Ambiguous Adventure
by Cheikh Hamidou Kane
Sent to learn the enemy's weapons. He loses himself.
you want to understand the colonial education system as a form of cultural destruction dressed as opportunity
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Samba Diallo is the most gifted student in his Senegalese village — destined for Islamic scholarship. His family makes the agonizing decision to send him to the French colonial school instead, to learn the tools of the colonizer. He goes to Paris. He becomes brilliant in French. He loses the thread that connected him to everything he was. Kane's 1961 novel is the most precise dispatch from inside the mind of the colonized intellectual — the one who acquired what was on offer and discovered it had a price nobody told him about.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Senegal • West Africa
- Voice
- Written by a Senegalese author
- Themes
- True Cost of Empire
