38 pages • 1 hour read
Cheikh Hamidou KaneAmbiguous Adventure
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1961A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary
Samba meets Lucienne in a café. He thinks about how it has been some time since their last meeting, and although he could have made the time to meet her, “no more could he avow the reason for his sudden withdrawal: the impossibility of enduring any longer the calm inquiry of those blue eyes which the girl had fixed on him since the first moments of their meeting” (122). After their examinations, on which they both did well, he made this appointment to see her at a café. Rather than engaging in their usual lighthearted wit, Lucienne instead questions Samba and asks if his reluctance to meet her was due to her behavior at the dinner party. She informs him that she is a member of the Communist Party, a fact he already knows because he saw her distribute leaflets prior. He admits to her that this makes him admire her more. Samba then acknowledges the differences between himself and Lucienne: While they are both passionate in their beliefs, she fights for “liberty” while he fights for “God” (126). In response, Lucienne wonders whether it is possible to “cur[e]” Samba’s people of the “part of themselves which weighs them down” (126), to which Samba replies that he is unsure. He describes a scene that makes him happy: a house in the countryside with animals. However, he remarks that this dream is a sham and that “behind it, there is something a thousand times more beautiful, a thousand times more true” that he can no longer locate (129).
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary
Samba attends a dinner party at Pierre-Louis’s home. Upon entering, he meets Pierre-Louis’s wife, who is Gabonese royalty, as well as his granddaughter: Both are named Adèle. Recognizing his attraction to the granddaughter, Samba chides himself for “sending vulgar winks toward a young girl whom he is seeing for the first time” (132). Upon inquiry, he shares the moment when he met Pierre-Louis as a time that he felt lonely in Paris. He recalls “that in the country of the Diallobé, man is closer to death and he lives on more familiar terms with it” (134), whereas in Paris, he “forgets” about death and lives in a “silent” world. Samba explains, “I am not a distinct country of the Diallobé facing a distinct Occident, and appreciating with a cool head what I must take from it and what I must leave with it by way of counter-balance. I have become the two” (135). He elaborates that this is not a difference in nature between the two and that therefore the West is not inherently better or more capable: The West’s “victory” is merely an accident. If people like the Diallobé accept the West, Samba states, “[W]e shall be worth no more than it is, and we shall never master it. And our defeat will be the end of the last human being on this earth” (138).
At dinner, Samba is seated next to young Adèle, who timidly shares her interest in visiting Africa. He reflects on Adèle as a “half-breed” who, although of African origins, is born of the West and does not understand why she sometimes thinks things that contradict Western opinion. Samba is proud that he gave “a human visage to that part of her which the girl believed to be faceless” (141).
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary
In the autumn, Adèle and Samba visit a cafe. Samba talks about his educational background and the foreign school. She states that she hates the colonizing powers, but Samba urges her not to hate them while acknowledging that it is difficult to love them. These comments distress her, and he brings her home. On the metro train to his house, Samba hallucinates Thierno’s face. He asks Thierno “what is left” for him (Samba) and says he wants to be “reviv[ed] to the secret tenderness” (145), but in that moment, the hallucination disappears.
Part 2, Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Samba’s life in France is far more social than his life in the Diallobé community, which was guided by a religious sense of purpose and, for the most part, closed to outsiders. Now he frequently sees friends, attends dinner parties, and meets new people. Yet despite these plentiful parties and interactions, he remarks to the group in Chapter 5 that he feels lonely.
The conversation between Lucienne and Samba reveals a tension between his possible romantic interest in Lucienne and his desire to serve God. Though Samba views Lucienne’s communism as admirable for her personally, he is implied to see it as incompatible with his own attachment to nature, God, and religion. He enjoys the company of Lucienne but at the same time is cautious and fearful, and by the end of the conversation it is clear that they are both passionate but heading in different directions in their lives.
While Lucienne is a temptation that Samba can acknowledge and compartmentalize, his brief interaction with Adèle challenges his sense of morality on a different level. He is physically attracted to Adèle but wrestles with an inner struggle between lust for the physical and loyalty to his religion.
Chapter 5 contains a crucial point in the narrative: a public admission from Samba that he is both Diallobé as well as Occidental (i.e., Western). The seemingly opposing themes of religion and secularization/science, life and death, tradition and modernity, which split along geographical/cultural lines, are nevertheless all present within Samba. Adèle also carries this duality—African origin and Western culture—within her. This similarity explains some of Samba’s affinity for her. Although the events of Chapter 6 occur most likely some months after Adèle and Samba’s first meeting, their conversation continues as if it occurred on the same night. A tenderness and affection have developed between the two, but their discussion also reveals that they are both torn between loving and hating their colonizers. Despite Samba’s connection to Adèle and her family, his hallucination and cry for help ultimately emphasizes his own feeling of being lost in the West.
