Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane: book review

Ambiguous Adventure (1962) is set in Senegal. Samba Diallo is a young boy studying at a Koranic school. His master Thierno is an ‘old, emaciated, withered and shrunken’ man. He treats Samba harshly, yet admires him for his intelligence. Demba, the oldest in the class, thinks Samba is ‘the strongest … but also the saddest’ in the group.

Samba is from an aristocratic family, the Diallobes. Samba’s father is a knight, with the air of a knight from the Middle Ages. His aunt, the Most Royal Lady, the sister of the Diallobe chief, is 60 years old, but looks forty. She is the one that seems to rule the countryside, as she is older than her brother and visits him daily to give him advice.

The Most Royal Lady and others in the community do not like the new foreign school: ‘The foreign school is the new form of war which those who have come here are waging.’ However, she recommends that parents send their children to the new French school. Samba Diallo goes to the new school and is in Monsieur N’Diaye’s class. And there he meets the Lacroix family, originally from Pau in the Basses-Pyrenees region of France. Jean and Georgette are in his class. Even Jean Lacroix ‘remembered perceiving this sadness’ in Samba.

In Part II, Samba is France, at the University of Paris, where he is studying philosophy. This is his ambiguous adventure. Initially excited to learn more about Western ways, he begins to feel disconnected from his faith. His thoughts turn inwards to reconnect with his true identity.

This short 178 page novel won the 1962 Grand Prix Litteraire de l’Afrique Noir. Brief and easy to read, its themes are transitional – from boyhood to adulthood, from one culture to another, and from strict religious beliefs to balancing work and faith.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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