African Culture
(Camara Laye)
African culture has never been well represented in literature. While authors such as Khatib Yacine, Driss Chraibi and Tahar Benjelloun have written on North African, Maghreb cultures, historic texts dealing with "black" Africa are rare and authors, few. "The African Child" by Camara Laye is a classic in world literture. Written in 1945, the autobiography tells of the severity and challenges of life for a young boy in Guinea. The book follows the life of the author from age five up to his admittance to a school in Paris. From beginning to end, the book paints a great mythology of the African continent, of its workers and artists, its women, of its rituals and dress, and of its subservience to the west. As the book begins, the author describes the Guinean countryside through his father's profession, and we learn about the simple ways of village life. He talks of the Niger river and its crocodiles, how, through sorcery, his mother is immuned to their jaws; he relates the trials of rice harvest; of voodoo and his father's induction of Gris-Gris before beginning work. Camara Laye also tells us of his scholarly achievements, which granted him the opportunity, at the age of eighteen, to leave his home to study in France. This book is a wealth of information, a shining star by the light of which we uncover a bit of the Dark Continent. Above being a simple autobiography, "The African Child" hides a human agenda: it inspires compassion for the people there who suffer, and love for a harsh land. It creates empathy for a most foreign land through pure objectivity; not once does the author question what he lived. Instead, he paints beautiful descriptions that teach us about every small detail of African life, Guinean cuisine, and the lifestyles of all manner of people throughout his country. He immerses us in the reality of living as a Man of Africa, of misery, decrepitude, deprivation, poverty, confusion with the introduction of Christianity and Islam, all through the eyes of Child who, through his unusual intelligence and innate curiosity, misses nothing.
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