LA MORT QUI A ETRANGLE LE COEUR DE L'AFRIQUE (2018) BY JANVIER CHANDO
REVIEWER: Peter Wuteh Vakunta, Ph.D.
This is 40-page booklet is a bitter-sweet story. After reading the work, it dawned on me that language mastery is an indispensable tool in the effective transmittal of human thoughts. It seems to me that Chando set out to provide his readers with an appetizing narrative of the events that preceded the brutal assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Zaire. Sadly enough, poor mastery of the language of Moliere totally marred his attempts to recount the nitty-gritty of a tale that has haunted bona fide Panafricanists for decades. I will provide a handful of clumsy syntactic constructions that I found inimical to the transmission of the author's thoughts:
"Les historiens, les sociologues et les geopoliticiens s'accordent a dire que le Congo est le pays le plus traumatise d'Afrique et du monde, et que de toutes les atrocites que le Congo a connues dans son histoire maltraitee, l'assissinat de Patrice Lumumba etait l'acte le plus cruel."(p.25)
There is no denying the fact that a reader needs the aid of a soothsayer in order to unravel the hidden signification buried underneath this badly conceived syntactic structure.
And this is not all. One more example culled from a multitude:
"C'est pourquoi les interets occidentaux ont percu une menace dans la volonte de Patrice Lumumba de parvenir a une veritable independance pour le Congo et de prendre le controle total des ressources du pays pour le developpment de la nation infantile et l'amelioration des conditions de vie du peuple Congolais."(p.30) This begs the question what in the whole this is supposed to mean.
I could go on and on but suffice it to say that the entire book is marred by terribly poor syntactic constructions, not least of which are incorrect verbal tenses, capitalization of adjectives of nationality in French and worse still inexplicable omissions that leave the reader gasping for semantic breath.
As a language professional specialized in the fields of translation and interpreting, as well as second language pedagogy, I can only conjecture that Janvier T. Chando wrote his test in English and ran it through google translate. As any seasoned translator would tell you, garbage in gives birth to garbage.
One last lacuna that I noticed in this work is the inexplicable absent of a bibliographical page. There is nothing that lends credence to the fact that Chando consulted the works of other historians in the process of crafting his book.
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