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The Dark Child

by Camara Laye, Alfred Ernest Jones (Translator), James Kirkup (Translator), Philippe Thoby-Marcellin (Introduction)

3.56 of 5 stars 3.56 · rating details · 474 ratings · 45 reviews

The Dark Child is a distinct and graceful memoir of Camara Laye's youth in the village of Koroussa, French Guinea. Long regarded Africa's preeminent Francophone novelist, Laye (1928-80) herein marvels over his mother's supernatural powers, his father's distinction as the village goldsmith, and his own passage into manhood, which is marked by animistic beliefs and bloody ri

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Paperback, 192 pages

Published January 1st 1954 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published 1953)

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Apr 08, 2013 Jonathan Widell rated it 4 of 5 stars

In this novel, the author takes us to the African village of his childhood. Ever since (I don't know when) people in the west or north have used some relatively primitive society to reflect their own society. Sometimes, those "alien" societies are populated by noble savages, such as in Rousseau's romantic view of the noble savage. Sometimes that fairly simple formula is broken by more challenging approaches, such as in William Golding's The Lord of the Flies, where British boys turned into savag...more

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Nov 18, 2011 Susan Denney rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: French speakers interested in African culture.

I used several chapters of this book in my 4AP French classes. I have read the book many times. The book has an outlook which is unique. Camara Laye has a foot in two worlds. We see him as a boy in the villages of his father and grandmother. He opens a window for us into a world where spirits reside in every living thing and where a snake can speak and share knowledge with the leader of a clan.

He also shows us his introduction to European science-based culture. And even though the two worlds see...more

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Jul 08, 2011 Nathaniel rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: originally-in-french, africa

In the first 90 pages of this book, the great drama involves influential parents intervening to stop schoolyard bullying and in the second 90 pages of this book, the great drama involves the foreskin being chopped from the author's penis. ("Later on, I went through an ordeal much more frightening than Konden Diara, a really dangerous ordeal, and no game: circumcision." Oh my god!!)

And in case you were worried that your pulse might slow in the dying chapters of the "novel," in the last fifteen p...more In the first 90 pages of this book, the great drama involves influential parents intervening to stop schoolyard bullying and in the second 90 pages of this book, the great drama involves the foreskin being chopped from the author's penis. ("Later on, I went through an ordeal much more frightening than Konden Diara, a really dangerous ordeal, and no game: circumcision." Oh my god!!)

And in case you were worried that your pulse might slow in the dying chapters of the "novel," in the last fifteen pages, there is some canned hand-wringing about hurting a mother's feelings by traveling to another country to pursue your education. I have never read an African novel with less substance or less style.

It boggles my mind that Laye wrote this book in his twenties. It has no youth in it whatsoever: no playfulness; no striving; no struggle and no love. It felt like the sanitized nostalgic reminiscences of an old man who reached his age without acquiring wisdom or wit and whose primary concern is making the circumstances around his youth seem as pure, well-designed and dignified as possible.

The persistent non-happening of this book might have been elevated if the author was insightful or reflective; but the closest thing he offers are perhaps a dozen scattered rhetorical questions like, "Do we still have secrets?" "Are we not always consumed with longing?" "Do our hearts ever rest?"

Um? Our protagonist has a heart? He longs for something? Could've fooled me. Closest we come to experiencing that longing is his rhetorical question, which has no power whatsoever.

There are so many wonderful books about growing up in Africa and there are some pretty decent ones romanticizing village life and traditional crafts. This is not one of them. It would be a shame if this was even one of the first twenty books that you read by an African author. I swear by the five yours I wasted that there is nothing between the covers but ink.

If you set out to write a book that is designed to make your parents feel better about your exile and the role they had in shaping your destiny; perhaps the product is inevitably doomed to an earnest and artless one-dimensionality.(less)

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Jun 15, 2008 xiexie feizhou rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Written at a time when 'African writing' was about the explanatory....falls with the Achebe school in this sense of "This is my people: We are not savages" but more elegaic and beautiful than Achebe, who is overrated in every way.

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Jun 25, 2012 Melinda rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

Short, dense memoir of a boy growing up in Guinea and leaving his tribal world for school in France. I liked the details -- the way he described the harvest in his grandmother's village of Tindican, the details of the public ceremony preceding the circumcision (where the older boys act as guiding "lions"), and the writer's exploration of Conakry where he is sent to school and views the sea for the first time. Another memorable detail for me is when his mother gives him an "elixir" to drink each...more

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Apr 06, 2012 Moses Kilolo rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have always heard of Camara Laye, but never really got to read any of his writing till now. I'm glad I did. This book, detailing the earlier part of his life in the French Gambia is simply amazing. Its writing is brilliant, and there is no doubt it is a book to last. So sad that I still don't know much about what happened from the time he went to France for further education, but Im going to find out. Its similarity to Ngugi's book is that education is given a focal point in his dreams and des...more

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Dec 11, 2010 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a fairly short and simple autobiographical account of a boy growing up in Guinea in the 1930s and 40s. Camara Laye wrote it in 1954 while studying in France, and you can feel the nostalgia for his homeland. Although the writing style is quite understated, the emotion is communicated quite effectively, and it’s very moving in places.

As the title suggests, the book only deals with his childhood, and it is faithful to a child’s outlook on the world. At the start, his entire world is the ver...more This is a fairly short and simple autobiographical account of a boy growing up in Guinea in the 1930s and 40s. Camara Laye wrote it in 1954 while studying in France, and you can feel the nostalgia for his homeland. Although the writing style is quite understated, the emotion is communicated quite effectively, and it’s very moving in places.

As the title suggests, the book only deals with his childhood, and it is faithful to a child’s outlook on the world. At the start, his entire world is the veranda around his father’s hut. Then it gradually expands to the rest of the concession, then to school, the town of Kourassa, then the wider country of Guinea when he goes off to study in the capital Conakry. Finally the link with childhood is severed altogether as he gets on a plane to France.

The mixture of pain and excitement at each stage of growing up is beautifully rendered. He wants to be part of his family, to follow his father as a blacksmith or his uncle as a farmer, but always knows that his success in school is moving him further away from that. He is being marked out for a different future, his family are sacrificing to give him something better, and he wants that, but also wants to stay where he is. His parents, too, are caught in this conflict of wanting him to succeed but knowing that his success means his departure from their lives.

Quite a bit of time is spent describing the circumcision rite, which may be of anthropological interest to some, but was for me more interesting as a symbol of the other changes he goes through in the book, the pain and fear at something new, the loss of the old, but also the anticipation of being a man, the pride he feels when he is given his own hut and his own grown-up clothes.

My copy is from 1969, and made me realise a couple of things. First, the introduction emphasises again and again the “dignity” of the protagonist and his family, as if it’s some amazing discovery that Africans can have dignity. Some people of course would still hold similar views, but I’m glad that for most of us today the value of a book like this is no longer in the radical discovery that African people are actually human beings. The second thing I realised is that I need to start buying hardbacks – this paperback literally crumbled in my hands as I read it. Does anyone else have very old paperbacks (60s or earlier)? Do they last?

Anyway, I enjoyed this book as an insight into a life at a moment of great change, starting in a very traditional setting and moving very quickly into different worlds. A lot of the political context is absent – French colonialism, for example, is only a shadowy presence in the book – but I don’t see this as a fault. This is a childhood memoir, and does no more or less than you’d expect: it gives a faithful depiction of the author’s early years. I found it interesting and quite moving.(less)

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Dec 11, 2009 Gregory Mose rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a beautiful account of a childhood in eastern Guinea in the 1930s. From watching his father smelt gold and make jewelry to undergoing the traditional Malinke circumcision ritual, Camara tells of his adventures with frankness and humor, and manages to evoke a world and a way of life now all but lost. I give it three stars only because it is a slow read, and many readers who do not have a particular interest in Africa will find it rather dull. But if the subject is your cup of tea, this bo...more

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Nov 03, 2010 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a fairly short and simple autobiographical account of a boy growing up in Guinea in the 1930s and 40s. Camara Laye wrote it in 1954 while studying in France, and you can feel the nostalgia for his homeland. Although the writing style is quite understated, the emotion is communicated quite effectively, and it's very moving in places.

As the title suggests, the book only deals with his childhood, and it is faithful to a child's outlook on the world. At the start, his entire world is the ver...more This is a fairly short and simple autobiographical account of a boy growing up in Guinea in the 1930s and 40s. Camara Laye wrote it in 1954 while studying in France, and you can feel the nostalgia for his homeland. Although the writing style is quite understated, the emotion is communicated quite effectively, and it's very moving in places.

As the title suggests, the book only deals with his childhood, and it is faithful to a child's outlook on the world. At the start, his entire world is the veranda around his father's hut. Then it gradually expands to the rest of the concession, then to school, the town of Kourassa, then the wider country of Guinea when he goes off to study in the capital Conakry. Finally the link with childhood is severed altogether as he gets on a plane to France.

The mixture of pain and excitement at each stage of growing up is beautifully rendered. He wants to be part of his family, to follow his father as a blacksmith or his uncle as a farmer, but always knows that his success in school is moving him further away from that. He is being marked out for a different future, his family are sacrificing to give him something better, and he wants that, but also wants to stay where he is. His parents, too, are caught in this conflict of wanting him to succeed but knowing that his success means his departure from their lives.

Quite a bit of time is spent describing the circumcision rite, which may be of anthropological interest to some, but was for me more interesting as a symbol of the other changes he goes through in the book, the pain and fear at something new, the loss of the old, but also the anticipation of being a man, the pride he feels when he is given his own hut and his own grown-up clothes.

I enjoyed this book as an insight into a life at a moment of great change, starting in a very traditional setting and moving very quickly into different worlds. A lot of the political context is absent - French colonialism, for example, is only a shadowy presence in the book - but I don't see this as a fault. This is a childhood memoir, and does no more or less than you'd expect: it gives a faithful depiction of the author's early years. I found it interesting and quite moving.(less)

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Sep 20, 2008 Osho rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2008, around-the-world

Guinea.

According to some sources, this is not a memoir but a novel, or "literature," though the protagonist has the same name as the author. I will approach it as a fictionalized memoir; it is better as an autobiography than it is as a novel. This tale from 1954 fits in the "leaving for school" rather than the "leaving due to war" subgenre. For this reason, and because it stops short of Laye's experiences in France, it is more romantic and, despite the author's inner turmoil about leaving, less...more

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Oct 25, 2010 Quiet rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Dark Child is a good book. It tells you about the main events taking place during his life.Most of the events ive read if mostly happy like when he see his father crafting something or when he helped his uncle during the ceremony.Also sad though when the older kids were picking on him and his friends because they were younger and pretty much powerless but i will continue reading this book and see what will happen.Overall though its a amazing book.

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Jun 25, 2008 Lesleylarson rated it 3 of 5 stars

I first attempted this autobiography in French, when on a Study Abroad in West Africa. In English this time, my own African experience was rediscovered in the description of this boy's childhood in Kouroussa, French Guinea. Though it is a true autobiography, it reads more like a novel -- a story of the coming of age of any African boy.

It delivers a taste of cultural customs, religious rites, and a certain manner of conversation that is formal, yet interested, that I also observed while in West A...more

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Jun 25, 2008 Lesleylarson rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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Jan 15, 2012 Elise rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: african-american-african-diaspora

This book, which I read in one sitting, will always be close to my heart. I identified so much with Camara Laye because of my own firsthand experience of leaving my childhood home post-Katrina, during the time of the New Orleans diaspora. His detailed, slice of life account of the enchanting lives of Muslims in the village of Kouroussa(Guinea--French Africa) was very moving. I can't wait to discuss it in my "Literature of the African Diaspora" class!

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Oct 01, 2012 Ugaaso rated it 4 of 5 stars

An absolutely spellbinding book. It made me appreciate the adventure-filled African childhood I could've had without war, famine and the chaos of internal displacement in one's own country (all direct results of a civil war in my country of birth, Somalia, in 1991). This novel is a sweeping family saga filled with hope and humanity. Camara is a magician of a novelist.

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May 29, 2010 Elie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: africa, non-fiction, originally-in-french

This was the best coming-of-age African novel I've read so far. Laye's narrative is richly detailed without being voyeuristic (well, mostly) and covers all the important bits 1) family's magical realism 2) male circumcision and 3) going to school abroad. Maybe Soyinka's was a little better, but still.

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Apr 09, 2011 Darcy Conroy rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: wip-research, africa

No excuses or literary conceit in this review. This is more of a descriptive essay than a memoir, as the author tells us the events of his childhood but avoids offering any insight. The author also witholds description in many places giving as his excuse that he was too young and so did not understand, but one cannot help but notice that most of these instances concern the uses of traditional magic by his family and that, perhaps, he was avoiding shaming them, or himself - devout Mohammedans (hi...more

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Apr 06, 2009 Sherri rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book was well-written, but just didn't really hold much interest for me. Its informative if you're wondering about Guinean customs of the mid-20th century, but it's just not something I would normally pick up to read. I'll be interested to see what the book group has to say tomorrow.

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Jul 21, 2012 Ify rated it 5 of 5 stars

A classic, lovely and quick read, gives you a glimpse into the Africa of my father's generation. The pull between maintaining traditional ways and the lure of western education. Laye captures the rhythm and voice of Africa in telling his own story.

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Dec 06, 2009 Shannon rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book could be the opener for Season of Migration to the North. It's more childhood based and steeped in tradition and about a kid trying to find his place in an ever-changing world. It's less provocative than SOMTTN, but it's worth reading.

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Mar 26, 2013 Ninasafiri rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A great in-dept story about life of the Malinke tribe in Guinea. I couldn't stop reading and felt said that after only 160 pages the book finished. Can't wait for more to read from Camara Laye. Great anthropological book!

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Sep 14, 2008 Liz rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Dan Belongia

Recommended to Liz by: David Newbury

Shelves: class

A classic African biography that was published for native Africans. It is a story of how modernism and village life collide to change lives. This books is a translation, so a lot is lost. However, it is a good biography to read when considering how someone chooses to narrate their own life. Also, colonialism may not be blatantly present in this book, but the aftermath of it is. I would recommend reading this book without a huge history about Guinea-Conakry. Because then you can think about what...more

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Dec 16, 2011 Anne-Marie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: hangin-on-my-bookshelves, school-assignment, why-oh-why

J'étais encore assez jeune quand j'ai lu ce roman. Tout ce dont je me souviens, c'est que j'avais été heureuse qu'un personnage meure... parce que ça mettait un peu d'action. Je ne pense pas que c'est très positif. Mais là encore, il faudrait que je le relise.

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Aug 08, 2012 Kimberly rated it 3 of 5 stars

I read this book for an Upper Division General Education Requirement. I enjoyed the story. It was an easy read.

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Jul 26, 2011 Mari Menta rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

très interessant! la litterature des pays africains devrait etre lu pour comprendre mieux et accepter ladiversité ....

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Jul 25, 2011 David Smith rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Merci Soule d'avoir propose ce livre. It's a privileged invitation to a private world of growing up in rural Guinea. Recently reissued as part of Penguin's African Writers Series.

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Apr 16, 2012 Fundo rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Loved it! Would like to read it again!

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Sep 24, 2011 Michelle rated it 3 of 5 stars

Interesting read - I hadn't read an autobiography from French Guinea, so I learned a lot.

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Feb 07, 2009 Holly rated it 4 of 5 stars

A wonderful book.

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Feb 24, 2011 Wysterria rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: for-school, biography

Required for my African culture class and not disappointing. No amazing life stories, but told in such a way that it was not dull. Family ties in African families are so much more powerful than in many American ones.

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About Camara Laye

During his time at college he wrote The African Child (L'Enfant noir), a novel based loosely on his own childhood. He would later become a writer of many essays and was a foe of the government of Guinea. His novel The Radiance of the King (Le Regard du roi) is considered to be one of his most important works.

He was born Malinke (a Mandé speaking ethnicity) into a caste that traditionally worked as...more During his time at college he wrote The African Child (L'Enfant noir), a novel based loosely on his own childhood. He would later become a writer of many essays and was a foe of the government of Guinea. His novel The Radiance of the King (Le Regard du roi) is considered to be one of his most important works.

He was born Malinke (a Mandé speaking ethnicity) into a caste that traditionally worked as blacksmiths and goldsmiths. His family name is Camara, and following the tradition of his community, it precedes his given name—Laye. His mother was from the village of Tindican, and his immediate childhood surroundings were not predominantly influenced by French culture. He attended both the Koranic and French elementary schools in Kouroussa. At age fifteen he went to Conakry, capital of Guinea, to continue his education. He attended vocational studies in motor mechanics. In 1947, he travelled to Paris to continue studies in mechanics. There he worked and took further courses in engineering and worked towards the baccalauréat.

In 1953, he published his first novel, L'Enfant noir (The African Child, 1954, also published under the title The Dark Child), an autobiographical story, which narrates in the first person a journey from childhood in Kouroussa, through challenges in Conakry, to France. The book won the Prix Charles Veillon in 1954. L'Enfant noir was followed by Le Regard du roi (1954; The Radiance of the King, 1956). These two novels are among the very earliest major works in francophone African literature.The Radiance of the King was described by Kwame Anthony Appiah as "One of the greatest of the African novels of the colonial period."
In 1956, Camara returned to Africa, first to Dahomey (now Benin), then Gold Coast (now Ghana) and then to newly independent Guinea, where he held government posts. In 1965, he left Guinea for Dakar, Senegal because of political issues, never to return. In 1966 his third novel, Dramouss (A Dream of Africa, 1968), was published. In 1978 his fourth and final work was published, Le Maître de la parole - Kouma Lafôlô Kouma (The Guardian of the Word, 1980), based on a Malian epic, as told by the griot Babou Condé, about the famous Sundiata Keita (also spelled Sunjata), the thirteenth-century founder of the Mali Empire.

Camara died in 1980 in Dakar, Senegal of a kidney infection.(less)

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