From a Colonial to a Postcolonial African Voice:Amkoullel, l'enfant peul

Abstract

In our broad use of the term to characterize contempo? rary African culture, there is an implicit understanding that the colonial experience played a critical role in shaping the identity of societies that emerged from extensive periods of European rule. We can trace such an impact directly through a great variety of written African documents pro? duced under colonialism as well as through various reflections on this expe? rience by African historians and other thinkers after the attainment of independence. However, among the fictional works that have entered into the canon of modern African literature, the topic of colonialism is conspicuous for its relative absence. This hiatus can be explained in part by the chronology of colonial rule, which did not last long enough for the first generation of major writers in English and French to reach their full powers much before its demise.2 Some of these early figures?most notably Chinua Achebe, Mongo Beti, and Ferdinand Oyono?have written on colonial themes. Others, like Camara Laye, describe situations in the colonial era with virtually no refer? ence to European rule. More commonly, the focus of African writing is upon decolonization and its postcolonial aftermath, since these are the experiences the authors know at first hand. Amadou Hampate Ba stands out in this context, first of all because he is older than even such senior francophone figures as Leopold Sedar Senghor and Birago Diop (who also grew up in the far more established colonial confines of the Senegal coast) and is considerably older than the Nigerian literary pioneers, Chinua Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi. Yet it is Hampate Ba, with his rather limited formal French education, who pro? duced probably the richest literary account of colonialism in L'etrange des? tin de Wangrin (discussed elsewhere in this issue). In the memoir of his own childhood, Amkoulkl, Hampate Ba provides us with not only another classic account of the lived colonial experience, but also an insight into the process by which an African scholar and verbal artist could find a voice: first as a contributor to the colonial project of recording (and even creating) tradition and then to the rendition of his own life through a particularly effective form of European-language literature. The title of this book comes from a nickname that Hampate Ba acquired in his childhood and continued to use later in life.3 It translates as