Books set in Guinea

The Dark Child

Camara Laye

Camara Laye's luminous memoir recalls a Malinke boyhood in the Upper Guinea town of Kouroussa, before the pull of French schooling carries him away. The world of the book is the town on the Niger: the family compound and his father's goldsmith forge with its guardian snake, the grandmother's rice-farming village of Tindican, and the sacred grove of the initiation rites; far off on the coast lies Conakry, the college, and the road to France.

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