Henri Lopes, 86, who spanned literature and politics in Africa, dies

Henri Lopes, a writer and former prime minister of the Republic of Congo whose groundbreaking fiction mocked the abuses of African leaders but who later served one of the continent’s most ruthless leaders, died on November 2 in the Paris suburb of Suresnes. He was 86.

His death, in a hospital, was announced by the embassy of the Republic of Congo in Paris.

Mr. Lopes’ dual career spanned the formative years of both African nationhood and the continent’s literature. He was richly rewarded in both areas, with high positions in politics and diplomacy and prestigious literary prizes.

His 1982 novel, ‘Le Pleurer-Rire’ (‘The Laughing Cry’), satirizes a ruthless and choleric African dictator and is considered a foundational work in African literature. His “Tribaliques,” a combative collection of short stories published in 1971 and much written about since, was an early portrayal of the shortcomings of an emerging African society torn by ethnic rivalry.

Mr. Lopes (pronounced LO-pez) ended his career as Ambassador of the Republic of Congo in Paris and retired in 2015. His country, a former French colony, lies across the Congo River from the much larger Democratic Republic of Congo, once a Belgian colony. possess.

The journey of Mr. Lopes through ministries, ideologies, rulers and literary favor encapsulated the choice – and dilemma – that African intellectuals faced in the second half of the 20th century: go along with the leadership in power or live in a precarious life.

He came along. He was the second most famous citizen of the Republic of Congo, and he never broke with the first, the country’s president. Denis Sassou-Nguessowho has ruled the country almost continuously since 1979 – with the exception of a five-year period after losing the 1992 elections.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when the nation gained independence, the mild-mannered, mild-mannered Mr. Lopes served successively as minister of education, minister of information, minister of justice, minister of foreign affairs and chairman of the Revolutionary Court, which sought to destroy enemies of the state . He was Prime Minister from 1973 to 1975, then director of the party newspaper and then Minister of Finance. Along the way he helped write the national anthem.

“We tried to rule the country while we were learning,” he said in his last interview before his death. in a documentary film by Hassim Tall Boukambou, which will be released in January.

When Mr. Sassou-Nguesso, a former army colonel, regained power after a civil war in 1997, he remembered his old comrade in the Congolese Workers’ Party. Mr. Lopes was already in Paris, where he was UNESCO’s Deputy Director General for Africa.

“So Sassou had someone who gave respect to his regime, and Henri Lopes was able to stay in Paris,” Sekou Camara, who headed a World Bank project in the Republic of Congo and who had known Mr. Lopes since childhood, said in an interview. interview by phone.

But after that, Mr. Lopes “never had the courage to break away from Sassou,” said Andrea Ngombet, the leader of an exile opposition group who once received a gift of books from Mr. Lopes.

“There is always a way to endanger you in these regimes,” he said in an interview, noting Mr. Lopes’s “big villa” in Suresnes.

For Mr. Lopes’ funeral in Paris on November 14, Mr. Sassou-Nguesso sent four ministers from his government, including the prime minister, as part of an entourage of 27 people.

The “central paradox” of Mr. Lopes’ career was both his clear view of the dark corners of African politics and the fact that he profited from them, said Brett L. Carter, an expert on the Republic of the United States. States. Congo and assistant professor at the University of Southern California. “I don’t know how he reconciled that.”

Mr Ngombet noted that “his and Sassou’s fates were linked.”

“He managed to acquire a kind of material comfort that was incompatible with his functions,” he said.

Mr. Lopes was appointed ambassador to Paris, the country’s most important diplomatic post, in 1998. During his tenure, there were numerous human rights violations in the Republic of Congo, including an infamous massacre at the port of Brazzaville, the capital; rigged elections; the torture and imprisonment of political opponents; and Mr. Sassou-Nguesso’s widely documented corruption.

“I describe the Sassou government as a mafia,” said John F. Clark, a professor at Florida International University and author of a book on the history and politics of the Republic of Congo.

The Congressional Research Service wrote in 2019 that “corruption is rife” in the country, with Mr. Sassou-Nguesso’s family owning real estate worth tens of millions of dollars in Paris alone, which has long been the subject of investigation by the French authorities. The Republic of Congo, rich in oil, is extremely poor; most of his wealth is concentrated in the presidential palace.

But for all his literary celebrity, Mr. Lopes never took a public stand against these abuses. His 2018 memoir, ‘Il est déjà demain” (“It’s already tomorrow”), has absolutely nothing to say about Mr Sassou-Nguesso once he returned to power.

“I worked with him until the moment I left the embassy,” Mr. Lopes explained in an interview with Jeune Afrique magazine.. “So I have a duty to restrain myself,” he said. “I could have made excuses for him, which would not have been credible. Or I could have criticized even though I had just left his team. So I took the risk of not saying anything.”

His widow, Christine, said in a telephone interview from Suresnes that Mr. Sassou-Nguesso had been her husband’s “brother, his companion and his friend.”

Before serving as president, Mr. Lopes was celebrated for his literary achievements. He won the Grand Literature Prize of Black Africa in 1972 for ‘Tribaliques.” And 21 years later he received the coveted Grand Prize of French-speaking Countries, from the ultimate arbiter of the French language, the Académie Française, for the body of his work.

In 1992 in the French newspaper Le Monde, the critic Alain Salles compared Mr. Lopes to Patrick Modiano, a future French Nobel laureate in literature, who wrote that “the phantoms of colonization and decolonization have replaced those of occupation and purge” in Mr. Modiano’s fiction set during World War II .

On his death last month, Le Monde wrote that Mr. Lopes “had early been one of the pioneers of ‘African literature’ as it was then understood.”

By the time “The Laughing Cry,” considered his most important novel, was published in 1982, Mr. Lopes was well aware of the disappointments of decolonization, having lived through several coups. and the March 1977 assassination of President Marien Ngouabi, under whom he once served. His portrayal of the character Bwakamabé, a dictator, in “Laughing Cry” is wild:

“I, I am the father. And you, you are my children,” says Bwakamabé, who rejects the idea of ​​a vote. ‘You should give me honest advice. But if you are afraid of my reactions, and you want to spare me, then you should respectfully keep your mouth shut.”

Henri Lopes was born on September 12, 1937 in what was then Leopoldville, later Kinshasa, the capital of the then Belgian Congo. His parents, Jean-Marie Lopes, a small landowner, and Micheline Vulturi, were mixed-race children of Belgian and French colonists who had volatile relationships with local women, a fact that weighed heavily on the sense of himself, his place in the Congolese society and his position in the Sassou-Nguesso government.

“Being mixed race didn’t just scar me; it formed my identity, my essential existence,” he once told an interviewer for the French magazine Le Point. And it left him somewhat alienated. As Professor Clark of Florida International University put it: “He is not in the heartland of the Mafia. If you are part of the mafia family but an outsider, you will never be fully trusted.”

Mr. Lopes studied at the Sorbonne – his mother, divorced, had married a Frenchman, who took young Henri to France – and joined several African student associations. In the mid-1960s he taught at the École Normale Supérieure de l’Afrique Centrale in Brazzaville before being recruited into the government, as was common for young men who had undergone training.

In addition to his wife, his second, Mr Lopes, is survived by four children from a previous marriage: his daughters Myriam, Annouk and Laure, and his son Thomas.

Of his long career in politics, Mr. Lopes often told interviewers that he preferred writing. But for many, his political involvement overshadowed his literary achievements.

As Professor Carter of USC said: “To the extent that he put his achievements at the service of the regime, many Congolese will never forgive him.”