Translated from French by Richard Philcox
Published by Seagull Books, 2017, 264 pages

“Why is it that any attempt to write about one’s life ends up as a jumble of half-truths? … In the pages that follow…I shall try…to figure out the considerable role Africa has played in my life and imagination. What was I looking for? I still don’t know for sure.”

Maryse Condé, a Franco-Caribbean writer, spent over a decade in West Africa, from 1959 to the early 1970s. During that time, she lived in the Ivory Coast, Guinea, Senegal and Ghana, during a time of change and the early days of independence. Her volatile relationship with Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor whom she married as a student in Paris, would provide both joy and sorrow, and a backbone for this book. She would move to Guinea to be with him but the marriage wouldn’t last.

In 1959, just before the country gained independence, Condé got a job as a teaching assistant in Bingerville, Ivory Coast. She went to political rallies in support of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who became the country’s first president. There was hope in the air.

“In the Ivory Coast, I felt that a new Africa was striving to be born, an Africa that would rely solely on its own resources, that would rid itself of the arrogance and paternalism of its colonizers.”

When her daughter was born, she moved to Conakry, Guinea, which she felt was her “real port of entry into Africa”, another country filled with hope after independence. But the hope didn’t last, sliding into brutal repression, during which many of her friends were arrested. 

On an invitation from a friend, the writer and anti-colonialist Edouard Helman (writing under the name Yves Bénot), Condé moved to Ghana with her five children, another young independent African nation with freedom in the air. But life here isn’t easy, she has work permit problems but a family to support.

Eventually, “infused with Accra’s exuberant vitality”, she started to write.

There is so much in this book: she writes about meeting Malcolm X and listening to Che Guevara; being arrested in Accra; and trying to get past the mutual distrust between the French Antilleans working in Africa and the Africans. Condé captures a tumultuous time—not just in the countries she lives in, but also in her own life, as she tries to raise five children (often doubting her abilities as a mother) and has several bad relationships.  

This is also a story about a woman maturing and coming into her own. She says that Guinea changed her: “it was this country that taught me compassion and the importance of the people’s well-being. … I had lost some of my dearest friends here. And it was here I was becoming a very different human being.” 

At the start of the book, Condé promises an honest autobiography. It is a promise she keeps. She does not sugar-coat the truth or try to make herself look good—you get the real woman with all her faults. Like her life, her relationship with Africa is never easy or straightforward. I admire her for her courage and her ability not only to survive but do well. 

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.