The Critical Powers of Salimata's Disenchantment: A Gendered Rereading of Ahmadou Kourouma's Les Soleils des Indépendances

With its gendered re-reading of Ahmadou Kourouma's canonical text, this article seeks to render visible some blind spots in African literary criticism and bring some of the complexities of Les soleils des indépendances (1968) into the line of sight for new generations of critical readers. Because of its powerful evocation of the misery of post-independent urban life, Kourouma's literary debut has traditionally been read as an illustration of Africa's disenchanting political predicament after independence. Although Les soleils des indépendances is duly ranked among classic examples of the African novel of disenchantment such as Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People (1966) and Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), an all too exclusive critical focus on the political predicament of the novel's male protagonist Fama has obscured the important role played by his equally disillusioned wife. I will demonstrate that Kourouma's Salimata does not simply serve as a metaphor for the nation's political predicament nor her story as a female counterpart to her husband's tale, as has been suggested by other critics. Rather, Salimata's life-story enables Kourouma to offer, already in his early novel of disenchantment, a unique gender critique on this male-dominated genre and its critical reception, and this more than a decade before women's issues more widely began to receive the limelight in African literature and criticism.