This article offers a reading of the novel Machin la Hernie by Sony Labou Tansi based on the concept of « minor literature » as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka : pour une littérature mineure. The challenge is to analyse the enunciative processes of the text so as to provide a clinical description of postcolonial corporeality. The study of the text and of its enunciative performance also endeavours to clarify the anthropo logical issues raised by the text and to delineate the teratological figure of a leader who would have « the State in his belly » .