Bernard-Marie Koltès: Combat de nègre et de chiens (1979)

Bernard-Marie Koltès didn't intend Combat de nègre et de chiens to be about Africa and blacks: he's not an African writer, he says. Therefore, he continues, there is nothing of neocolonialism to be understood here, nothing about racial issues. This is simply a place in the world, and on one occasion he spent a month in the African bush seeing friends on a public works building site. This was a place with five or six houses surrounded by barbed wire with watch towers. About a dozen whites lived there terrorised by the outside world, with black armed guards all around. It was shortly after the Biafran war and gangs of pillagers were around. At night the guards used weird noises to keep themselves awake, and it was this noise that made Koltès decide to write this play, in which 'petit-bourgeois' activities (such as in the 16th arrondissement, Koltès notes) take place.

Combat de nègre et de chiens is a kind of huis clos in which only four characters are seen. There are three whites: Horn, who is the sixty-year-old boss of the site; Cal, the thirty-year-old engineer who suggests that Horn is impotent; and Léone, the woman who has come from Paris and whom Horn intends to marry. Alboury is the black who has come to the site to take back his brother ostensibly killed in an accident, but in reality shot and hidden in a sewer by Cal.

The atmosphere is of fear, impending violence, misunderstanding. The four characters frequently fail to understand each other and communication is often one or more stages removed from the intended target: they don't talk to each other but through, around or completely divorced from the supposed interlocutor. It could be argued of course that this is the way most people normally communicate with each other, egotistically and with little or no interest in or comprehension of the other: the shadow Samuel Beckett casts is very long. And in addition too, Koltès is a member of the highly esteemed group of writers published by Minuit. This is a fascinating piece of work.