His Araignée disgracie won a prize for the best tale from the Committee of Cultural Expression of France overseas.
[4][5] Straddling two cultures, soaked in French literature and texts from the Negritude movement, he was both a nationalist and a Marxist, and he was secretly engaged in the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC).
He then devoted himself to Cameroonian literature on which he began a documentation which would result years later, in 1984, in the publication of the monumental book, The Cameroonian book and its authors: a contribution to the literary history of the United Republic of Cameroon from 1895 to the present day with a bio-bibliographic record of the authors.
fine observations of the life of his village, in the same vein as Lettres de mon moulin by Alphonse Daudet.
[7] Philombe's first books were published by Éditions CLE in Yaoundé, created in 1963 with the help of Dutch and German Protestant churches.
For greater freedom of publication, and for the sake of promoting Cameroonian literature, René Philombe created his own publishing house Semences Africaines in 1972, which allowed him to edit his own texts for a large part which had remained unpublished until then.