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Praise for Alain Mabanckou

‘Alain Mabanckou addresses the reader with exuberant inventiveness in novels that are brilliantly imaginative in their forms of storytelling. His voice is vividly colloquial, mischievous and often outrageous as he explores, from multiple angles, the country where he grew up, drawing on its political conflicts and compromises, disappointments and hopes. He acts the jester, but with serious intent and lacerating effect’ Man International Booker Prize judges’ citation

‘Africa’s Samuel Beckett … Mabanckou is a subversive … [his] freewheeling prose marries classical French elegance with Paris slang and a Congolese beat’ Economist

‘A dizzying combination of erudition, bawdy humour and linguistic effervescence’ Financial Times

‘Scorching wit and flights of eloquence … vitriolic comedy and pugnacious irreverence’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent

‘A novelist of exuberant originality … [Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty is a] delightful comic novel in which the boy narrator’s ingenuousness is teamed with a sly authorial wit … its seductive charm and intelligence recentre the world’ Maya Jaggi, Guardian

‘Mabanckou’s novels about life in Africa have won much acclaim. Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, a fictionalised account of his childhood in Congo-Brazzaville, is perhaps his best yet … Nobel laureate JMG Le Clézio likens Mabanckou to Céline, Chinua Achebe, JD Salinger and Réjean Ducharme. Such a varied list suggests that he is, in fact, incomparable’ Financial Times

‘[African Psycho is] Taxi Driver for Africa’s blank generation … a deftly ironic Grand Guignol, a pulp fiction vision of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth that somehow manages to be both frightening and self-mocking at the same time’ Time Out New York

‘[Memoirs of a Porcupine] subverts stereotypical notions of African literature, setting cliché and shibboleths on collision course. Magical realism meets black comedy in an excellent satire by an inventive and playful writer’ Herald

BLACK MOSES

ALAIN MABANCKOU

Translated by Helen Stevenson

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This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s PEN Translates programme. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London WC1X 9HD

www.serpentstail.com

Black Moses was first published as Petit Piment by
Edition Seuil, Paris in 2015

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

eISBN 978 1 78283 267 6

Dedicated to all those wanderers of the Côte Sauvage who, during my stay in Pointe-Noire, told me pieces of their life story, and above all to ‘Little Pepper’, whose great wish was to be a character in fiction, since he’d had enough of being one in real life…

AM