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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.

Mottos

Mottos in Latin and French appear at several points in the novel, and each motto implies something other than its literal meaning. For instance, Salim learns that the town has its own motto, which expresses approval of the intermingling of different races. The motto was bestowed on the town to celebrate the steamer service’s sixtieth anniversary, but the history of the motto has disturbing implications. The motto comes from the Aeneid, an epic poem by Virgil that recounts the founding of Rome, yet the town’s version of the motto reverses the original text’s meaning. In the Aeneid, the hero takes respite in a town on the North African coast. There he falls in love with an African woman, and he considers abandoning his journey to Europe. But the gods disapprove of the intermingling of Africans and Europeans, and when the hero departs, his African lover kills herself. Though revised to serve the interests of the colonial powers, knowledge of the motto’s original context foretells an ominous future for the town. Like this one, the other mottos in the novel also implicitly serve the interests of power yet have foreboding secondary meanings.

Ruins

Ruins appear at various points in the novel suggesting how every civilization that rises must fall. After arriving in the town, Salim noticed that the former colonial outpost was scattered with ruins of empire. He explains that local Africans, finally liberated from the yoke of imperial oppression, released their pent-up rage by destroying many of the buildings and monuments that Europeans had constructed. For Salim, who felt attracted to the town’s European past, the ruins left him confused. He had pictured himself finding success in this town, progressing toward the kind of wealth and prosperity symbolized by Europe. The ruins therefore signaled the premature ruin of his dreams. Standing among the ruins of empire profoundly unsettled his sense of time: “You felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future.” In other words, he felt like he was looking at relics of a life he’d never get to live. Despite Salim’s frustration, the town eventually builds itself back up. But the boom doesn’t last. A rebel army violently takes over, threatening once again to reduce the town to a mess of burned-out ruins.

Photographs of the President

The repeating motif of Presidential photographs charts the politician’s trajectory from a promising young leader to a dangerous autocrat. The earliest photographs of the President suggest a savvy politician who can lead Africa into the future. Though the photographs require the use modern camera, the images themselves depict the President in the garb of a traditional African chief. In this sense, the early photographs unite elements of tradition and modernity, which appropriately captures the President’s political platform of a “new Africa” that doesn’t banish tradition but modernizes it. Over the course of the novel, however, the photographs increasingly function like propaganda. The images gain ever-wider distribution. The visual composition subtly emphasizes the President’s power, ensuring that his body occupies most of the image and relegating other figures to the remaining sliver of space. The images also grow in size, and they’re eventually accompanied by pithy maxims. Though meant to show himself as being as powerful as European leaders, the President ends up looking like an autocrat.

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