Narrative
A Dakar Childhood
De Tilène au Plateau, une enfance dakaroise
Nafissatou Niang Diallo · 1975
Synopsis
A little girl is born at the Camp des Gardes in Tilène, in the Médina of Dakar; orphaned of her mother in the cradle, she grows up with Mame, her paternal grandmother, who surrounds her with a tenderness that makes up for the severity of her father, a municipal employee. Expelled from Koranic school for disobedience, she shines at the French school, then at secondary school. The day the state sells the land of the large family house, they have to leave for the Plateau, the European quarter, and live between two worlds.
Context
The book was written on the author's return from two years spent in Toulouse, and appeared in Dakar from Les Nouvelles Éditions africaines in 1975, in one hundred and thirty-three pages. It opens with the author's birth and the house built by her grandfather and father, and follows a happy childhood up to the first trials. The critic Amadou Elimane Kane reads in it a narrative at once autobiographical and novelistic, in a simple and precise style. An English translation by Dorothy Blair, A Dakar Childhood, appeared in England in 1982, the very year of the author's death; Les Nouvelles Éditions africaines du Sénégal reissued it in 2020.
Who it is for
A little over a hundred and thirty pages in simple French. Nothing to know beforehand: the landmarks of life in Dakar are given as the pages go by, without notes or glossary.
Prizes and reception
Among the first literary works published by a Senegalese woman, it is regarded as a classic of the country and was reissued in 2020.