René Philombé, a writing name used by Philippe Louis Ombedé, was born on November 13, 1930, in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon. He passed away on October 25, 2001. René Philombé was a Cameroonian writer, journalist, poet, novelist, and playwright who wrote mostly in French. He helped start the Association of Cameroonian Poets and Writers (APEC) and served as its secretary for 20 years. He was awarded the Mottart Prize by the Académie Française and the Fonlon-Nichols Prize by the African Literature Association.

Biography

René Philombe’s father was Nkoulou, a writer-performer and descendant of the Nkoulou and Batschenga chiefs. His mother was Princess Berthe Manyan, granddaughter of Tidadi, king of the Babouté. His birth name was Yaka Nkoulou, but after a white priest arrived, his father renamed him Philippe Louis Ombedé. The author later changed this name to René Philombe, which means “to be reborn” in French.

He began high school in Yaoundé in 1945. He became a Marxist there and was dismissed from the school in 1946. He continued learning on his own and took correspondence courses, including those from the School of Arts and Sciences in Paris. His first writings were published during this time. His story, Araignée disgracie, won a prize for best tale from the Committee of Cultural Expression of France overseas. He also founded a cultural association in his father’s village, where he lived.

In 1949 or 1950, he passed a competitive exam to become a police secretary and worked as a police officer in Douala. He lived between two cultures, influenced by French literature and the Negritude movement. He was both a nationalist and a Marxist and secretly joined the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC). He attended a pan-Cameroonian assembly in 1951, which led to disciplinary action. However, he graduated first in his class at the Yaoundé police academy in 1952.

In 1955, he was struck by poliomyelitis, which left his legs paralyzed for the rest of his life. He left the police force and focused on Cameroonian literature. He began collecting information that later became a major book, The Cameroonian Book and Its Authors, published in 1984.

He wrote Lettres de ma cambuse (published in 1964) during his early years of paralysis. The book contains detailed observations about village life, similar to Lettres de mon moulin by Alphonse Daudet. Between 1957 and 1959, he created a French newspaper, The Voice of the Citizen, and a newspaper in Ewondo, Bebela ebug. In 1960, he founded the Association of Cameroonian Poets and Writers (APEC) and served as its secretary until 1981.

Cameroon became independent in 1960 under President Ahmadou Ahidjo of the Union Camerounais. Ahidjo viewed members of the UPC as rebels. René Philombe faced censorship and was imprisoned for several months in 1961. During this time, he wrote Choc anti-choc, a novel in poems, which was not published until 1978. In 1963, he was accused of recreating the UPC and imprisoned again.

Philombe’s early books were published by Éditions CLE in Yaoundé, created in 1963 with help from Dutch and German Protestant churches. To gain more freedom to publish and promote Cameroonian literature, he founded his own publishing house, Semences Africaines, in 1972. This allowed him to publish many of his previously unpublished works.

Rewards

In 1965, he was awarded the Mottart Prize by the Académie Française for all his work. In 1993, he and Mongo Beti were the first to receive the Fonlon-Nichols Prize from the African Literature Association.