Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane is not an Adventure

“For a long time, God’s worshippers ruled the world. Did they do it according to His law? I do not know...I have learned that in the country of the white man, the revolt against poverty and misery is not distinguished from the revolt against God” (10)

I feel empty, and not in a cathartic way. I had high hopes for Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, enough that I sought it out in its beautiful, hard-to-find Neversink edition. In general, I love novels that deal with colonialism, assimilation, religion and other complicated ideas.

Well, Ambiguous Adventure is definitely a novel of ideas. The trouble is, it’s absolutely nothing else.

Kane’s novel follows the story of Samba Diallo, born to a high-ranking family of the Diaollobé in 20th-century Senegal. He is brilliant and pious, but his education at the Koranic school of the Glowing Hearth is cut short when his parents send him to a French colonial school. They hope that he is the future, and that his Western knowledge will save their declining community. From there, he studies philosophy in Paris, debates with a handful of differing viewpoints and gradually loses his once-devout Muslim faith to the apathy of Western secularlism.

“You are entering the place where there is no ambiguity” (160)

Usually I don’t mind philosophical dialogues in a story—the protagonist is a student, after all—but for such a well-travelled character, Diallo hardly leaves his own head. It’s as if his mind is untethered from his surroundings, when his surroundings are what shapes his philosophy! The result is all tell and no show: 90% of the story consists of conversations between him, his family, his teacher and/or various French people which reiterate the same two or three points about civilization, God and death. They’re good points, but take them away and there is no story. I can’t deal with that.

The saving grace of Ambiguous Adventure is Samba Diallo’s teacher at the Glowing Hearth, a very devout old man who is slowly succumbing to the pain of aging. The teacher is very clearly a metaphor for the “old” way of life that the Diallobé abandon, but his faith and his friendship with Diallo are one of the few anchors in the otherwise-detached story. Perhaps it is significant that the character most devoted to the Word is so vibrant on the page, while the more Westernized, secular characters are mere shadows of philosophy.

“The Morning of the Occident in black Africa was spangled over with smiles, with cannon shots, with shining glass beads. Those who had no history were encountering those who carried the world on their shoulders...on the black continent it began to be understood that their true power lay not in the cannons of the first morning, but rather in what followed the cannons” (43-44)

Ambiguous Adventure is caught between two words: it’s a coming-of-age story where nothing interesting happens and a lecture that Kane is too ashamed to deliver himself. Just because a book doesn’t conform to the Western literary conventions I’m used to doesn’t mean it’s a bad book. I just didn’t enjoy any of this particular story.

On the bright side, the afterword by Wole Soyinka is cool as heck. If you’re interested in the story, I recommend you read that. It’s 150 pages shorter than the novel and better-written. I’m going to have to read Soyinka’s plays now.