La solitude qui s’ignore : l’isolement de Johnny Chien Méchant

Loneliness is a complex phenomenon and acquires various forms – it encourages creativity, but mostly it isolates. Within customary societies, including the African ones, the loneliness isn’t acceptated, because of ancestrale traditions who obligate individuals to live in groups. In spite of this conception of social life, some dramatic modern problems reverse the vision of social human being: child-soldiers are living in gaggles, but stay isolated and alone. Johnny Mad Dog, character of Dongala’s eponyme novel, illustrates the loneliness in the crowd, the loneliness which ignores itself, an unconscious one.