Someone has suggested [that Beti's Mission to Kala] is a picaresque novel and that the protagonist, Jean-Marie, is a picaresque hero. The statement is misleading because the plot of the classic picaresque novel is mainly episodic, and character growth is almost nil. Beyond this, the classic picaro normally comes from the lowest stratum of society, has little breeding, lives on his wits, and only a very thin line separates his rascality from actual criminality. A picaro is always a prankster and a rascal who begins and ends as one with little or no character development.

But the plot of Mission to Kala is not strung together haphazardly. The story line has causality, and events are ordered and arranged organically. There is a marked growth, change, and development at the end in the character of Jean-Marie. The characters themselves are convincingly motivated, and there is a dynamic interaction among them. (p. 181)

Another critical misjudgment is that Mission to Kala is a satire pure and simple. Now, a satire squarely in its genre, is one in which the protagonist suffers disillusionments by trying to apply systems to a world that is far from systematized (Candide, for example, sets out with incredible naivete, believing that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds"). In such works—Voltaire's Candide, Rabelais' Gargantua, and the like—characters are usually presented as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent so that the ultimate result would be caricatures due to the stylized nature of character delineation. Emphasis on ideas and a free play of intellectual fancy are the hallmarks of satire. Of course, one must admit that Mission to Kala makes satiric jabs at the self-deceptions and facile assumptions of superiority which Jean-Marie (a laughable example of the colonized mind), with his half-digested bits of Western education, clothes himself; but the work is squarely in the novel tradition. (p. 182)

Mission to Kala is a novel in which the journey motif (physical and metaphorical) shapes the novelistic form. It traces the physical journey of Jean-Marie Medza … from his village to Kala, to retrieve his uncle's runaway wife and bring her back. He succeeds in his mission…. But in the process, he gains an insight into himself and achieves maturity. An undercurrent of irony pervades the action and enriches it. (p. 183)

At the end of the physical journey, the mission is successful—Niam's wife is brought back….

But it is the temporal or metaphorical journey which assumes greater importance in the book, for the journey motif provides Medza with opportunities for growth, maturity, and self-discovery. In the process, he goes through a series of "admissions," "discoveries," and "initiations" which constitute the movement and rhythm of the novel. In the manner of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Jean-Marie is the alazon or self-deceiver, posturing with an inflated self-image of himself—this "scholar," this "prodigy," as he likes to think of himself—while Duckfoot Johnny and Zambo play the part of the eiron or self-depreciators who, in fact, possess sophistication.

At the beginning of his journey, Jean-Marie regards himself not just as a mere boy sent on a delicate family mission, but as "a brigand chief, a pirate, a true Conquistador" on a "splendid machine" (his borrowed bicycle, mind!) going to conquer a foreign land. He imagines himself "the star in the ascendant, the coming man of the tribe." He refers to the "primitive savagery" he witnessed in Kala on his arrival. He took time out to ask "by what miraculous process this man could be related to me in any way?" on seeing Zambo, his cousin, to whom he refers as "a great hulking devil."… Duckfoot Johnny, who pretends ignorance, leads him into further self-deception…. (p. 184)

The self-deception continues in social drinking where Jean-Marie found out, to his dismay, that he could not handle alcohol like any of his friends in Kala. In one scene, he recruits Zambo to help him deceive his friends by surreptitiously consuming his share of the liquor for him, misleading Duckfoot Johnny into the belief that Jean-Marie is a guzzler like himself…. Even in the intellectual sphere which is the source of his snobbery of Kala villagers, Jean-Marie found on close questions from the ignorant villagers, "vast gaps in the frontiers of my kingdom." It was a very sobering admission—the beginning of Jean-Marie's admission of his other weaknesses…. (p. 185)

After his stay in Kala, Jean-Marie felt grown-up enough to rebel against his father and to confront him as a man…. In Freudian terms, his rebellion against his father—a rejection of paternal authority—becomes part of the inevitable road he must traverse in his journey to adulthood. In this journey, events have forced Jean-Marie to see himself as he really is and even to regret part of his past, especially, his education from which his inflated self-image stems. He came to discover, to his chagrin, that his education had been a veneer all along…. (pp. 186-87)

What gives aesthetic shape to Mission to Kala is the change of place which occurs between Jean-Marie and the Kala villagers in the end: Jean-Marie who sets out on a mission to conquer and educate the Kala rustics with his superior education, remains in Kala, not to educate but to be educated by them and to be initiated into every phase of adult village life. It is this reversal which shapes the novel like an hourglass and gives it its architectonic structure. This is one of the major reasons I contend that Mission to Kala is not a picaresque novel, for the plot of the picaresque is episodic and not organic. And organic structure is the hallmark of Mission to Kala. It is one of the few novels coming from Francophone Africa with a recognizable structure and pattern. The movement of the novel has a rhythm provided by a series of admissions, discoveries, and initiations by the protagonist in his journey to adulthood and maturity. It is a novel which has, in Aristotelian terms, both discovery and peripeteia or "reversal."… In Mission to Kala the snobbish and arrogant conquistador, Jean-Marie Medza, who went to educate the barbarous savages in Kala remains, not to educate them but to learn a thing or two from them, to imbibe the wisdom of life from them, to be initiated into manhood by them. (pp. 188-89)

I mentioned earlier that the ironic mode is at the base of the comic enjoyment we derive from Mission to Kala. Comedy in this novel stems from the ironic posture of the author who laughs up his sleeves at the self-deceptions indulged in by his "prodigy"—Jean-Marie Medza, who tries to cover up more and more potentially embarrassing situations with more and more self-deceptions. He suffers minor discomfitures but the reader and the author love him too much to want to see him suffer any serious distress. It is comedy also that helps define the shape of Mission to Kala. The comic pleasure we derive from the novel stems from the concave shape of the plot …, as opposed to the convex shape of tragedy …, because in spite of everything, the mission is a "success." Niam's wife is brought back to him. The source of the comic pleasure, too, is positive rather than negative. Negative comic pleasure is usually the type we derive from comedy of the classical tradition in which a thoroughly despicable character like Volpone, or Shylock, is made, by reason of his own folly, to lapse from cleverness to suffer a humiliating reversal of fortune, caught, as it were, in his own trap, while trying to overreach himself. Rather, Jean-Marie is, as I mentioned above, a protagonist with whom the reader identifies because of the general goodness of his character. (pp. 189-90)

[However, one] must not close one's eyes to the artistic defects of Mission to Kala. The perceptive reader who is interested in the aesthetic quality of the novel will not help noticing that the ending of Mission to Kala is an artistic flop. An offending passage (to the aesthetic sense) stems, I think, from Mongo Beti's attempt at the very end, to extend the frontiers of his novel into the picaresque. It reads (after Jean-Marie leaves his father's house for good, joined by Zambo):

It turned out to be a life of endless wandering: different people, changing ideas, from country to country, and place to place. During these peregrinations my cousin Zambo and I stuck together, like two lambs attached to the same body.

This passage spoils everything. It blemishes an otherwise well-chiselled piece of work. If meaning accretes from the expectations for which the story-line has prepared the reader, it is cheating the reader out of his expectations to suddenly transform Jean-Marie in the end from a mature adult with a wife of his own, into a wandering hobo who, with Zambo, "were imprisoned and tortured together, experienced the same miseries and disillusionments, shared the same joys." As I see it, it is not only artistically crude but offensive to our aesthetic sense to allow Jean-Marie to go through ignorance to experience, maturity, and adulthood with that recognized ticket of admission to adult society and respectability—a wife—and then deface him by presenting to us at the end a depraved and debased image of him. And when the ending also debases Zambo from a hero among his peers in Kala to a wandering picaro in order to make him share the equally abased and reduced stature of Jean-Marie, the reader feels not only disappointed, frustrated, and cheated out of his expectations, but also feels in the sudden turn of events a distortion of the facts. The ending, such as it is, seems to have ignored the simple truth which the novel tells: Medza's successful mission to bring back Niam's wife in the process of which he also grows and matures, gets married, and returns with other admirers from Kala in tow. Medza arriving back in his village gives every impression of a successful man. By allowing Medza's father to chase him out of his household and deny him the enhanced stature of an adult which his own marriage has stanched, is the beginning of a bad ending.

It is possible that Mongo Beti was consciously adhering to modern conceptions and theories of the novel—theories that champion writing an open rather than a closed novel and adopting the technique of inflationary and deflationary characterization. If this is the case, he unconsciously defaced the rounded edges of his work which he so painstakingly put together. By so doing he has deprived Mission to Kala of that beauty which glows from within a finely chiselled piece of work thus depriving the perceptive reader the source of his keenest enjoyment. If I were to end the novel on a note fitting to the structure and meaning of Mission to Kala, I would have Jean-Marie's father welcome him and his wife like a man. I would not send him out on further peregrinations after his major mission was so successfully accomplished. (pp. 192-93)