Africa-Press. Swiss-Chadian novelist Nétounon Noël Ngikiri is one of the most prominent contemporary African literary voices. His works reopen the files of slavery, colonialism, and inherited violence, starting from Chad and its African surroundings, writing from Swiss exile in French.
His novel “No Rainbow in Paradise” is among his best-known works. It takes the reader back nearly two centuries into the history of slavery in Chad and neighboring countries, revealing how patterns of violence persist in new forms.
The novel won several prestigious literary awards, including the “Out of Competition” prize (2022), the Grand Prize for Sub-Saharan African Literature (2022), and the “Letters of the Borders” prize (2023).
Its Arabic translation was recently published by Dar Al-Rais, translated by Sudanese novelist and translator Atif Al-Hajj, who lives in Chad—making it the first of Ngikiri’s works to appear in Arabic.
An Arabic translation of your novel “No Rainbow in Paradise,” in which you cover two centuries of slavery in Chad and neighboring countries, has just been published. It is the first translation of your work into Arabic. How do you view this step, and what does the Arab reader mean to you?
This is indeed my first translation into Arabic, and I feel deeply moved and proud—especially since Arabic is one of the official languages in my country, Chad. It is a pivotal milestone in my literary journey, because it allows a wide Arab readership to encounter a novel that is not ordinary, but rather one in which the Arab-Islamic world occupies an extremely important place.
Translator Atif Al-Hajj produced an elegant translation of the novel—he is also a novelist. How do you see literary translation when it comes from a creative writer? Do you think a translator who is also a writer is better able to carry the text across?
I have not practiced literary translation myself because I lack its technical tools, but I believe it is founded above all on possessing the text and then reviving it in another language. Translation, in this sense, is like building a new house in a different color, based on the blueprints of an existing house.
From this perspective, translation becomes a creative act in its own right. And I think translators who come from a background of creative writing—by virtue of their ability to access what the Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor called “poetic rapture”—are better able to grasp the text’s deep imagination than others.
What the ancestors did not forget
In “No Rainbow in Paradise,” you return to nearly two centuries of the history of slavery. How was the idea born, and how did it become a project that took you years?
This novel was the outcome of long, sustained work, and it was supposed to be my very first novel. Its first spark goes back to my childhood: my father was one of the “Senegalese riflemen” in Chad, and I grew up in a French military barracks, which gave me early access to Western education.
At the same time, since my parents had not received formal schooling, I immersed myself in African culture within the family. During evenings around the fire, I learned how the trans-Saharan slave trade devastated our ancestors over centuries. Yet formal education focused only on the Atlantic slave trade, ignoring trafficking toward North Africa and the Middle East.
When I expressed my surprise to my teachers, they replied that they were bound by official curricula. This silence—imposed in the name of “preserving national unity”—stirred my curiosity from an early age, so I began researching the subject in secondary school, relying on oral and written sources.
Later, I visited museums, dug through colonial archives, and attended every conference that addressed this issue. But collecting abundant material was not enough in itself; I had to find an angle from which to build the story and pull its threads tight.
I needed a narrative angle, and it did not reveal itself until the autumn of 2015, during a writing residency at Ledig House in Omi, in the United States. I was putting the final touches on the manuscript of my novel “In the Jungle, Any Which Way,” and one evening, while watching CNN, I learned about bombings carried out by Boko Haram in Baga Sola in Chad—so the spark of the novel ignited.
It took me a full six years to put the final period on this project. My publisher, from the very first reading, was enthusiastic to the utmost. Less than a year later, I felt an indescribable astonishment as I leafed through the first printed copy of “No Rainbow in Paradise.”
Trump and tearing up history notebooks
In light of attempts to erase the history of slavery—such as the decision by U.S. President Donald Trump to remove its symbols from public space—how do you see the impact of these policies on human consciousness?
History is the trace of the past and its imprint. It gives us a compass to understand the present and anticipate the future, and it teaches us what should be followed and what must be rejected.
In “No Rainbow in Paradise,” the idea of historical repetition is clear: the novel begins with the slave trader Rabah Fadlallah in the late nineteenth century, and ends with Abubakar Shekau, leader of Boko Haram, who abducted the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014 and sold some of them for a pittance to his “most deserving” fighters.
What links the two? The first man’s history was either taught in a distorted way or erased altogether. After independence, leaders of the new African states needed symbols that would grant them legitimacy, so they revived warlords from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under the claim that they resisted colonialism—forgetting that they were slave traders defending their commercial interests.
They went on to glorify warlords such as Usman dan Fodio, Samori Touré, El Hadj Omar Tall, and Rabah Fadlallah on the grounds that they resisted Western invasion. The truth is that those slave traders fought only to defend their “personal interests”—that is, the profitable trade in their Black brethren, which external interventions threatened.
It is true that the European powers that defeated them quickly imposed a new system of enslavement for their own benefit. But does that justify absolving those leaders of their criminal past? In this context, Trump’s decision looks like a childish act—like someone sweeping dirt under the carpet to give the house the illusion of cleanliness, even though the filth always returns.
Peoples, like individuals, are prone to neurosis. Erasing history with a stroke of the pen exposes societies to delayed explosions—collective psychological disorders, or even civil wars. Cleansing history of what bothers us is like removing every “Do Not Enter” sign in a city under the pretext of improving traffic flow: it makes no sense—unless you make a living repairing car frames.
