Novel
Aboki ou L'appel de la côte
Halilou Sabbo Mahamadou · 1978
Synopsis
Amadou, a young man from Niger, answers the call of the coast and goes to work in Ivory Coast, like so many Sahelians of his generation; he spends twenty years there. The sources say little more than this course of events, which political unrest and an injury bring to a close.
Context
The book appeared in Dakar from Les Nouvelles Éditions africaines, three years before the novel about school that the same author published in Niamey. It deals with the exodus, the departure of young men from the Sahel to the plantations and cities of the coast, a movement that the country's writers took up in those years. It incorporates Hausa proverbs given in French translation, a device that its author used again afterwards and that academic studies have noted as his hallmark. The length of the stay, twenty years, makes the book the story of a life rather than of a departure.
Who it is for
In French. Nothing is required to enter the narrative, other than accepting that it follows an entire life, from being hired on the coast to the return home.
Prizes and reception
The book that made its author's reputation, and one of the two titles on which studies of the Nigerien novel rely.