Autofiction and Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'aventure ambigue

Abstract

Cheikh Hamidou Kane belongs to a whole generation of francophone African writers who felt the need, at a specific stage in their development, to give an account in fictionalized form of their intellectual itinerary. This exploration invariably involves a clash of cultures, with the "new school," l'école des Blancs, introduced by the colonizing power acting as catalyst in the transition from the traditional world of the African village to the wider world influenced by European values, frequently represented by a crucially formative period spent in Paris. Sometimes the emphasis is on the lost childhood world, and the Paris period mostly implicit, as in what is probably the most famous of these novels of childhood, Laye Camara's L'enfant noir; sometimes Paris is foregrounded to convey dramatically the psychological trauma caused by contact with an alien world: Ousmane Socé's Mirages de Paris and Aké Loba's Kokoumba, l'étudiant noir spring to mind in this context, or Mudimbe's L'écart; sometimes it is the alienating effect of school itself that is emphasized, and the disrupting effect it has on the families involved, as in Seydou Badian's Sous l'orage. In all these novels, the autobiographical element, while exploited differently, is crucial. In this article, I want to explore the way in which Cheikh Hamidou Kane uses autobiographical material in the structuring of his first novel, L'aventure ambiguë, and, to a lesser extent, of his second, Les gardiens du temple, at the same time giving a broader perspective on what this material actually comprises.