Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane. New York. 1963. Walker & Company. Translated from the French by Katherine Woods. 178 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Robert Kohn.
DESCRIPTION - Everywhere people have come suddenly to realize the urgent need for understanding Africa and the Africans. Because of this, the small body of contemporary African literature has assumed an interest disproportionate to its size. Ambiguous Adventure, a prize-winning novel by a Senegalese political leader, is one of the most recent and important additions to modern African letters. The story of Samba Diallo, son of a tribal chieftain, educated first in an Islamic school, then in a French colonial school, and finally in a French university, is a kind of bildungsroman of the modern African mind itself. In no other book has the African intellectual's search for creed and identity been more vividly or poignantly presented. Samba Diallo's dilemma is not that of the revolutionary whose simple objective is to win political freedom for his country by ridding it of a foreign despotism. Instead, it is the very attractiveness of alien culture which constitutes the threat to Samba's integrity. ‘They have tried to transform me in their image,' he says. And later, he adds, ‘It suddenly appears to us that all along our way we have been metamorphizing ourselves, and now, see, we have become something other than what we were. Sometimes the metamorphosis is not even completed when it makes a hybrid of us, and leaves us so. Then, filled with shame, we hide ourselves away.' Cheikh Hamidou Kane, at 85, has been Director of the Cabinet within the Senegalese Ministry of Development and Planning, Governor of the Region of the T hies, and Commissioner of Planning in the Dia Government. His novel won the 1962 Grand Prix for French-speaking Black Africa, was published by Julliard in Paris last year and has been extensively serialized. The translation for the U.S. edition is by Katherine Woods.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cheikh Hamidou Kane (born 3 April 1928 in Matam) is a Senegalese writer best known for his prize-winning novel L'Aventure ambiguë (Ambiguous Adventure), about the interactions of western and African cultures. Its hero is a Fulani boy who goes to study in France. There, he loses touch with his Islamic faith and his Senegalese roots.
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