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Sami Tchak: Le Continent du Tout et du presque Rien ( The Continent of Everything and Practically Nothing)
Our narrator is s Maurice Boyer , a French ethnologist . When we first meet him, he is retired and a widower. His son,Julien, w who is a filmmaker, plans to make a film about him. Maurice was an ethnologist and. Julien ask for an explanation of what it is. Ehnology is the daughter of colonial verticality and it has led, at best, to an uncertain humanism.
Maurice recounts what got him into that field and gives us a fairly concise, fascinating account of some of his influences, including various books written by Africans, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as the famous French sociologists. It wasBalandier’s Ambiguous Africa that most influenced him . He ends up studying theTem people in modern day Togo and specifically in the village ofTedi. He is highly critical of his predecessors, some of them, clearly represent Western imperialism and the oppression of the native people. This is a trap he himself has to be careful not to fall into. This issue will be a key in this book.
So he sets off forTedi , after damning one of his predecessors for oversimplification and, of course, studying the locals from a western point of view rather and from their point of view. I do not need to tell you that he will make the same mistake himself.
We learn the history of the village and some of the key issues.
He is welcomed by the locals, including the chief, and becomes Morou, a corruption of Omar. Initially, he stays with the chief, but then gets his own hut. His meals are prepared for him by one of the wives of the chief and indeed it seems she is his favourite wife but she is not terribly enthusiastic as she was in love with someone else and snatched away to become his wife without her consent. This is one of the many complicated issues he gets involved in, perhaps too involved.
A key issue is that he has proposed to study is the effect of Islamisation on the village. In the village as with surrounding areas the religion is totally Islamic, but if course it is also a foreign religion.
He meets the imam who is a highly intelligent and educated man and learns his colourful story and how he ended up in this small village.
Indeed, he becomes so close to the imam that the chief points, out he seems to be studying the imam rather than the village and its people.
The purpose of his study, of course, is to keep out any disputes and just observe and comment on them. Unfortunately he foolishly gets involved in one and that causes him a lot of problems. He is advised to leave but sticks around for a while, ignored by most of the villagers. Gradually, however, he gets back in their good graces.
Things are still a bit tricky and when he learns that his father has died, he decides to go home to his father’s funeral. The implication is that he would return but he never does.
He writes his thesisand concludes I developed the theory that, over the centuries, Black people had become weaklings and other, stronger people had managed to overpower them on the spiritual level. First the Arabs, then the Europeans.
So now we are into his later career which also has its issues. He does meet a woman studying Brazil and they get married and have a family. However, he also gets involved in various controversies and discussions which inevitably lead to problems. These issues involve both his students and colleagues, including a former best friend. Many of these, of course, involve the tricky issue colonialism, post colonialism and related issues, which of course are fascinating to learn about those for us who may not have studied them in depth.
Possibly his best and certainly his most driven student is Safiatou Kouyate. She will also be his lover. We follow both her and him. According to her Western capitalism had undermined or outright destroyed all other systems, casting a shadow on humanity. Each day, it murdered human dignity and human life by the millions. This is of course a controversial point of view and Safi will get him involved in various discussions about it. There are of course other points of view such as the Frenchman who claims at the French invented Africa. However, we are not surprisingly the Africans do not agree with.
As well as discussions on these and related issues there are other discussions on a variety of related topics as there are various meetings attended by various people with varying views on the topic.
I found these discussions fascinating. For example.France is racially becoming more and more negroid, so much so that now one can actually speak of the creation of an African State on European soil … If France develops along the lines it has taken in our day, and should that development continue for the next three hundred years, all traces of French blood will finally be submerged in the formation of a Euro-African Mulatto State who said this? Not JD Vance or Musk butAdolf Hitler in hisMein Kampf.
We also get into the whole range of issues around immigration, Islamic terrorism and even Yhe Great Replacement Theory
While Maurice is getting cosy with Safi, his wife is mourning her lost love Babacar Ndiaye and the couple argue about the relative merits of these two primarily from the point of view of their intellectual achievements.
This is certainly an odd book in that it is a mixture of the story of our hero, Maurice, his time in Africa and his subsequent career as an academic in France but it also goes into considerable detail on all the various theories, arguments and intellectual points of view regarding Africa, its place in the world, and its relationship with the West and vice versa and where he as gone and where it might be going. Whether you know much about this or not it is most fascinating read to hear all these different points of view and the arguments for an against them.
Publishing history
First published in 2021 by Editions Jean-Claude Lattes
First English translation in 2026 by Seagull Books
Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman