L’enfant dans les récits de vengeance pour la jeunesse en Afrique francophone

Vengeance, a permanent feature of anthropology, affects all ages. If in real life we observe ordinary forms of meanness among children, narratives of vengeance portray the child in a much more complex light. This article studies two sides of the figure of the child in Francophone African children’s literature: the vengeful child and the child who is a victim of vengeance. Even children are sensitive to injustice and humiliation: the wrongs they experience provoke in them the memory of a suffering that renders their thirst for vengeance unchanging. Depending on the context or circumstances, the vengeful child can appear either noble or tragic. Yet, sometimes the child himself becomes the victim of a collective vengeance. In this case, the work poses the complex question of forgiveness.