DRC: when Phèdre meets Mobutu

Mobutu, tragic hero? When exploring the frustrated destiny and excesses of the Zairian despot thanks to Belgian director Thierry Michel's documentary, comics writer Apollo immediately thinks of the great figures of Greek mythology. Occupational risk?

This Réunion native born in Carthage, Tunisia, is also a French teacher and was influenced by Racine's plays. In his head, the idea for the comic T'Zée, an African tragedy Born: the drama of Phaedra, wife of Theseus, king of Athens, will be repeated in the Congolese jungle.

Eternal tyrants

“These archaic stories have so much plasticity that they can adapt to contexts that have nothing to do with each other. Versailles in the 16th century, with Racine, or here, Zaire in the 1990s”, highlights Apollo. Mixing reality and myth, retouching names and reorienting O trajectories, presents Bobi, second wife of the dictator T'Zée, in love with her stepson Hyppolite, who is in love with the daughter of an independentist, a kind of Pierre Mulele's first fiction.

What interests me is this end of the world to which the West has paid little attention, this megalomaniacal madness that is dying

“Everything is at the same time very inspired by reality and almost invented”, summarizes Apolo, who is confident that he wanted to free himself from any historical rigor. But the specter of Lumumba, the Mai-Mai or the genocide of the “small neighboring country” is never far away…

Like Mobutu, the character T'Zée wears a leopard print hat and had his own Versailles built in the heart of the equatorial forest. His raised fist and medals are, however, inspired by the Ugandan despot Idi Amin Dada. “As many novelists did from the 1970s to the 1990s, we created an archetype of an African dictator. Our character is a mixture of all these eternal tyrants”, comments Apollo.

End of reign

The screenwriter teamed up once again with Brüno, with whom he created the science fiction diptych Biotope the series Colonial Command. Clean design but attentive to details, green and ocher tones… This album exudes a scent of the end of a reign. The dictator's fall is approaching. “What interests me is this end of the world to which the West ended up paying little attention, this megalomaniacal madness that is dying and that French-speaking African literature so well announced”, explains Apollo.

The writings of the Congolese Sony Labou Tansi and Emmanuel Dongala, the Cameroonian Mongo Beti, Maliano Amadou Hampaté Bâ and Ivorian Ahmadou Kourouma also appear in the five acts of the comic book. “We will tell the truth. The truth about his dictatorship […]wrote the latter in 1998 in While I wait for the beasts to vote. The whole truth about your dirt, your bullshit; we will denounce their lies, their numerous crimes and their murders. »

Fantasy land

Appollo draws the end of a world, but also what it survived: sappers, fights, fetishes... Everything that, in short, marked the imagination of this reunion that lived five years in the DRC. If he also passed through mainland France, Morocco, Angola and Réunion – where he now lives – he has a particularly vivid memory of the warmth of the Congolese, the fervor of Kinshasa and its “absolutely incredible” cultural production.

The DRC is a country that accompanied me for a long time, it was my imaginary country

The artist never stopped associating with local talents. With Séraphin Kajibwami, in 2011 he participated in an AIDS awareness mission by the NGO African Artists for Development with Kamituga Diamonds, which then became the largest circulation of a French-language comic strip in Sub-Saharan Africa, at 100,000 copies. With Barly Baruti, in 2014 he created the album Mrs., an adventure story set against the backdrop of the First World War. “The DRC is a country that I have fantasized about a lot, that has accompanied me for a long time”, says Apollo. It was my fantasy land. When I went to live there, the emotion that still causes me today increased. » And that he hopes to convey the delete readers.