Stranger in his Homeland

written by Linus Asong

Stranger in His Homeland completes the long-awaited trilogy of Linus Asong’s fictitious village of Nkokonoko Small Monje, separately treated in The Crown of Thorns and its sequel A Legend of the Dead. However, it leads us back not to events after A Legend of the Dead, but to the crisis that created the passionately exciting The Crown of Thorns. Honest, enthusiastic, arrogant and self-righteous, Antony Nkoaleck, the first graduate of his tribe means well. But his society, entrenched in corruption, sees things differently and therefore judges him according to its own norms. Just one or two errors on Antony’s part are enough to cost him his job with the government, the coveted throne of Nkokonoko Small Monje, and finally his life. It is a sad story, strongly reminiscent of Myshkin’s fate in Dostoevysky’s novel The Idiot, a story in which the Russian novelist vividly shows the inability of any man to bear the burden of moral perfection in an imperfect world.

Linus Asong

Linus Asong was born in the South West Region of Cameroon in 1947. With a combined B.A honours in Education, in 1980 he entered the University of Windsor in Canada whence he graduated with a terminal degree in Creative Writing. He holds an M.A and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta, in Edmonton Canada, and is presently Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Ecole Normale Superieure Bambili (University of Yaounde 1). Until his death in July 2012, Asong was a stand-up humorist, a consummate portrait painter, an accomplished literary scholar, and a celebrated prolific writer with over a dozen novels to his credit.