Henri Lopes, author and former prime minister of the Republic of Congo, whose groundbreaking fiction satirized the abuses of African leaders but later served one of the continent’s most brutal, died Nov. 2 in the Paris suburb of Suresnes. It was 86.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by the embassy of the Republic of Congo in Paris.
Mr. Lopez’s dual career spanned the formative years of both African nationhood and the continent’s literature. He was richly rewarded in both fields, with high positions in politics and diplomacy and with prestigious literary awards.
His 1982 novel, “Le Pleurer-Rire” (“The Laughing Cry”) satirizes a brutal and choleric African dictator and is considered a seminal work in African literature. “Tribaliques,” an aggressive short story collection of his published in 1971 and much written about since, was an early depiction of the shortcomings of a nascent African society torn apart by ethnic rivalries.
Mr. Lopes (pronounced LO-pez) ended his career as the Republic of Congo’s ambassador to Paris, retiring in 2015. His country, a former French colony, is across the Congo River from the much larger Democratic Republic of Congo, once a Belgian occupation.
Mr. Lopez’s journey through ministries, ideologies, rulers and literary favor summed up the choice—and dilemma—that faced African intellectuals in the second half of the 20th century: Go with the leadership in power or live precariously .
He went along. He was the second most famous citizen of the Republic of Congo and never separated from the first, the country’s president, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, who has ruled the country almost continuously — except for a five-year period after losing the 1992 election — since 1979 .
In the 1960s and 1970s, with the nation newly independent, the soft-spoken Mr. LĂłpez was successively Minister of Education, Information, Justice, Foreign Minister and President of the Revolutionary Tribunal. enemies of the state. He was prime minister from 1973 to 1975, then director of the party newspaper and then finance minister. Along the way he helped write the national anthem.
“We were trying to rule the country while we were learning it,” he said in his last interview before his death. in a documentary film by Hashim Tal Boukambou which will be released in January.
When Mr. Sassou-Nguesso, a former army colonel, took power in 1997 after a civil war, he remembered his old comrade from the Congolese Workers’ Party. Mr. LĂłpez was already in Paris, having served as UNESCO’s deputy director-general for Africa.
“So Sassou had someone who respected his regime and Henri LĂłpez was able to stay in Paris,” said Sekou Kamara, who ran a World Bank project in the Republic of Congo and had known Mr. LĂłpez since childhood. age. telephone interview.
Afterwards, however, Mr. LĂłpez “never had the courage to move away from Sassou,” said Andrea Ngobet, the leader of an opposition group in exile, who was once given a gift of books by Mr. LĂłpez.
“There’s always a way to compromise you in these regimes,” he said in an interview, noting Mr. LĂłpez’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 a 27-person entourage.
The “central paradox” of Mr. LĂłpez’s career has been, on the one hand, his clear view of the dark corners of African politics and, on the other, his profit from them, said Brett L. Carter, an expert on the Republic of Congo and an assistant professor at the University of Southern California. “I don’t know how he reconciled it.”
Mr Ngombet noted that “his and Sassou’s fates were linked”.
“He managed to acquire a kind of material convenience that was incompatible with his functions,” he said.
Mr. LĂłpez was appointed ambassador to Paris, the country’s most important diplomatic post, in 1998. During his tenure, there were many human rights violations in the Republic of Congo, including an infamous massacre in the port of Brazzaville, the capital. rigged elections; torture and imprisonment of political opponents; and the widely documented corruption of Mr. Sassou-Nguesso.
“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 tens of millions of dollars in real estate in Paris alone, long under investigation by French authorities. The oil-rich Republic of Congo is extremely poor. most of its wealth is concentrated in the presidential palace.
However, despite his literary celebrity, Mr. LĂłpez never took a public stand against these abuses. His 2018 memoir, Il est dĂ©jĂ demain” (“It Is Already Tomorrow”), has nothing to say about Mr. Sassou-Nguesso once he regained power.
“I worked with him until I left the embassy,” Mr. LĂłpez explained in an interview with Jeune Afrique magazine.. “So I have a duty to restrain myself,” he said. “I could have found excuses for him, which would not have been credible. Or I could have been critical, even though I had just left his team. So I took the risk of saying nothing.”
His widow, Christine, said in a telephone interview from Suresnes that Mr. Sassou-Nguesso was “her husband’s brother, his partner and his friend.”
Before serving as president, Mr. Lopez had been honored for his literary achievements. He won the Black African Grand Literary Prize in 1972 for ‘Tribaliques.” And 21 years later he received the coveted Grand Prix of the Francophone Countries, from the ultimate arbiter of the French language, the French Academy, for his body of work.
In 1992, in the French newspaper Le Monde, the critic Alain Salles compared Mr. LĂłpez to Patrick Modiano, a future French Nobel laureate for literature, writing that “the ghosts of colonization and decolonization have replaced those of Occupation and Liquidation” in Mr. Modiano’s World War II fiction War.
On his death last month, Le Monde wrote that Mr. Lopez was “early one of the pioneers of ‘African literature’ as it was then conceived.”
When ”The Laughing Cry,” considered his most important novel, was published in 1982, Mr. Lopez knew well the frustrations of decolonization, having lived through several coups and the March 1977 assassination of President Marien Ngouabi, under whom he once served. His portrait of the character BwakamabĂ©, a dictator, in “Laughing Cry” is wild:
“I, I am the father. And you, you are my children,” says BwakamabĂ©, rejecting the idea of ​​voting. “You should give me advice, honestly. But if you are afraid of my reactions and want to spare me, you should respectfully shut up.”
Henri Lopes was born on September 12, 1937, in the then LĂ©opoldville, later Kinshasa, capital of the then Belgian Congo. His parents, Jean-Marie Lopes, a small landowner, and Micheline Vulturi, were mixed children of Belgian and French colonists who had fleeting unions with local women, which weighed heavily on Mr. Lopes’ sense of lightness. himself, his place in Congolese society and his place in the Sassou-Nguesso government.
“Being mixed race didn’t just mark me. it constituted my identity, my essential existence,” he once said in an interview with the French magazine Le Point. And it left him somewhat alienated. As Professor Clark, of Florida International University, said: “He’s not inside the mafia. If you’re part of the mafia family, but you’re an outsider, you’re never fully trusted.”
Mr. LĂłpez studied at the Sorbonne — his mother, divorced, had married a Frenchman, who brought the young Henri with her to France — and joined several African student associations. In the mid-1960s, he taught at the École Normale Superieure de l’Afrique Centrale in Brazzaville before being recruited into the government, as was customary with trained young men.
In addition to his wife, his second, Mr. Lopez has four children from a previous marriage: his daughters Myriam, Annouk and Laure and his son, Thomas.
About his long career in politics, Mr. LĂłpez often said in interviews that he preferred to write. But for many, his political involvement overshadowed his literary achievements.
As USC’s Professor Carter said, “to the extent that he put his achievements at the service of the regime, many Congolese will never forgive him for that.”