by Sibabalwe Oscar Masinyana
This is the most widely circulated and
therefore easily accessible biographical information about Cheikh Hamidou Kane: he lives in Dakar and he was born in
1928 in Mataru in Senegal. Like most Muslims born into an Islamic family
and community he began his studies at a madrasa (Islamic school) in Senegal, and then attended the
University of Paris to study philosophy and law before training as an
administrator at the Ecole Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer. He returned to Senegal
in 1959 to occupy a string of significant administrative posts in Mamadou Dia’s
government before working for UNICEF in Lagos and Abidjan. In 1961, he
published L’Aventure Ambiguë which won him the 1962 Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noir.
A slim work most likely, even if
loosely, based on his personal experiences, Ambiguous Adventure (translated from
French by Katherine Woods in 1963) is one of the best kept secrets in African
literature with its continued survival assured by a devoted cult (word of mouth)
following. It has recently been re-issued in a revised translation by Melville House publishers as part of their Neversink Library series that "champions books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored." Being the only novel Kane wrote, it shares the same mystique (and
provokes the same fealty) as the other more famous singular novels written by an
author –Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1758-67),
Alain-Fournier’s The Lost Domain (1912), Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard(1958), John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), and probably
the most famous of them all being Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird (1960). It has received high praise and cited as a favourite by personalities like Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Angélique Kidjo.
“That day, Thierno had beaten him
again. And yet Samba Diallo knew his sacred verse;” thus begins the novel with
the young Samba Diallo being severely punished at the madrasa by his aging
teacher for mispronouncing a verse of the Holy Qur’an. The teacher is harsh, so
merciless that Samba’s ear, “already white with scarcely healed scars, was
bleeding anew” from Thierno’s hard pinch “cutting through the cartilage of the
lobe.” Yet, this scene of what we’d now certainly classify as child abuse is
soon transformed by the teacher’s reflections as a necessary even though
seemingly cruel step in ensuring that this child achieves perfection in his
recitation of the Word of Allah. Thierno is a very old and highly devoted
teacher responsible for the religious education of the county’s children in the
school he runs on the hearth. He is highly revered and regarded as the
conscience of the country, for “No one in the world, certainly, had crouched
down like this so many times in his life as the teacher of the Diallobé, for no
one prayed so much as he.”
He believes that this child is a gift from Allah;
“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.” Whilst
listening to him correctly recite the verse, Thierno is moved anew by how the
“Word of God flowed pure and limpid” from Samba’s lips. The teacher is devoted
to making him a perfect hafiz because of his certainty that “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.”
But Thierno’s plans for the child are
interrupted at the behest of Samba’s cousin, The Most Royal Lady (La Grande Royale), who insists
that the child, along with other children of the elite families should attend
the foreign school even though she detests it as much as everyone else in the
community. She is the older sister of the Diallobé chief and the first born of the Dialloubé
royal family, and although a woman (and therefore not eligible for rulership)
she is nonetheless a powerful, persuasive woman with whom “no one dared hold
out against for long.” “It was said that it was she, more than her bother, whom
the countryside feared,” and that she had pacified the enemy tribes by her
firmness and that the tribes “subjugated by her extraordinary personality had been
kept in obedience by her prestige.” She convinces the whole community that they should
send their best children to the foreign schools in order to learn from their
conquerors “the art of conquering without being in the right” as a way of ensuring
the future of their children.
However, the chief’s main concern, which surfaces throughout the novel,
is that in learning from these new schools the children will forget. “Would
what they would learn be worth as much as what they would forget?” The Most
Royal Lady shares these concerns: “Perhaps the memory of us will die in them.
When they return from the school, there may be those who will not recognise
us.” However, she insists that for the future survival of the community they as
the elders “should agree to die in our children’s hearts and that the
foreigners who have defeated us should fill the place, wholly, which we shall
have left free.” The rest of the novel, which chronicles Samba’s experiences as
he journeys from the Dialloubé country to the foreign school and eventually to Europe to
study philosophy at a university in France until his return to his native
country, is an extended engagement with this question of the effects of foreign,
Western, education on the psyche of the African child and adult.
To be sure – as should be obvious from
the above summary – Ambiguous Adventure is dated and exhibits numerous features
common to almost all post-independence African literature; in a lot of ways, it
covers territory we have encountered often and that we already know more or
less well through other texts. At every turn it is clear in one way or another
that the work is from another time, whether due to encountering what are now
historical shifts presented as having just happened or through finding some
philosophical exposition that the novel hoists as a dawning, and thus perhaps
to us a not yetfully developed response to some still-unfolding event. Of
course this is neither a surprise nor a flaw in the author’s imaginative
expression; Kane was among the first bourgeois Africans to travel and study in
Europe during the colonial era and must have seen as new things that our
continuous exposure to them either through books or through various media or
even from personal experience now seem very quotidian.
There is, for instance,
the character of ‘the fool’ in this novel that has a very Fanonian moment of
being seen for the first time as a black man by white Europeans and suffering
through the “incongruity” this encounter causes within the self. There is also
‘the fool’s’ exaggerated fascination with European architecture and his
reflections on the West’s alienation from nature because of streets covered in
asphalt that has no end; “nowhere the tender softness of the bare earth.”
Moreover, the novel has a very ‘un-novelistic’ feel to it – written more like a
philosophical treatise grappling with the inevitable clash of civilizations
that arose from Africa’s encounter with the physically and mentally
colonialising European nations – and has such, goes on tangents that although
developed admirably and organically still seem to ‘lose the plot’ as it
were.
Ambiguous Adventure shares these
characteristics with several other, perhaps more spectacular, African artistic
products of the time – an era when, collectively and for the first time, young
extremely talented politically conscious and rabidly witty (usually male) black
and/or African writers in Africa and in the diasporas and abroad were
articulating enduring critiques of Western civilisation through the very tools
or genres that Western education had afforded them (the novel; particular kinds
of poetic and philosophical expressions; the essay; etc). Observations in the
novel such as, “The new school shares at the same time the characteristics of
cannon and 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” are observations these African writers
constantly wrestled with in their work.
Kane’s conversation with the Western
philosophical, historical, scientific and even religious traditions are all
subjects to which African literature kept returning to and addressing with
varying levels of success. So Kane’s offering, in narrative terms, is to some extent
not an outlier or necessarily one that shines the brightest even though it is
amongst the most noble.The text’s quiet and humble stature, I think, is
what accounts for (ambiguous) comments of/or praise such as “An interesting
read, though not one I’d have picked up unprompted” or “you cannot miss that
this book was written more than 40 years ago” by bloggers such as MAP-MAKER
from the UK and BOOK-Man-8 from Germany, respectively; it’s as if someone has
to champion the book and bring it to one’s attention as special (this is how I
became aware of it) because it does not particularly stand out as a literary
classic that it is due to the frequency of its themes in other more highly
acclaimed or popular works and also due to the relative obscurity of its creator.
However, Kane’s work stands apart for
the fact that it wasn't just the usual story about an African abroad but about
a Muslim African in Europe, a confluence of identity that is now decidedly more
topical than it ever was during publication of the text. As such it brings into
the equation a distinctive set of considerations and a particular sensibility
that are necessarily absent from most of the works of this time. This subject
position offers a testimonial that, historically at least, rarely rises to prominence
amidst the sheer volume of African literature that was and is often underpinned
by either a focus on or the conjunction or opposition of the Christian and/or the traditional
African mythos.
Moreover, unlike most of these texts with religion as one of
the central themes, Kane’s novel is a spiritual text in that it takes
seriously, without a hint of irony or ridicule, the spiritual crises that Samba
undergoes both as a child who is wholeheartedly engaged in an attempt to lead a
life of piety as one of Thierno’s disciplines at the Glowing Hearth and then
later as an adult trying to reconcile Western intellectualism with those
African and Islamic values learnt from his teacher. His princely father, The
Knight, with whom he lives with briefly as a university student when he arrives
overseas is another instrumental figure in Samba’s spiritual and intellectual
development, and the conversations in the book between father and son are
decidedly some of the most brilliant moments – philosophically and spiritually
– in the entire novel. It his father who, sensing the fatigue and “profound
disquietude” that is threatening to break and overwhelm his son, commands him
to leave Europe and go back home in order “to learn that God is not
commensurable with anything, and especially not with history, whose
vicissitudes are powerless in relation to His attributes.” The Knight’s letter
to Samba, which constitutes Chapter 7 of Part 2 of the novel, is one of the
best and most concise discourse on the merits of religious practice (as opposed to
philosophising about religion) available in any literature.
Furthermore, Ambiguous Adventure puts to unique and
effective use a stylistic approach to the novel that has since become one
of the conventional frames in African literature. It is a framework that was already evident
in Amos Tutuola and Chinua Achebe’s early works, was chiselled to perfection by
Wole Soyinka in his novels and dramas, and underwent endless reconfigurations right
up to some of the works of contemporary writers such as Ben Okri and Véronique Tadjo in varying degrees: a rubric that is skeletal on
plot, heavy on philosophy and insight, unusually religious or spiritual in an almost cosmic or mythical
sense, rudimentary in characterisation in preference for one or two relatively
well developed characters intermingling with numerous
symbolic-figure-characters rather than particularised individuals, necessarily
political if not outright polemic, and set in an unspecified yet distinctively
outlined (real or mythological) African context. With these troupes for a
novel-text, Kane nonetheless produced an impressively succinct, thoroughly
effective and extraordinarily moving – or at least persuasive – masterpiece
that is Ambiguous Adventure.
But most crucial than all this (the
beauty of its remarkable yet simple sentences; the arresting but
uncomplicated imagery; the sketchily plotted adventure from Africa to Europe
and back again without getting lost amidst the many characters and ideas that
emerge and disappear throughout the work),the thing that ultimately inspires
the reader’s fierce affection for Ambiguous Adventure, I think, is its enduring authenticity – the manner with which Kane
portrays the emotional, spiritual and intellectual evolution and maturity of
the novel’s main character, Samba Diallo. Samba’s feelings about the trails of
his journey are feelings that many African can still identify with.
When he says,
“It may be that we shall be captured at the end of our itinerary, vanquished by
our adventure itself,” he speaks of a fear that many honest African
intellectuals would be very familiar with. “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.” But rather than leave us condemned in this
state of shame, Kane, through Samba, offers us insights to reflect upon as
possible solutions to this transformation dilemma. Reading this book would go a
long way to elucidate many of the spectres encountered on our own,
contemporary, ongoing, but no less ambiguous, adventure.
