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 childhood 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 thought to be a foundational work in African literature. His “Tribaliques,” a pugnacious brief story assortment printed 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 by means of 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: Associate 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 repeatedly — aside from a five-year hole after shedding 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, overseas 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 way in which he helped write the nationwide anthem.
“We were trying to govern the country, while learning it,” he mentioned in his final interview earlier than his dying, in a documentary film by Hassim Tall Boukambou that can 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 normal for Africa.
“So Sassou had someone who gave respectability to his regime, and Henri Lopes was able to stay in Paris,” Sekou Camara, who directed a World Financial institution undertaking within the Republic of Congo and who had recognized Mr. Lopes since childhood, mentioned in a telephone interview.
Afterward although, Mr. Lopes “never had the courage to detach himself from Sassou,” mentioned Andrea Ngombet, the chief of an opposition group in exile, who was as soon as given a present of books by Mr. Lopes.
“There is always a way of compromising you in these regimes,” he mentioned 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, mentioned Brett L. Carter, an knowledgeable on the Republic of Congo and an assistant professor on the College of Southern California. “I don’t know how he reconciled that.”
Mr. Ngombet famous that “his and Sassou’s destinies were tied together.”
“He managed to acquire a kind of material ease that was not compatible with his functions,” he mentioned.
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 government as a mafia,” mentioned 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 value 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 superstar, Mr. Lopes by no means took a public place towards these abuses. His 2018 memoir, “Il est déjà demain” (“It is Already Tomorrow”), has nothing in any respect to say about Mr. Sassou-Nguesso as soon as he regained energy.
“I worked with him up until the point that I left the embassy,” Mr. Lopes defined in an interview with Jeune Afrique journal. “So, I have a duty to hold back,” he mentioned. “I could have made excuses for him, which would not have been credible. Or I could have criticized, even though I had just left his team. So, I took the risk of saying nothing.”
His widow, Christine, mentioned in a phone interview from Suresnes that Mr. Sassou-Nguesso had been her husband’s “brother, his companion and his friend.”
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 acquired 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 replaced those of the Occupation and the Purge” in Mr. Modiano’s fiction set throughout World Warfare II.
At his dying final month, Le Monde wrote that Mr. Lopes had “early on been one of the pioneers of ‘African literature,’ as it was conceived at that time.”
By the point “The Laughing Cry,” thought-about his most vital novel, was printed in 1982, Mr. Lopes was properly conscious of the disappointments of decolonization, having lived by means of 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 am the father. And you, you are my children,” Bwakamabé says, rejecting the concept of a vote. “You should give me advice, with frankness. But if you are afraid of my reactions, and you want to spare me, you should 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 mother and father, Jean-Marie Lopes, a small landowner, and Micheline Vulturi, have been the mixed-race kids of Belgian and French colonizers who had fleeting unions with native ladies, a proven 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 mixed race didn’t just mark me; it made up my identity, my essential existence,” he as soon as instructed 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 in the interior of the mafia. If you’re part of the mafia family, but an outsider, you are never fully 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 frequent with younger males who had been educated.
Along with his spouse, his second, Mr. Lopes is survived by 4 kids from a earlier marriage: his daughters Myriam, Annouk and Laure, and his son, Thomas.
About his lengthy profession in politics, Mr. Lopes would usually inform interviewers that he had most well-liked writing. However for a lot of, his political engagement overshadowed his literary achievements.
As Professor Carter, of U.S.C., mentioned, “To the extent to which he put his accomplishments in the service of the regime, many Congolese will never forgive him for that.”
