Former Prime Minister of Congo and former Africa director of UNESCO, the Congolese author has written the contemporary history of his continent. Alain Mabackou praised a pen “crossed” in particular by “a caustic irony” and “his introspection of Congolese morals”.
Considered one of the talented writers who made Congo “the Latin quarter of Central Africa”, former Congolese Prime Minister Henri Lopes died Thursday, November 2 in France, at the age of 86, his family announced Friday in Brazzaville in a communicated. “Henri died Thursday November 2 at the Foch hospital in Suresnes (near Paris), carried away by illness,” she specifies.
A free-spirited man who wrote the contemporary history of Africa, he authored numerous works, notably novels: The Crying-Laughingconsidered his masterpiece, My Bantu grandmother and my ancestors the Gauls,Syears tom-tom or It’s already tomorrow.
“One of the illustrious French-speaking writers”
“We all admired his writing, shot through with caustic irony, his fine humor and his introspection of Congolese customs,” wrote his compatriot on X (formerly Twitter), the writer Alain Mabanckou, paying tribute to “one of the illustrious French-speaking writers”“(A) elder, (A) friend and brother of Letters!”
“Immense loss for the Francophonie”underlines on the same social network Olivier Zegna Rata, former chief of staff of Hervé Bourges at the Superior Audiovisual Council. “Henri Lopes has left us, a lucid and elegant diplomat, a writer illustrating the genius of our language, a generous and honest spirit who did honor to the Congo! Honor and respect to a capital contemporary!”
“Saying things that haven’t been said”
Henri Lopes was born in 1937 in Kinshasa (Léopoldville at the time, in the former Belgian Congo, current Democratic Republic of Congo), to a Portuguese father and a mother from the Plateaux, in the center of Congo-Brazzaville. After his studies in Brazzaville, Bangui, Nantes (western France) and Paris, he taught history at the Ecole Normale Supérieure d’Afrique Centrale in Brazzaville, now Marien Ngouabi University.
Then entering politics, he was Prime Minister of President Marien Ngouabi, under the Marxist-Leninist regime, between 1973 and 1975. In the 1980s and 1990s, he worked at UNESCO as deputy director for Africa, before to be appointed Congolese ambassador to France in 1998, a position he held for 17 years.
“There are things I have to say that haven’t been said.”, he confided to RFI, explaining how he had been drawn to writing. He published his first work, Tribalics in 1971, a collection of eight short stories which won the Grand Literary Prize for Black Africa.
Writing for Henri Lopes was also an opportunity to look at his crossbreeding, “a heartbreak” in which thanks to “a work” on himself he ends up finding “an enrichment”. In recent years, he spoke of death, “a very close question” in view of his “great age”. “We wonder when we pass, what face we are going to make”, he concluded philosophically.