The African Child (L'Enfant noir)
Camara Laye
An affectionate recollection of a Guinean boyhood.
Laye's autobiographical novel recalls his Malinke childhood in Kouroussa, from his goldsmith father's craft to schooling in Conakry, in a nostalgic, lyrical key. Some contemporaries faulted its near-silence on colonialism, but its tender interior portrait of traditional life offered an early, widely translated model of the African autobiographical novel and its evocation of a vanishing world.
Its legacy. It became one of the most taught Francophone African texts in schools.
- Author
- Camara Laye
- First published
- 1953
- Genre
- Novel
- Theme
- The West African Novel
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