[In Mission terminée] Jean-Marie Medza returns home having failed his second baccalauréat. He discovers, to his horror, that he is the advocate-designate whose responsibility it is to bring back the wayward wife of his distant cousin, Niam.

He sets off towards the unknown mounted on the chief's bicycle. Horror is now replaced by pride and self-satisfaction—until he reaches Kala, the backwood village to which the woman fled. Here, he meets his cousin Zambo and Mama, his cousin's father. They introduce him to the many, varied characters and aspects of their village. (p. 63)

His classical education earns him—and Mama—a fine flock of animals and birds; his new-discovered physical prowess—tutored by Zambo—brings him the distinction of marriage to Edima, young daughter of the chief.

At last Niam's wife returns; she is summarily condemned and fined. Jean-Marie and Edima are immediately dispatched on the path of matrimonial bliss and he then decides to return home to face his father, absent at the beginning of the holiday.

On his return, he discovers that his father's anger is untempered by the delay. Jean-Marie decides to leave Edima, home, flock, everything to go in search of ideal happiness with Zambo, his faithful shadow, always at his side.

While [Ferdinand] Oyono and [Mongo] Beti demonstrate basically the same attitude towards colonial Africa and its inhabitants in their novels, their treatment, style and presentation are different in many ways. Oyono takes the classical situations, an almost stylized representation of colonial life among Europeans and Africans. Beti is an experimenter, creating various situations and examining their evolution and the results. All the various side issues have equally to be analysed and occasionally—as with Kris in Le roi miraculé—a foreign element is added to give a little more spice to the brew. His novels are much more rambling than Oyono's. Many more aspects of colonial life among Africans are dealt with and the novels' effect, from the point of view of social criticism, is less direct, less forceful than those of Oyono. On the other hand, Beti's Europeans are not only the colonial 'type' but also, and more especially, the kind who want to do good for the Africans but, unfortunately for them, start from the premise that all Africans are unable to organize their lives unless helped by Europeans. His favourite butts are, for this reason, missionaries and dedicated colonial administrators.

These innocents, the Reverend Father Le Guen in Le roi miraculé for example, are put among a backwoods people, given an opportunity to do good, according to their lights, and then left to fend for themselves. Their failure and disillusionment are not wholly due to the Africans' positive social qualities but to their more powerful instinctive urge to survive: self-interest is clearly the motivating force behind his characters, Africans and missionaries alike. This primitive and not very creditable reaction is, in the context of Beti's novels, not natural but the result of pressure put upon people by the colonial situation.

Mission terminée is different in some respects from [Le pauvre Christ de Bomba and Le roi miraculé]…. In this novel Europeans are absent. However, Jean-Marie, with his French education, his feeling of superiority and general self-confidence, is an adequate substitute. Initially, he looks upon this mission as a means of parading his superior knowledge. Only later does he realize how inadequate his education and understanding of life really are. (pp. 63-5)

The contrast between Jean-Marie's simple self-confidence and faith in the universal truths taught by the Europeans and the villagers' direct, materialistic approach to life is the foundation of Beti's comedy. It is enhanced by the contrast between Jean-Marie's narrative style and language and the carefully weighed words of the Kalaians…. Jean-Marie, like a three-headed man in a circus, is paraded from compound to compound. He gives his version of world affairs, answers questions and, the following morning new sheep, fowl or sacks of grain add to his wealth. These evening sessions, during which the villagers probe deeper into his learning than any school examiners, make Jean-Marie question the infallibility of his knowledge for the first time. (p. 65)

The situations which the juxtaposition of such contrasting personalities create are a succession of riotous, slap-stick circuses. They are, for the most part, entirely unrelated and are made to appear the result of fortuitous conjunctions of events. Jean-Marie is never able to know for sure what surprise the village and its inhabitants have next in store for him. His stay is a perpetual battle of wits. He wants to maintain his reputation as a cultured man-about-town; they are determined to assimilate everything into their unbending view of life. Jean-Marie appreciates more and more, as his stay lengthens, the positive qualities they have and which he has never been able to acquire. But this is hidden behind the Rabelaisian humour which subjects everything to its influence.

This humour is the expression of a fundamentally brutal attitude to traditional ways and prejudices. Nothing is sacred: prejudices, passions, ideals, purity are all corrupted by Beti's unrelenting laughter and insistence on the physical nature of things. Jean-Marie's first meeting with Edima, his first, tender calf-love is described in terms of his carnal appetites. His attempts to tell the villagers what they want to know are turned into inquisitions during which they force him to question his solidarity with them. Yet, behind all this there is this inexpressible sadness, as if a great deception had made life bitter and cynical humour was the only relief.

Beti's language is as riotous as his humour. It is rich in French idiom; images are taken from any source available and as many clichés as he could discover are thrust into the narrative…. This language gives vitality and humour to the story but, in fact, seems to be somewhat inappropriate. This strangeness is a deliberate device which emphasizes the peculiar position of the narrator. (pp. 66-7)

The development of Jean-Marie's character at the critical stage of the change from adolescence to manhood is, sometimes despite and sometimes helped by the comedy, made to appear natural and unforced. It is a continuous sequence which leads from stage to stage without any one of them having more significance than the other. There is no climax but an inevitable progression … which is imperceptible to everyone in the novel….

There are, then, many threads running through Mission terminée. There are so many and so often they lead nowhere or are still between our hands at the end of the novel that it is impossible to say what this mission accomplished. The overwhelming aspect of the novel is its humour, good-natured but uncompromising, which distorts but, finally, does not destroy. It is a farce but, at the same time, there is bitterness and sorrow. It is the story of a young man's first encounter with the life his ancestors and elders lived when he has reached an age at which he has been completely alienated from this traditional life and at the most impressionable time of his adolescence. He is both very assured but self-conscious, blasé and sensitive, critical but unsure of his foundations. The result is ribald but nostalgic.

In [Le roi miraculé] Beti uses much the same themes, setting and techniques as in Mission terminée and Le pauvre Christ de Bomba. He contrasts the naïve goodness of the missionary, Le Guen in this case, with the cunning of the villagers in their struggle over the fate of twenty-two of the chief's wives after the chief has, somewhat ambiguously, been converted to Roman Catholicism. He shows how superficial Catholic influence is and how, if tribal customs and Catholicism exert conflicting pressures on the Africans in the backwoods, the former is the stronger. This theme is a parallel to that in Le pauvre Christ de Bomba where Father Drumont discovers that his Christian teaching is being interpreted in terms of local beliefs, with disastrous consequences. (p. 68)

In all three novels, the action is set in the backwoods where traditional ways, although without their former social significance, are still strong. They are, in fact, strong enough to withstand and reject any attempt to change or destroy them. The village … [is the centre] of tight, inward-looking societies whose members look upon the outside world as an extension of their own. In this way, Beti emphasizes the futility of their resistance to change while, at the same time, showing that the alternative being offered in the cases he gives has nothing to commend it either.

Beti's comedy is essentially boisterous and depends on the development of incongruous situations based on complete misunderstanding or incomprehension. The outsiders, Jean-Marie or the missionaries, find themselves faced with a society which is totally incomprehensible and uncomprehending. Their imagination and reason are stretched to the limit in their attempts to come to terms with the problems caused by this lack of contact. However, to the outside observer, these efforts appear grotesquely absurd because, in the central character's terms of reference, there is obviously no satisfactory conclusion which could possibly be found. Events are, therefore, entirely outside their control.

In Mission terminée and Le pauvre Christ de Bomba, the story is told by an intermediary who plays an important part in the novel. Jean-Marie tells his own story while Denis, Drumont's general steward, records his master's misfortunes in his diary. Their style, racy in the first case, naïve in the second, gives the comedy its outrageous flavour and, at the same time, makes the events seem plausible. In Le roi miraculé Beti replaces Denis by Gustave, Le Guen's steward, and Jean-Marie by Kris. Neither recount the story but their attitudes, Kris's cynicism and Gustave's mixture of naïvety, sharp wits and intuitive understanding, influence the reader's interpretation of events, emphasizing certain aspects and implications, which bring out the less obvious and, sometimes discreditable, motivations behind a character's actions. Kris's presence at the great battle which is the climax of the struggle for power between the various factions in the tribe makes it appear a rather primitive and childish squabble while Gustave's reactions to the scene between the chief's first wife, Makrita, and Le Guen in the church show just how far out of his depth the good missionary has ventured, and how absurd he now appears. The personal note in the narrative is supplied by Le Guen's letters to his mother with their naïve appreciation of the situation as it appears to him. Extracts are put into the narrative at moments when the events he describes have obviously an entirely different significance for everyone else to that which he gives them. (pp. 69-70)

Beti's language and style are similar in all three novels. In Le roi miraculé, however, although the language is colloquial, he does not use slang and outrageous imagery as in Mission terminée. Nor is it totally naïve as Denis's presentation of events in Le pauvre Christ de Bomba. The effect is one of objective cynicism while he also attempts to present actions and events as seen through the eyes of the various protagonists, giving each individual's peculiar inflexion to the scene he is witnessing. For this novel expands on a theme suggested by Mama in Mission terminée and by the attitude Beti finds among the elders of Jean-Marie's village on the 'grande route': self-interest motivating every person's acts and thoughts. This is the source of the basic comedy in the novel and Beti delves into his characters' personalities, presenting them through their own words and actions which, in the actual situation, are ridiculously pompous or foolish. (pp. 70-1)

There are a multitude of side-issues surrounding [the central plot of Le roi miraculé]. Some of them exert an influence, obvious or implicit on the developments, others are simply extraneous but link up, imperceptibly, with similar minor events. The whole story makes a composite description of a certain period in Essazam's history, with the complex interplay of events making it impossible for the motivating forces behind them to be discerned. What are given as cause and effect by the protagonists and by the administration's apparently impartial findings, tell, as Beti makes quite obvious, only half the story. The villagers are much better politicians than God's servant, Le Guen, and eternal values have to give way to traditional concerns and the needs of colonial policy. (p. 72)

The characters of this novel have in fact much more importance in the novel and greater independence of action than those in the other two. Here, instead of being presented through the descriptions of a narrator, they are developed through their own words and acts, without a third person to interpret them. They are important because it is the interaction of their desires and interests which forms the basis of the comedy and satire of the novel. Because their motivations are an important factor in the novel Beti makes these characters much more definite as individuals. Their own personal interests are shown influencing every gesture and, in one case at least, the result is tragically grotesque rather than farcical. (p. 73)

This novel is the last published by Beti. Like his others and those of Oyono it is, behind the humour, totally negative. The satirical attack on colonial Africa is totally destructive. This novel, with its emphasis on self-interest is, in this respect, Beti's most pessimistic. Altogether, these novels by Beti and Oyono represent the watershed … in the Africans' attitude to Europeans. (p. 74)