topics: |  fiction | africa | senegal | diaspora | postcolonial

Samba Diallo grows up in a conservative Islamic society in Senegal, which
is still reeling from its sudden enslavement by the French.  He is
apprenticed to an Islamic teacher at an early age, and becomes attached to
him, despite his occasional harsh behaviour.  However, all is not well
within the Diallobe, and there is deep questioning about how they were
defeated so easily.  An authoritative aunt organizes a conclave where it
is decided that Samba would go to a French school, and eventually to
university in France, so that he can learn the "winning ways" of the white
man.

In Paris, he finds himself questioning the role of his religion, and
discovers the ambiguity of a journey that deprives him of the anchor of
his faith without providing any equivalent alternatives in the soul-less
science of the west.  The book raises some important questions about the
social function of western knowledge and science.

The text is poetic at times, interposing deep philosophical dilemmas with
descriptions of natural effulgence, that serves to underline the intensity
of the conflict.

Excerpts

[Early in the book we find Samba reciting the Quran, whose Arabic he does
not understand.  But he is a good student, and very devout even in this
tender age.]

	The teacher [held Samba] by the ear and, cutting through the
	cartilage of the lobe, his nails met.
	
	"Repeat it! Again! ... Be accurate in repeating the Word of your
	Lord." 
	
	Once more, trembling and gasping, he repeated the flashing sentence.
	His eyes were imploring, his voice was fading away, his little body
	was burning with fever, his heart was beating wildly.  This sentence
	– which he did not understand, for which he was suffering martyrdom
	– he loved for its mystery and its somber beauty.  

	This word was not like other words.  It was a word which demanded
	suffering, it was a word come from God, it was a miracle, it was as
	God Himself had uttered it.  The teacher was right.  The Word which
	comes from God must be spoken exactly as it has pleased Him to
	fashion it.  Whoever defaces it deserves to die.
	
	The child succeeded in mastering his suffering, completely.  He
	repeated the sentence without stumbling, calmly, steadily, as if his
	body were not throbbing with pain.
	
	The teacher released the bleeding ear.  Not one tear had coursed
	down the child’s delicate face.  His voice was tranquil and his
	delivery restrained.
	
	The Word of God flowed pure and limpid from his fervent lips.  There
	was a murmur in his aching head.  He contained within himself the
	totality of the world, the visible and the invisible, its past and
	its future.  This word which he was bringing forth in pain was the
	architecture of the world – it was the world itself. p.4-5

	The [teacher's gaze] was full of admiration... What purity, what a
	miracle!  Truly, the child was a gift from God. p.4-5

Tradition vs the new school

"The woodcutters and the metal-workers are triumphant everywhere, and their
iron holds us under their law.  ... not being able to conquer them, we
should have chosen to be wiped our rather than to yile.   But we are among
the last men on earth to possess God as He veritably is in His
Oneness.... How are we to save him?"  [Sambo's father, on the question of
whether to send Sambo to the foreign school.] 

Teacher: "It is certain that their school is the better teacher of how to join wood
to wood, and that men should learn how to construct dwelling houses that
resist the weather." 

[but six-year-old Samba is sent to learn from the Islamic teacher.]

--

... but he insists on a place for God within. A strong hand must defend
the spirit, but he values inner force and the absolute over the Most Royal
Lady's choice of physical and material triumph. She embodies the epic of the
Diallobe in her haughty countenance. She reiterates and argues with the
Master that: "...the time has come to teach our sons to live. I foresee
that they will have to do with a world of the living... p. 27

"Diallobe, I salute you." A diffuse and powerful hum of sound answered
her. She went on: "I have done something which is not pleasing to us -and
which is not in accordance with our customs. I have asked the women to come
to this meeting today. We Diallobe hate that, and rightly, for we think that
the women should remain at home. But more and more we shall have to do things
which we hate doing, and which do not accord with our customs. p. 45

Arrival of the West in Africa

Strange dawn! The morning of the Occident in black Africa was spangled over
with smiles, with cannon shots, with shining glass beads. Those who had no
history were encountering those who carried the world on their shoulders. It
was a morning of accouchement: the known world was enriching itself by a
birth that took place in mire and blood.

From shock, the one side made no resistance. They were a people without
a past, therefore without memory. The men who were landing on their shores
were white, and mad. Nothing like them had ever been known. The deed was
accomplished before the people were even conscious of what had happened. 
[...]

Those who had shown fight and those who had surrendered, those who had come
to terms and those who had been obstinate—they all found themselves, when
the day came, checked by census, divided up, classified, labeled,
conscripted, administrated.

For the newcomers did not know only how to fight. They were strange
people. If they knew how to kill with effectiveness, they also knew how to
cure, with the same art.  Where they had brought disorder, they
established a new order. They destroyed and they constructed.  On the
black continent it began to be understood that their true power lay not in
the cannons of the first morning, but rather in what followed the cannons.

Behind the gunboats, the clear gaze of the Most Royal Lady of the Diallobe
had seen the new school. 

The new school shares at the same time the characteristics of cannon and
of magnet. From the cannon it draws its efficacy as an arm of combat. Better
than the cannon, it makes conquest permanent. The cannon compels the body,
the school bewitches the soul. Where the cannon has made a pit of ashes
and of death, ... the school establishes peace,  THe morning of rebirth
will be a morning of benediction throught the appeasing virtue of the new
school. p. 48-49

The knight's sermon

On the horizon, it seemed as if the earth were poised on the edge of an
abyss. Above the abyss the sun was suspended, dangerously. The liquid silver
of its heat had been reabsorbed without any loss of its light's splendor. -
p.74

    Your science is the triumph of evidence, a proliferation of the
    surface. It makes you the masters of the external, but at the same
    time it exiles you there, more and more. p.78

---
“The West is in process of overturning these simple ideas, of which we are
 part and parcel. They began, timidly, by relegating God to a place ‘between
inverted commas.’ Then two centuries later, having acquired more assurance,
they decreed, ‘God is dead.’ From that day dates the era of frenzied
toil. Nietzsche is the contemporary of the industrial revolution. God was no
longer there to measure and justify man’s activity. Was it not industry that
did that? Industry was blind, although, finally, it was still possible to
domicile all the good it produced… But already this phase is past… After the
death of God, what they are now announcing is the death of man”.  91 

Everything will depend on what will have happened to me by the time I
reach the end of my studies. p. 112

It may be that we shall be captured at the end of our itinerary,
vanquished by our adventure itself. It suddenly occurs to us that, all along
our road. we have not ceased to metamorphose ourselves, and we see ourselves
as other than what we were. Sometimes the metamorphosis is not even
finished. We have turned ourselves into hybrids, and there we are left Then
we hide ourselves, filled with shame (pp. p. 113

No, they are not empty. One meets objects of flesh in them, as well as
objects of metal. Apart from that, they are empty. Ah! One also encounters
events. Their succession congests time, as the objects congest the
street. Time is obstructed by their mechanical jumble. p. 128

... the moment bears the image of the profile of man, like the reflection
of the kallcedrat on the sparkling surface of the lagoon. In the fortress
of the moment, man in truth is king, for his thought is all-powerful, when
it is. Where it has passed, the pure azure crystallizes in forms. Life of
the moment, life without age of the moment which endures, in the flight of
your elan man creates himself indefinitely. At the heart of the moment,
behold man as immortal, for the moment is infinite, when it is. The purity
of the moment is made from the absence of time. Life of the moment,
life... p. 177

About the author

Cheikh Hamidou Kane was born the son of a local chief in Senegal in 1928. He
studied philosophy and law at the Sarbonne in Paris and later at the École
Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer. While in Paris, Kane wrote Ambiguous
Adventure basing it on his experiences. Upon returning to Senegal, he
published his novel to considerable acclaim winning the Grand Prix
Littéraire d’Afrique Noir. Kane garnered employment in the Senegalese
government in multiple ministerial positions. Kane lives in Dakar, Senegal.

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