The Dark Child

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.

The boy

Kouroussa (the family compound)

Chapter 1

In the compound at Kouroussa the boy lives among his family, the trades and the beliefs of the Malinke world, watched over by customs he only half understands. Laye recalls it all with a tender, elegiac clarity, a childhood already being lost to the schooling and the modern world that will claim him.

Chapters 1-2

explicit Camara Laye grows up in the family compound in Kouroussa, a real town on the upper Niger in Guinea; the town is the fixed centre of the memoir.

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The father

The father's forge

Chapter 1

The father works gold at his forge with an authority that seems almost magical, aided by the little black snake, the guiding spirit of his line, that the boy watches with awe. The forge, and the mystery of the father's power over metal and men, is the memoir's central image of a traditional world the son will not inherit.

Chapter 1

inferred The boy's father is a goldsmith whose forge, with its guardian snake and its rituals, stands within the Kouroussa compound; sited there in the real town, the specific workshop the memoir's own.

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