[Remember Ruben] treats of the relationship between individuals and a complex, clouded situation of emerging national politics. When a solitary, young boy arrives at the village of Ekoumdoum, a new dimension enters village life. The youth, renamed Mor-Zamba, lost, coldly reticent and taunted by the villagers, attracts to himself another youth, Abena, a future revolutionary. Abena's sole ambition, symbolically, is to 'get a gun'. Morzamba's ambition to have the daughter of a prominent villager for wife stirs up forces of hostility which lead to his being taken off to a labour camp. Abena goes to look for him, and from then on their actions become larger than their characters….

Behind everything lurks Ruben, trade union leader, relentless critic of national politics, and later guerrilla leader, whose personality links together the forces of protest. He is a mythical figure, never confronted in the narrative. After his death the phrase...