Novel
Les Écailles du ciel
Not translated into English
Tierno Monénembo · 1986
Synopsis
Cousin Samba, cursed from birth, is driven out of Kolisoko, his village in Leydi-Bondi, an imaginary country, in the time of colonisation. He ends up in the Bas-Fonds of Djimméyabé, a wretched district overlooked by the European town, meets Oumou-Thiaga there, becomes a barber and campaigns for the independence party alongside the schoolteacher Bandiougou. Once independence comes, the regime of President Noudourou-Wembîdo proves as despotic as colonisation, and Samba experiences prison.
Context
Published by Seuil in 1986, the novel received the grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire the same year. It covers two eras, colonial domination with its upper town and its lower town, then postcolonial power, and Hassan Elbahraoui reads in it a study of despotism, colonial then postcolonial. Its author, who had left Guinea seventeen years earlier, was then living far from his country, settled in France since 1973.
Who it is for
For readers interested in the disillusionments of African independences, told through the life of an ordinary man.
Prizes and reception
The novel was awarded a prize in the very year of its publication, twenty-two years before its author's Prix Renaudot.