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Bere Adu [Le moment est venu] de J. J. Adaye (Akan, 1913): Un roman au service du développement

Eichholzer, Erika (2007). Bere Adu [Le moment est venu] de J. J. Adaye (Akan, 1913): Un roman au service du développement. In: Itinéraires et Contacts de Cultures. Paris: CENEL.

This article deals with the first novel in Twi/Akan, the major language in Ghana. For a
long time, it was believed that "Ghana could boast of no vernacular novelists of its own
until the 1960s" (Newell, 2002: 65). The catechist J.J. Adaye, however, a Basel Mission
product, published a 90-page novel entitled Bere Adu! (= "The time has arrived") in
1913 already. This book was rather seen as a collection of short stories than a novel by
some authors who dealt with literature in Ghanaian languages. Bere Adu! fell into
oblivion, even though it was republished by the Waterville Publishing House Accra in
1969. When we go back to the sources and read an article by the Basel Missionary Arthur
Jehle on "What will become of our mission students on the Gold Coast?" in the
Evangelisches Missionsmagazin, we learn about the genre of this book: "[Adaye?s] book
is the first independent oeuvre in Tshi (= Twi), a so-called novel of purpose. He and
others have more of these in preparation. If we were able to expand our mission press,
the profession of a writer should be added to the ones mentioned above [printer,
typesetter, proofreader, etc.]" (EM, 1916: 109).
In this paper, I maintain that Bere Adu! could be viewed as a novel of development,
whereas less so in the classical sense of character development but rather in the sense of
national development as the plot is about three young men from then Gold Coast who
? in order to raise capital ? migrated to Matadi in the Belgium Congo, where the
Belgians were building railways. The story is about their experiences abroad and how
they used the new knowledge that they acquired to bring back to the Gold Coast and
use it for its development.