|
Book recommendation
The Dark Child
The Autobiography of an African Boy by Camara Laye (1953)
ph. Camara Laye’s first novel, L’Enfant noir (The Dark Child), was
awarded the Priz Charles Veillon. An autobiographical novel, he traces
the development of his cultural and personal values as a young man
coming of age within the Malinke tribe of Upper Guinea during the
1930’s. It is the story of his happy childhood up until the time he
left for France at the age of nineteen.
Debbie Ariyo, International Co-ordinator of Africans Unite Against
Child Abuse, recently stated that one only has to look around to
realize that the notion of the happy “African Child”, proudly eulogized
by the author Camara Laye in his famous book has long since gone.
Recent events demonstrate that the present day African environment
denies the average African child any true joy of living. The African
child continues to suffer the effects of war, poverty, ignorance,
mal-nutrition, under-nutrition, starvation, diseases especially AIDS,
exploitation, oppression and neglect, and the evidence, as two examples
show, is both horrific and overwhelming:
- Out of the 300,000 child soldiers around the world, it is
estimated that 120,000 of these are African children who have been
forced and recruited to take part in wars and fighting in some African
countries. Sudan, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, to name a
few African countries, are all shamed by the tragedy of child soldiers.
- According to a recent ILO report, an estimated 60 percent of sex
workers in Italy are from Nigeria. In the words of Meera Sethi of the
International Immigration Organization, Africa has become a “supplier
of fresh flesh” for countries in the European Union, via paedophile and
prostitution rings. Sethi said Belgium, Britain and Italy receive the
youngest African girls, while Germany and Spain are major transit
countries.
Laye’s book starkly contrasts with the situation of so many children
of the African continent today. For too long have we shunned real
responsibility towards those children and indeed children in need
everywhere. Genuine interest in their plight is called for. At the same
time the book encourages us to reflect our own societal values. Human
values, and what constitutes a dignified life, are the same the world
over and Laye’s depiction of an African childhood recalls many of
precisely those precious values which Western society today appears
only too eager to cast overboard.
In his introduction to Laye’s book William Plomer wrote: “It is not
an earthly paradise to which Camara Laye introduces us, but a coherent
society with a consistent manner of life which appears entirely free of
vulgarity. It is a formal society permeated by a sense of mystery. No
attempt is made to explain everything. Experience elsewhere shows that
to do so often means explaining everything away. ‘Are there not things
everywhere around us,’ he asks, ‘that are incapable of explanation?’
Where he grew up the sense of community is implicit and inherent.
Tradition and long usage have created politeness, correctness, mutual
respect, and simple dignity, but the ceremoniousness of life is not
rigid or a matter of empty or elaborate forms. In work or in play (the
line between which is not easily to be drawn and need not be drawn)
nothing is cheapened, everything is given its due importance: the
making of a trinket, etiquette at meal times, the harvesting of the
rice, the rites of initiation into manhood are communal acts in which
the individual exerts his best scope or skill, because he has never a
doubt that he belongs to what is going on and is a necessary part of
it.”
“Camara Laye’s unfolding of his various feelings about his kinsfolk
and friends and of their behaviour is affectionate and skilful at the
same time, and the delicate precision with which he describes his love
for Marie crystallises a not uncommon but not easily definable phase in
the emotional development of the human male. But perhaps it is in the
noble portraits of his father and mother that Camara Laye will most
touch the reader: the final interview with them before his departure
for remote and unknown Argenteuil is wonderful in its imaginative
understanding of their feelings as well as in its natural rendering of
his own.”
|
The differences that existed between the people who lived in
the towns, especially the capital Conakry, and those in the country
were keenly felt, as the excerpt below illustrates. These differences
had become accentuated by the encroaching French colonial influence
which so radically changed and “modernised” Guinea. Laye’s people, the
Malinke, were still a mainly agrarian people whose culture had
evidently harmonised Islamic and ancient African traditions.
“The outward forms of common civility are more scrupulously
observed in the country than in the town; there a certain ceremony in
manners is observed which the town has no time for. The way of life, of
course, is simpler in the country, but a countryman’s dealings with his
fellow-men follow accepted rules. Familiarity is discouraged, perhaps
because country people are familiar with every detail of each other’s
lives. In everything I noticed a kind of dignity which was often
lacking in town life; no one ever did anything without first having
been ceremoniously invited to do so. The personal liberty of others was
in fact always highly respected. And if their minds seemed to work
slower in the country that was because they always spoke only after due
reflection, and because speech itself was a most serious matter.”
(The Dark Child by Camara Laye)
|
|
 |
|
