The Bildungsroman in Cameroon Anglophone Literature: John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across The Mongolo and Margaret Afuh’s Born Before Her Time

Abstract

This paper investigates the bildungsroman genre in postcolonial Cameroon Anglophone fiction through a textual analysis of John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo and Margaret Afuh’s Born before Her Time. It seeks to show that these two writers have borrowed a foreign genre and successfully manipulated its original template to highlight the problems between the individuals’ aims and the socio-cultural, political and economic values of the post colony. It also aims at demonstrating that a close reading of these texts deepens our understanding of the bildungsroman in the Cameroon literary context and its inevitable relationship to questions of identity.