André Gide's trip to the Congo helped turn French opinion against colonial exploitation
In 1926 the celebrated novelist André Gide set off through French Equatorial Africa and came back with a journal describing villagers forced into the forest for weeks to gather rubber for concession companies. He likened it to slavery. A decade later a Soviet tour cured him of communism. The Nobel Prize followed in 1947.
A Parisian by birth, arriving on 22 November 1869, Gide came from Protestant stock whose ancestors had left Italy; his father, a law professor, died when he was 11, and he grew up largely isolated in Normandy. He published his first novel at 21. Travels in North Africa in 1893 and 1894 brought him to accept his homosexuality, and he met Oscar Wilde in Algiers in 1895, though Wilde wrongly believed he had been the one to awaken it. That same year he married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux in a marriage that was never consummated, and in 1896 he became mayor of a small Normandy commune.
His work kept circling a tension between Protestant austerity and sexual transgression, and the struggle to be fully oneself without betraying one's values. In 1908 he co-founded the Nouvelle Revue Française. His 1924 defence of homosexuality, Corydon, provoked such hostility that it blocked his path to the Académie Française, yet he regarded it as his most important book. The same year brought a memoir and French versions of two Joseph Conrad novels, the first to appear in that language, and in the 1920s younger writers such as Camus and Sartre looked to him.
The African journey, from July 1926 to May 1927, covered today's Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Chad and Cameroon. His published journals attacked the system that handed swathes of colony to French firms, and they fed a growing anti-colonial movement. After 1925 he also campaigned for more humane treatment of prisoners.
Like many intellectuals, he drifted toward communism in the early 1930s without joining any party. Invited to the Soviet Union in 1936, where he spoke at Maxim Gorky's funeral, he found his speeches censored and Stalin's portrait hanging where icons once had. Return from the USSR warned sympathetic readers that conformity had replaced criticism. By the 1940s he had rejected communism altogether. He died on 19 February 1951, and his New York Times obituary ranked him first among living French writers.
Source: André Gide
