Africa", comparing him to Leopold Sedar Senghor. It was translated into English (Bound to Violence) by Ralph Manheim in 1971. Ouologuem's novel is harshly critical of African nationalism, and "reserves its greatest hostility for the violence Africans committed against other Africans". Some critics felt that the praise and initial response of "authenticity" for the novel, which is often historically inaccurate, was a Western response. These critics viewed it as a rejection of a glorified view of African history: a review in The Nation said that Ouologuem had "shattered the ... myth of a glorious African past". However, the novel was soon mired in controversy, as some of its passages appeared to have been plagiarized from Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield (first published in 1934) and the French novel The Last of the Just (Le dernier des justes, 1959) by Andre Schwartz-Bart. After a lawsuit by Greene, the book was banned in France, and has only recently been re-published there. At the time, Ouologuem claimed that he had originally used quotations on some of the controversial passages, but his original manuscript is not available to verify this. He also claimed that in some early interviews, he had openly spoken of excerpting these passages, which is why it was not as controversial in France. Since 1977, the English edition has carried the note: "The Publishers acknowledge the use of certain passages on pages 54–56 from It's a Battlefield by Graham Greene." Despite the controversy, the novel remains one of the landmarks of postcolonial African literature, notable for its "cultural sweep: legends, myths, chronicles, religious matter woven into an opulent narrative; for eloquence: the cadence and music of the prose". Le devoir de violence delineates the seven-and-a-half centuries of history of central Mali (specifically, the Dogon region), from 1202 to 1947, when a fictitious nation, Nakem-Zuiko, is on the threshold of independence. The first part of the book deals with several powerful Malian empires, particularly the pre-colonial Toucouleur Empire which had Bandiagara as its capital, and the pre-Islamic Bambara Empire it replaced. It points out how African rulers collaborated with the slave traders, selling a hundred million citizens to be carried off into slavery. The narrative is marked by violence and eroticism, depicting sorcery and black magic as natural human activity. In the second, colonial part of the story, the protagonist, Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, descended from slaves, is sent to France to be