Henri Lopes, 86, Who Straddled Literature and Politics in Africa, Dies

Henri Lopes, a author and former prime minister of the Republic of Congo whose pioneering fiction mocked the abuses of African leaders however who later served one of many continent’s most brutal, died on Nov. 2 within the Paris suburb of Suresnes. He was 86.

His dying, in a hospital, was introduced by the Republic of Congo’s embassy in Paris.

Mr. Lopes’s twin profession spanned the adolescence of each African nationhood and the continent’s literature. He was richly rewarded in each spheres, with excessive positions in politics and diplomacy and prestigious literary prizes.

His 1982 novel, “Le Pleurer-Rire” (“The Laughing Cry”), satirizes a brutal and choleric African dictator and is considered a foundational work in African literature. His “Tribaliques,” a pugnacious brief story assortment revealed in 1971 and far written about since, was an early depiction of the shortcomings of a nascent African society riven by ethnic rivalries.

Mr. Lopes (pronounced LO-pez) completed his profession because the Republic of Congo’s ambassador in Paris, retiring in 2015. His nation, a former French colony, lies throughout the Congo River from the a lot bigger Democratic Republic of Congo, as soon as a Belgian possession.

Mr. Lopes’s journey via ministries, ideologies, rulers and literary favor summed up the selection — and the dilemma — confronted by African intellectuals within the latter half of the twentieth century: Go together with the management in energy or stay precariously.

He went alongside. He was the Republic of Congo’s second-most-famous citizen, and he by no means broke with the primary, the nation’s president, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, who has dominated the nation virtually constantly — aside from a five-year hole after dropping an election in 1992 — since 1979.

Within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, with the nation newly unbiased, the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Mr. Lopes was successively its minister of schooling, minister of knowledge, minister of justice, international minister and chairman of the Revolutionary Court docket, which tried enemies of the state. He was prime minister from 1973 to 1975, then director of the celebration newspaper, then finance minister. Alongside the best way he helped write the nationwide anthem.

“We have been attempting to manipulate the nation, whereas studying it,” he stated in his final interview earlier than his dying, in a documentary movie by Hassim Tall Boukambou that might be launched in January.

When Mr. Sassou-Nguesso, a former military colonel, retook energy in 1997 after a civil conflict, he remembered his outdated comrade from the Congolese Staff Social gathering. Mr. Lopes was already in Paris, having served as UNESCO’s deputy director common for Africa.

“So Sassou had somebody who gave respectability to his regime, and Henri Lopes was capable of keep in Paris,” Sekou Camara, who directed a World Financial institution challenge within the Republic of Congo and who had recognized Mr. Lopes since childhood, stated in a telephone interview.

Afterward although, Mr. Lopes “by no means had the braveness to detach himself from Sassou,” stated Andrea Ngombet, the chief of an opposition group in exile, who was as soon as given a present of books by Mr. Lopes.

“There may be at all times a means of compromising you in these regimes,” he stated in an interview, noting Mr. Lopes’s “grand villa” at Suresnes.

For Mr. Lopes’s funeral in Paris on Nov. 14, Mr. Sassou-Nguesso dispatched 4 ministers from his authorities, together with the prime minister, as a part of an entourage of 27.

The “central paradox” of Mr. Lopes’s profession was, on the one hand, his lucid view of the darkish corners of African politics and, on the opposite, his benefiting from them, stated Brett L. Carter, an skilled on the Republic of Congo and an assistant professor on the College of Southern California. “I don’t know the way he reconciled that.”

Mr. Ngombet famous that “his and Sassou’s destinies have been tied collectively.”

“He managed to accumulate a form of materials ease that was not appropriate along with his capabilities,” he stated.

Mr. Lopes was appointed ambassador in Paris, the nation’s most essential diplomatic posting, in 1998. Throughout his tenure, there have been quite a few human rights abuses within the Republic of Congo, together with an notorious bloodbath on the port of Brazzaville, the capital; rigged elections; the torture and imprisonment of political opponents; and the broadly documented corruption of Mr. Sassou-Nguesso.

“I’m describing the Sassou authorities as a mafia,” stated John F. Clark, a professor at Florida Worldwide College and writer of a e-book on the Republic of Congo’s historical past and politics.

The Congressional Analysis Service wrote in 2019 that “corruption is widespread” within the nation, with Mr. Sassou-Nguesso’s household possessing actual property price tens of tens of millions of {dollars} in Paris alone, lengthy a topic of investigation by the French authorities. The Republic of Congo, wealthy in oil, is extraordinarily poor; most of its wealth is concentrated within the presidential palace.

But for all his literary movie star, Mr. Lopes by no means took a public place in opposition to these abuses. His 2018 memoir, “Il est déjà demain” (“It’s Already Tomorrow”), has nothing in any respect to say about Mr. Sassou-Nguesso as soon as he regained energy.

“I labored with him up till the purpose that I left the embassy,” Mr. Lopes defined in an interview with Jeune Afrique journal. “So, I’ve an obligation to carry again,” he stated. “I might have made excuses for him, which might not have been credible. Or I might have criticized, despite the fact that I had simply left his staff. So, I took the chance of claiming nothing.”

His widow, Christine, stated in a phone interview from Suresnes that Mr. Sassou-Nguesso had been her husband’s “brother, his companion and his pal.”

Earlier than he served the president, Mr. Lopes had been celebrated for his literary accomplishments. He gained the Grand Literary Prize of Black Africa in 1972 for “Tribaliques.” And 21 years later he obtained the coveted Grand Prize of French-speaking Nations, from the last word arbiter of the French language, the Académie Française, for the physique of his work.

In 1992, within the French newspaper Le Monde, the critic Alain Salles in contrast Mr. Lopes to Patrick Modiano, a future French Nobel laureate in literature, writing that “the phantoms of colonization and decolonization have changed these of the Occupation and the Purge” in Mr. Modiano’s fiction set throughout World Battle II.

At his dying final month, Le Monde wrote that Mr. Lopes had “early on been one of many pioneers of ‘African literature,’ because it was conceived at the moment.”

By the point “The Laughing Cry,” thought of his most vital novel, was revealed in 1982, Mr. Lopes was nicely conscious of the disappointments of decolonization, having lived via a number of coups d’état and the March 1977 assassination of President Marien Ngouabi, beneath whom he as soon as served. His portrait of the character Bwakamabé, a dictator, in “Laughing Cry” is savage:

“I, I’m the daddy. And also you, you might be my youngsters,” Bwakamabé says, rejecting the concept of a vote. “You need to give me recommendation, with frankness. However if you’re afraid of my reactions, and also you wish to spare me, you must shut up respectfully.”

Henri Lopes was born on Sept. 12, 1937, in what was then Léopoldville, later Kinshasa, the capital of what was then the Belgian Congo. His dad and mom, Jean-Marie Lopes, a small landowner, and Micheline Vulturi, have been the mixed-race youngsters of Belgian and French colonizers who had fleeting unions with native ladies, a undeniable fact that weighed closely on the light-skinned Mr. Lopes’s sense of himself, his place in Congolese society and his place within the Sassou-Nguesso authorities.

“Being combined race didn’t simply mark me; it made up my identification, my important existence,” he as soon as advised an interviewer for the French journal Le Level. And it left him considerably alienated. As Professor Clark, of Florida Worldwide College, put it: “He’s not within the inside of the mafia. If you happen to’re a part of the mafia household, however an outsider, you might be by no means totally trusted.”

Mr. Lopes studied on the Sorbonne — his mom, divorced, had married a Frenchman, who introduced the younger Henri with him to France — and joined a number of African scholar unions. Within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, he taught on the École Normale Superieure de l’Afrique Centrale in Brazzaville earlier than being recruited into the federal government, as was widespread with younger males who had been educated.

Along with his spouse, his second, Mr. Lopes is survived by 4 youngsters from a earlier marriage: his daughters Myriam, Annouk and Laure, and his son, Thomas.

About his lengthy profession in politics, Mr. Lopes would typically inform interviewers that he had most popular writing. However for a lot of, his political engagement overshadowed his literary achievements.

As Professor Carter, of U.S.C., stated, “To the extent to which he put his accomplishments within the service of the regime, many Congolese won’t ever forgive him for that.”