Ambiguous Adventure Read online

  PRAISE FOR AMBIGUOUS ADVENTURE

  “A fine novel … The philosophical dialogue between the West and Africa has rarely been better presented than in Ambiguous Adventure … The hero of the novel, the deliverer-to-be and paragon of the new generation, returns from France a total spiritual wreck, his once vibrant sense of community hopelessly shattered. Summoned to assume the mantle of leadership, his tortured soul begs to be excused, to be left alone. ‘What have their problems to do with me?’ he asks. ‘I am only myself. I have only me.’ Poor fellow; the West has got him!”

  —CHINUA ACHEBE,

  AUTHOR OF THINGS FALL APART

  “From within his profoundly Muslim personality, Diallo manifests the quintessence of African humanity and the destiny of the black race.”

  —WOLE SOYINKA, NOBEL LAUREATE

  “My favorite novel … a complicated but brilliant novel about interracial relations.”

  —ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO, GRAMMY AWARD–

  WINNING SINGER-SONGWRITER

  “It is a work that summarizes and brings into focus the ideas and attitudes that lie at the center of inspiration of all French African writing.”

  —ABIOLA IRELE, LECTURES AFRICANES

  “Exceptionally beautiful.… highly original … oddly moving. Ambiguous Adventure is an indispensable book for anyone wishing to delve into the psychology of colonialism.”

  —WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS

  “Cheikh Hamidou Kane, avoiding the temporal and political element of his subject matter, the anguish of being black, lands upon a reflection that concerns us all: the anguish of being human.”

  —J. CHEVRIER, LE MONDE

  AMBIGUOUS ADVENTURE

  ————————

  CHEIKH HAMIDOU KANE was born in 1928 in Matara, Senegal, the son of a local chief. Having started at a Koranic school, he went on to a local French primary school, and eventually was sent off to read philosophy and law at the Sorbonne in Paris. Subsequently, he studied at the École Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer, which had been founded by the French government to train colonial administrators. During Kane’s years in Paris he wrote a novel based closely on his experience, Ambiguous Adventure, and after his return to Senegal in 1959 he set about getting it published, while also taking a job as a governmental bureaucrat. The novel was published in 1961 to immediate acclaim, and the following year won the Grand Prix Littéraire d’Afrique Noir. Kane meanwhile went on to rise in ministerial positions in the Senegalese government, serving as Director of the Department of Economic Planning and Development, Governor of the Region of Thies, and Commissioner of Planning. He has also worked for UNICEF in Lagos and Abidjan. Kane lives in Dakar.

  KATHERINE WOODS, besides being known for her translation of Ambiguous Adventure, is perhaps best known for her 1943 translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.

  WOLE SOYINKA is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright. In 1986 he became the first African ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was imprisoned in Nigeria for his opposition to dictatorship. He is the author of, among many books, Ake: The Years of Childhood, Climate of Fear, based on the prestigious Reith Lectures, delivered on the BBC, and a memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn.

  THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

  I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much. —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

  AMBIGUOUS ADVENTURE

  Originally published in French as L’aventure ambiguë

  Copyright © René Julliard, 1962

  Translation © Walker & Company, 1963

  Afterword is excerpted from Myth, Literature and the African World © 1976 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

  First Melville House printing: February 2012

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition of this book as follows:

  Kane, Hamidou.

  [Aventure ambiguë. English]

  Ambiguous adventure / Cheikh Hamidou Kane.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in French as L’aventure ambique”–T.p. verso.

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-055-6

  I. Title.

  PQ3989.2.K3A2 2012

  843′.914–dc23

  2011053353

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Afterword

  PART ONE

  1

  THAT DAY, THIERNO HAD BEATEN HIM AGAIN. And yet Samba Diallo knew his sacred verse.

  It was only that he had made a slip of the tongue. Thierno had jumped up as if he had stepped on one of the white-hot paving stones of the gehenna promised to evildoers. He had seized Samba Diallo by the fleshy part of his thigh and, between his thumb and index finger, had given him a long hard pinch. The child had gasped with pain and begun to shake all over. Threatened by sobs which were strangling him in the chest and throat, he had had the strength to master his suffering; in a weak voice, broken and stammering, but correctly, he had repeated the verse from the holy Book which he had spoken badly in the first place. The teacher’s rage rose by one degree.

  “Ah! So you can keep from making mistakes? Then why do you make them? Eh? Why?”

  The teacher had let go of Samba Diallo’s thigh. Now he was holding him by the ear and, cutting through the cartilage of the lobe, his nails met. Although the little boy had often submitted to this punishment, he could not hold back a slight groan.

  “Repeat it! Again! Again!”

  The teacher had shifted the grip of his fingernails, and they were now piercing the cartilage at another place. The child’s ear, already white with scarcely healed scars, was bleeding anew. Samba Diallo’s whole body was trembling, and he was trying his hardest to recite his verse correctly, and to restrain the whimpering that pain was wresting from him.

  “Be accurate in repeating the Word of your Lord. He has done you the gracious favor of bringing His own speech down to you. These words have been veritably pronounced by the Master of the World. And you, miserable lump of earthly mold that you are, when you have the honor of repeating them after Him, you go so far as to profane them by your carelessness. You deserve to have your tongue cut a thousand times …”

  “Yes, master … I ask your pardon … I will not make a mistake again. Listen …”

  Once more, trembling and gasping, he repeated the flashing sen
tence. 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.

  The teacher, who was now holding a burning faggot from the hearth very close to the child, was looking at him and listening to him. But while his hand was threatening, his eager gaze was full of admiration, and his attention drank in the words the little boy spoke. What purity! What a miracle! Truly, this child was a gift from God. In the forty years that he had devoted himself to the task—and how meritorious a task it was!—of opening to God the intelligence of the sons of men, the teacher had never encountered anyone who, as much as this child, and in all facets of his character, waited on God with such a spirit. So closely would he live with God, this child, and the man he would become, that he could aspire—the teacher was convinced of this—to the most exalted levels of human grandeur. Yet, conversely, the least eclipse—but God forbid! The teacher was driving this eventuality from his mind with all the force of his faith. Still looking closely at the child, he made, mentally, a short prayer: “Lord, never forsake the man that is awaking in this child. May the smallest measure of Thy sovereign authority not leave him, for the smallest instant of time …”

  As he intoned the sacred text the little boy was thinking, “Lord, Thy word must be pronounced as Thou hast spoken it …”

  The blazing faggot was scorching his skin. He jumped up, gave a spasmodic shake to the light shirt he was wearing, and sat down again, his legs crossed, his eyes lowered to his writing-tablet, some steps away from the teacher. He took up his verse once more, and rectified his error.

  “Here, come close! When vain thoughts distract you from the Word, I shall burn you … Pay attention: you can do that. Repeat with me, ‘God, give me attentiveness.’ ”

  “God, give me attentiveness.”

  “Again.”

  “God, give me attentiveness.”

  “Now go back to your verse.”

  Trembling and submissive, the child took up the impassioned intoning of the incandescent text. He repeated the verse over and over until he was close to losing consciousness.

  The teacher, his equanimity restored, had plunged into prayer. The child knew his lesson for the morning.

  At a sign from the teacher, the boy had put away his writing-tablet. But he did not move from where he was sitting. He was engrossed in a scrutiny of his schoolmaster, whom he now saw in profile. The man was old, emaciated, withered and shrunken by mortifications of the flesh. He used never to laugh. The only moments of enthusiasm that could be seen in him were those in which, lost in his mystic meditations or listening to the recital of the Word of God, he would stand erect, all tense, and seem to be lifted from the earth, as if raised by some inner force. There were many times, on the other hand, when, driven to a frenzied rage by the laziness or the blunders of one of his pupils, he would give himself up to outrageously brutal outbreaks of violence. But these outbreaks of violence were factors in, expressions of, the interest he took in the disciple who was at fault. The more he held him in esteem, the wilder were his rages. Then switches, burning faggots, anything that might come to hand would serve as instruments of punishment. Samba Diallo remembered that one day, in the throes of a mad rage, the teacher had thrown him to the ground and had furiously trampled on him, as certain wild beasts do to their prey.

  The teacher was from several points of view a formidable man. Two occupations filled his life: the work of the spirit and the work of the field. To the work of the field he devoted the strict minimum of his time, and he demanded from the earth no more than he had to have for his extremely frugal nourishment and that of his family, not including his pupils. The rest of his days and nights he consecrated to study, to meditation, to prayer, and to the education and molding of the young people who had been confided to his care. He acquitted himself of this task with a passion which was renowned through all the country of the Diallobé. Teachers from the most distant regions would come periodically to visit him and would go away edified. The greatest families of the Diallobé country contended for the honor of sending their sons to him. In general, the teacher would commit himself only after seeing the prospective pupil. When he had refused one, no pressure would ever have made him change his decision. But it might happen that when he had seen a child he would ask that he be allowed to educate him. He had done this in the case of Samba Diallo.

  Two years before, the little boy was returning with his father from a long river journey through the Diallobé country. When the boat on which they were traveling drew alongside of the quay, a large group of people assembled in the cabin occupied by Samba Diallo’s father. The visitors, filing into the cabin one by one, were coming courteously to salute this son of the countryside whose administrative duties used to keep him far from his own territory for long periods of time.

  The teacher was among the last arrivals. When he came into the cabin, Samba Diallo was perched on the knee of his father, who was sitting in an armchair. There were two other men in the room: the director of the regional school, and Samba Diallo’s cousin, who was by custom the chief of the province. As the teacher entered the room the three men rose. Samba Diallo’s father took the newcomer by the arm and made him sit down in the armchair from which he had just got up.

  The three men talked at length on the most diverse topics, but their words would regularly return to a single subject: that of the faith and the greater glory of God.

  “Monsieur School Principal,” the teacher was saying, “what new good are you teaching men’s sons, to make them desert our glowing hearths for the benefit of your schools?”

  “Nothing, revered master—or almost nothing,” the school principal answered. “The school only teaches men to join wood to wood—to make wooden buildings.”

  Pronounced in the language of the region, the word “school” means “wood.” The three men smiled, with an air of understanding and slight disapproval of this classic play on words in connection with the foreign schools.

  “Certainly men ought to learn how to construct dwelling houses that resist the weather,” the teacher said.

  “Yes,” agreed the principal, “that is especially true of those who did not know at all how to build houses before the foreigners came.”

  “You yourself, chief of the Diallobé, does it not go against the grain with you to send your children to the foreign school?” the teacher asked.

  “Unless there is pressure, I shall persist in the refusal to do that, master, if it please God.”

  “I am quite of your opinion, chief”—it was the principal of the school who was speaking—“I have sent my son to the school only because I could not do otherwise. We have gone there ourselves only under pressure. Our refusal, then, is certain … The question is disturbing nevertheless. We reject the foreign school in order to remain ourselves, and to preserve for God the place He holds in our hearts. But have we still enough force to resist the school, and enough substance to remain ourselves?”

  The three men fell into a
heavy silence. Then Samba Diallo’s father, who had remained lost in thought, spoke slowly—as was his habit—fixing his eyes on the floor in front of him, as if he were talking to himself.

  “It is certain that nothing pervades our lives with such clamor as the needs of which their school permits the satisfaction. We have nothing left—thanks to them—and it is thus that they hold us. He who wants to live, who wants to remain himself, must compromise. The woodcutters and the metal-workers are triumphant everywhere in the world, and their iron holds us under their law. If it were still only a matter of ourselves, of the conservation of our substance, the problem would have been less complicated: not being able to conquer them, we should have chosen to be wiped out rather than to yield. 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? When the hand is feeble, the spirit runs great risks, for it is by the hand that the spirit is defended …”

  “Yes,” said the school principal, “but it is also true that the spirit runs great risks when the hand is too strong.”

  The teacher, wholly given over to his thoughts, slowly raised his head and considered the three other men.

  “Perhaps it is better so? If God has assured their victory over us, it is apparently because we, who are His zealots, have offended Him. For a long time, God’s worshippers ruled the world. Did they do it according to His law? I do not know … I have learned that in the country of the white man, the revolt against poverty and misery is not distinguished from the revolt against God. They say that the movement is spreading, and that soon, in the world, that same great cry against poverty will drown out the voice of the muezzins. What must have been the misbehavior of those who believe in God if, at the end of their reign over the world, the name of God should arouse the resentment of the starving?”

  There was a silence, and then Samba Diallo’s father spoke: “Master, what you say is terrible. May God’s pity be upon us … But must we push our children into their schools?”