Sembene Ousmane

These two novelettes look at the state of modern Africa. Dieng experiences bureaucratic incompetence and deceit in "The Money Order" which leads him to a public act of despair, while in "White Genesis", the decline of a way of life is examined through a tragic tale of incest

Two Novellas

The Money-Order with White Genesis

Marion

Now, in our time, year by year, like a natural disaster, the able bodied men went to seck their fortune in the towns where, it seemed, life was easier! Navet alter navet, the crops became poorer and poorer. The heads of families, their faces scorched by too much sun, their strength spent in vain, turned in on their instinct of sell-preservation with an unconscious virulence: they had a foreboding of a future which even now filled them with terror.

They sought comfort in the adda, the tradition, and in the hypothetical promise of one of the best places in paradise. Allah's paradise, like a nail fixed in the centre of their brain, the cornerstone of every activity of their daily existence, weakened and breached their faith in the future. Burying themselves in the old saying: 'Life is nothing', they had reached a state where they no longer felt desire. At the limits of their life here below nothing stood out, nothing which could rouse the covetousness of desire.

Once the need to exist (and not to live) had been satisfied, the rest and what was the rest, anyway?-was futile. But beyond the rest was human self-respect.

The impoverishment around them—-that total impoverishment that blinds the spirit-made them incapable of sacrificing themselves for their children, or of thinking it possible they might do so.

That burning desire for self-sacrifice, the gift of self for others, the refusal to give in, the rejection of the atavistic instinct, which is the first step towards the future, was for these people a betrayal of their faith, an act of defiance and a moral crime against the ancient established order.

The words of the sage came, luminous, into her mind: 'Some-times a child is born into the most ordinary low caste family who grows up and glorifies his name, the name of his father, of his mother, of his whole family, of his community, of his tribe.

More often, in a so-called high caste family which glories in its past, a child comes into the world who, by his actions, sullies his entire heritage, and even robs the individual diambur-diambur of his dignity? She repeated these words to herself, but still she hesitated to act.

Thinking was the function of the men, an iniquitous state of affairs that exasperated her.

Deprived of all right to criticize or to analyse, she now revolted against an order that had been established before she was born.

A sea of anger welled up and roared within her, waking and sharpening her awareness of her frustration and placing the accepted moral values in question by baring them to the light of day.

The Money-Order with White Genesis quotes

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