Africa from Within

Extract

The purpose of this article is to give some evidence of the kind of understanding we can win through reading African prose writers, and of the misconceptions we can clear up in so doing; and to make some suggestions as to what authors and what books we might begin by reading. A good deal of the prose writing done by Africans is biographical, either directly or derivatively. One of the best known examples is Camara Laye’s autobiography The African Child. In it he tells the story of his childhood and youth until the time he leaves Guinea, his home country, to go to France for higher studies. The extract below, which must be about a time when he was six or seven years old, shows the warmth and charm of the book. At that time he lived in Kouroussa, a large up-country town, and the incident described is a visit to his relatives at Tindican, a small village to the west of Kouroussa.

Whenever I went to Tindican, it was always with my youngest uncle, who used to come and fetch me. He was younger than my mother and was not much more than an adolescent; and so I used to feel that he was still very close to my own age. He was very good-natured, and my mother did not have to tell him to look after me; he was naturally kind, and needed no telling. He would take me by the hand, and I would walk beside him; he, out of consideration for my extreme youth, would take much smaller steps, so that instead of taking two hours to reach Tindican, we would often take at least four. But I scarcely used to notice how long we were on the road, for there were all kinds of wonderful things to entertain us.