As I noted in my Introduction, Michel de Certeau's “Ethno-Graphy” from The Writing of History shows how the West prepares its other for consumption. He maps the relationship between Europe and its other(s) as an epistemological construct sustained by metaphors (and the reality) of geographical distance and/as cultural difference. In particular, de Certeau emphasizes the West's insistence on a radical opposition between writing's historicity over and against the evanescence of a protean oral immediacy. Achille Ngoye's experimentations with the vernacular ultimately engaged with the second part of this equation, showing how orality as a distinct aesthetic-expressive medium conditions the literary, and how the binary opposition is also a constitutive convergence. Implicit in Ngoye's writing is the idea that this process of transcription and translation participates in the broader scientific project that gives value, place, and meaning to the other's otherwise naturalized un-self-conscious speech. Whereas Ngoye stressed the local processes of adaptation and transformation that produce a specific literary vernacular, the Congolese (Kinshasa) author Bolya (Bolya Baenga, 1957–2010) comments instead on the broader scientific processes that gather and order data—of which oral testimony is one important part.

Significantly, Bolya's two crime novels, only the first of which I will examine at any length here, use the crime fiction of Chester Himes to establish an elaborate—and highly entertaining—critique of ethnography. Still, the American's precise influence is not immediately obvious.