Mongo Beti was born in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, in 1932. He received his early education in local schools, it was followed by studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. Now a French citizen, he lives and teaches in Paris, where he is the editor of the journal Peuples Noirs, Peuples Africains, founded in 1978. Beti wrote his first novel, Ville Cruelle (1954), under the pseudonym Eza Boto. A favorite theme of Beti is the failure of colonial missionary efforts in Africa. He speaks not so much against Christianity as against the futile Europeanization of Africans in the name of religion. The Poor Christ of Bomba (1956), his best-known work, is written as a diary. The novel is a satire of… Christian religion in precolonial Cameroon.