Atlantic coast of the Republic of the Congo. There they form a small gang living off petty theft, and Moses is drawn deeper into the city's underworld during a period of political repression in the late 1970s and 1980s. The novel tracks Moses's growing entanglement with Pointe-Noire's margins and his gradual mental unraveling as pressures mount around him.
Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese-French writer and finalist for the Man International Booker Prize, sets this book within a larger cycle of novels based in and around Pointe-Noire. The French press compared the story to Oliver Twist relocated to 1970s Africa. Black Moses received the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.
