[citation needed] Though he lived in exile for many decades, Beti's life reveals an unflagging commitment to improvement of his home country.

As one critic wrote after his death: "The militant path of this essayist, chronicler and novelist has been governed by one obsession: the quest for the dignity of African people.

He wrote regularly for the journal Présence Africaine; among his pieces was a review "Afrique noire, littérature rose" about Camara Laye's novel The Dark Child.

"He takes Laye to task for pandering to French metropolitan readers with false images of Africa that efface colonial injustice.

Beti's first novel Ville cruelle ("Cruel City"), under the pseudonym "Eza Boto", followed in 1954, published over several editions of Présence Africaine.

After a long judicial action, Mongo Beti and his editor François Maspéro finally obtained, in 1976, the cancellation of the ban on the publication of Main basse.

Frustrated by what he saw as the failure of post-independence governments to bring genuine freedom to Africa, Beti adopted a more radical perspective in these works.

Various business endeavours in Betiland failed; eventually, he opened in Yaoundé the Librairie des Peuples noirs (Bookstore of the Black Peoples) and organised agricultural activities in his village of Akometam.

In response he published several novels: L'histoire du fou in 1994 then the two initial volumes Trop de soleil tue l'amour (1999) and Branle-bas en noir et blanc (2000), of a trilogy which would remain unfinished.

[citation needed] He was hospitalised in Yaoundé on 1 October 2001 for acute hepatic and kidney failure which remained untreated for lack of dialysis.

The novel is not widely read now; Beti published it under the pseudonym Eza Boto, a nom de plume he did not use later to dissociate himself from the work.

Gerald Moore notes that in this novel, Beti has learned to use his protagonist's naivete as a tool of satire: the apprentice's simplistic reflections on his experiences with the priest "becomes the pure mirror through which we see the greed, the folly, and the tragic misunderstandings of a whole epoch in Africa's history.

"[10] Mission terminée, 1957, is a comic novel describing the visit of a young Cameroonian man with a western education to a village in the interior.

Instead, he is charged with the duty of travelling to Kala, a remote village, to secure the return of a young woman who has fled her abusive, domineering husband.

Wole Soyinka praised its realism, writing "Idealization is a travesty of literary truth; worse still, it betrays only immature hankerings of the creative impulse.

Le roi miraculé: chronique des Essazam (1958) describes the transformation of a fictional African town by capitalism, Christianity, and colonialism.

The hero here, Le Guen, had been a minor character in The Poor Christ of Bomba; this novel is set shortly after World War II.

Le Guen takes advantage of a seemingly miraculous recovery from death to convince the local Chief of Essazam to embrace Christianity.

This chaos alarms both the Church and the colonial administration; at the end, Le Guen is transferred, and Essazam returns to its traditional ways.

He finds that his greedy parents had forced her into a loveless and inappropriate marriage; her ill-treatment at the hands of her husband began a chain of events that led to her death.

He treats not only his own experiences, which included long-delayed reunions and police harassment, but also his impressions of what more than two decades of nominal independence and autocratic rule had done to the material and psychological conditions of his countrypeople.