Abstract EN:

Between Borom Sarret, a film by Sembene Ousmane released in 1963, and Allah Is not Obliged, a novel by Ahmadou Kourouma published in 2000, one can see portrayed, through francophone literature and films, a good number of black African dictators. Those portraits reveal a multifaceted character in a tragic atmosphere. The African tyrant is portrayed as a hybrid character. Torn between tradition and modernity, between Africa and the Western World, the human and the animal, he uses those paradoxical features to build up an absolute power borrowed from the African king and the colonial master. This power enables him to transform the state in the image of his desires and the political space into a drama stage. Wearing a god-like mask, he acts and has others act in a senseless play. The representations of the African autocratic character show a twofold tragic situation. They make us see how a narcissist and megalomaniac dictator tramples down his people to satisfy his own ambition. They also throw light on the tragic nature of the dictator himself who, finding refuge in a seemingly eternal illusionary playhouse, sees himself drawn forth to a reality that reminds him of his true human condition. This sight uncovers the absurdity of a world created by this despotic regime and the pathetic as well as comical character symbolizing the tyrant of the black continent. The African dictator’s representations appear, in francophone literature and cinema, as cathartic signposts. While they express the nightmarish trajectory of African dictatorships, they generate a laughter that overrides tears coming from this sense of tragic and contribute somehow to the birth of an Africa ridden of the absolute power hydra.