Henri Lopes, a writer and former prime minister of the Republic of Congo whose groundbreaking novels mocked the abuses of African leaders but who later served as one of the continent’s most brutal, died Nov. 2 in the Paris suburb of Suresnes. He was 86.

His death in a hospital was announced by the Embassy of the Republic of Congo in Paris.

Mr. Lopes’ dual career spanned the formative years of both African nationality and the continent’s literature. He was richly rewarded in both areas, with high positions in politics and diplomacy as well as prestigious literary prizes.

His novel “Le Pleurer-Rire” (“The Laughing Cry”), published in 1982, satirizes a brutal and choleric African dictator and is considered a fundamental work of African literature. His Tribaliques, a combative short story collection published in 1971 and about which much has been written since, was an early depiction of the shortcomings of an emerging African society torn by ethnic rivalries.

Mr. Lopes (pronounced LO-pez) ended his career as Ambassador of the Republic of Congo in Paris and retired in 2015. His country, a former French colony, lies across the Congo River from the much larger Democratic Republic of Congo, which was once part of Belgium’s possession.

Mr. Lopes’ journey through ministries, ideologies, rulers and literary favor encapsulated the choice – and dilemma – facing African intellectuals in the second half of the 20th century: join the leadership in power or live in precarious situation.

He went along. He was the second most famous citizen of the Republic of Congo and never broke with the first, the country’s president. Denis Sassou Nguessowho has ruled the country almost continuously since 1979 – with the exception of a five-year break after the electoral defeat in 1992.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when the country was just becoming independent, the mild-mannered, mild-mannered Mr. Lopes served successively as education minister, information minister, justice minister, foreign minister and chairman of the Revolutionary Court, which tried enemies of the state. From 1973 to 1975 he was Prime Minister, then head of the party newspaper, then Finance Minister. Along the way, he helped write the national anthem.

“We tried to run the country as we learned,” he said in his final interview before his death. in a documentary by Hassim Tall Boukambou, which will be published in January.

When Mr. Sassou-Nguesso, a former army colonel, regained power after a civil war in 1997, he remembered his old comrade from the Congolese Workers’ Party. Mr. Lopes was already in Paris after serving as UNESCO’s deputy director-general for Africa.

“So Sassou had someone who gave respect to his regime, and Henri Lopes was able to stay in Paris,” Sekou Camara, who led a World Bank project in the Republic of Congo and knew Mr. Lopes since childhood, said in a telephone interview.

After that, however, Mr. Lopes “never had the courage to break away from Sassou,” said Andrea Ngombet, the leader of an exiled opposition group who was once given books by Mr. Lopes.

“In these regimes there is always a way to compromise you,” he said in an interview, referring to Mr. Lopes’ “big villa” in Suresnes.

At Mr. Lopes’ funeral in Paris on November 14, Mr. Sassou-Nguesso sent four ministers from his government, including the prime minister, as part of a 27-member entourage.

The “central paradox” of Mr. Lopes’ career is, on the one hand, his clear view of the dark corners of African politics and, on the other, his profiting from them, said Brett L. Carter, an expert on the Republic of Congo and assistant professor at the University of Southern California. “I don’t know how he reconciled that.”

Mr Ngombet noted that “his fate and that of Sassou were linked”.

“He managed to acquire a kind of material lightness that was incompatible with his functions,” he said.

Mr. Lopes was appointed ambassador to Paris, the country’s most important diplomatic post, in 1998. During his time in office, numerous human rights violations occurred in the Republic of Congo, including a notorious massacre in the port of Brazzaville, the capital; rigged elections; the torture and imprisonment of political opponents; and Mr. Sassou-Nguesso’s widely documented corruption.

“I describe the Sassou government as a mafia,” said John F. Clark, a professor at Florida International University and author of a book on the history and politics of the Republic of Congo.

The Congressional Research Service wrote in 2019 that “corruption is widespread in the country,” with Mr. Sassou-Nguesso’s family owning tens of millions of dollars worth of real estate in Paris alone, which has long been the subject of investigations by French authorities. The oil-rich Republic of Congo is extremely poor; Most of his wealth is concentrated in the presidential palace.

But despite his literary fame, Mr. Lopes never took a public stand against these abuses. His 2018 memoir “Il est déjà demain” (“It’s already tomorrow”), has nothing at all to say about Mr. Sassou-Nguesso once he regains power.

“I worked with him until I left the embassy,” Mr. Lopes said in an interview with Jeune Afrique magazine. “So I have a duty to restrain myself,” he said. “I could have made excuses for him that would have been unbelievable. Or I could have criticized even though I had just left his team. So I took the risk of not saying anything.”

His widow Christine said in a telephone interview from Suresnes that Mr. Sassou-Nguesso was her husband’s “brother, his companion and his friend.”

Before he took office as president, Mr. Lopes was celebrated for his literary achievements. In 1972 he won the Grand Literary Prize of Black Africa for “Tribaliques”..” And 21 years later, he received the coveted Grand Prix of French-speaking Countries from the supreme arbiter of the French language, the Académie Française, for his entire work.

1992 in the French newspaper Le Monde, the critic Alain Salles compared Mr. Lopes to Patrick Modiano, a future French Nobel laureate in literature, and wrote that “the phantoms of colonization and decolonization have replaced those of occupation and cleansing” in Mr. Modiano’s novels set during World War II.

On his death last month, Le Monde wrote that Mr. Lopes “was early on one of the pioneers of ‘African literature’ as it was then conceived.”

When “The Laughing Cry,” considered his most important novel, was published in 1982, Mr. Lopes was well aware of the disappointments of decolonization, having lived through several coups and the March 1977 assassination of President Marien Ngouabi, under whom he once served. His portrait of the character Bwakamabé, a dictator, in “Laughing Cry” is wild:

“I, I am the father. And you, you are my children,” says Bwakamabé, rejecting the idea of ​​a vote. “You should give me honest advice. But if you are afraid of my reactions and want to spare me, you should respectfully keep your mouth shut.”

Henri Lopes was born on September 12, 1937 in what was then Léopoldville, later Kinshasa, the capital of what was then the Belgian Congo. His parents, Jean-Marie Lopes, a small landowner, and Micheline Vulturi, were mixed-race children of Belgian and French colonials who had fleeting relationships with local women, a fact that weighed heavily on the light-skinned Mr. Lopes’ self-confidence in finding his place in of Congolese society and his position in the Sassou-Nguesso government.

“Being of mixed race hasn’t just shaped me; it constituted my identity, my essential existence,” he once told an interviewer for the French magazine Le Point. And it left him somewhat alienated. As Professor Clark of Florida International University put it: “He’s not part of the mafia. When you’re part of the mafia family but you’re an outsider, you’re never completely trusted.”

Mr. Lopes studied at the Sorbonne – his divorced mother had married a Frenchman who brought young Henri with him to France – and joined several African student societies. In the mid-1960s he taught at the École Normale Superieure de l’Afrique Centrale in Brazzaville before being recruited into the government, as was common for educated young men.

In addition to his wife, his deputy, Mr. Lopes, is survived by four children from a previous marriage: his daughters Myriam, Annouk and Laure, and his son Thomas.

About his long career in politics, Mr. Lopes often told interviewers that he preferred writing. But for many, his political activism overshadowed his literary achievements.

As Professor Carter of USC said: “To the extent that he used his achievements to serve the regime, many Congolese will never forgive him.”