Summary: Chapter 3

Salim explains that the sorceress Zabeth had a son with a trader from a tribe to the south. The son lived with his father’s tribe into adolescence, and when his father died, he moved north to live with his mother’s people.

Zabeth’s son’s name was Ferdinand, and he was about fifteen or sixteen at the time he returned to his mother. Zabeth brought Ferdinand to town and introduced him to Salim, explaining that she wanted Ferdinand to attend the local lycée, or secondary school. The school remained from colonial days, and though the building initially looked to Salim like yet another ruin, Belgian teachers arrived to revive operations. Whereas Zabeth had lived “a purely African life” in the bush, she wanted Ferdinand to acquire the skills that would be necessary to thrive in the new Africa, “outside the timeless ways of village and river.” Ferdinand boarded at the European-run school and checked in with Salim daily.

Salim describes Ferdinand as quiet and respectful, though he also detected a sense of distance and a “slightly mocking” look in his eye. He felt that he could detect in Ferdinand’s face a resemblance to African masks, which at once gave his face distinction but also hid his emotions. Salim suspected that “there was a lot going on behind that face that I couldn’t know about,” which gave the boy an enigmatic, inscrutable quality.

Ferdinand made friends with Metty, and the two boys spent their time drinking beer and picking up women in bars. Salim worried about their behavior, but he realized that he couldn’t condemn Metty for pursuing pleasures that he himself enjoyed. Even so, he pledged to not let Metty ever see him with an African woman since he thought such a liaison would offend his family, should they ever hear about it.

Salim describes the poor condition of both his shop and his house. His shop was a simple structure with concrete walls and floor, and his wares were organized in piles on the ground. His house had a “similar rough-and-ready quality,” with a messy kitchen and a living room in permanent disarray. The house used to belong to a Belgian woman who painted scenes from European life. She left several such paintings behind when she moved away, and her attempts to introduce a hint of Europe to her home contributed to Salim’s melancholy attitude.

Salim notes that Ferdinand’s mixed tribal heritage made him a stranger in this part of the country, and that as the boy grew older, he felt “a little bit at sea” with regard to his identity. Ferdinand tried on different personalities, copying the behaviors of his teachers and even pretending to be Salim’s business associate. One day, Ferdinand asked Salim what he thought of the future of Africa, and Salim wondered whether Ferdinand’s idea of Africa came to him from his experiences as an African or from the atlas at his school. Salim increasingly felt that something separated him from Ferdinand. Whereas Salim saw the world as simple and uncomplicated, Ferdinand became more confused the more he learned.

When a group of “warrior boys” from a tribe to the east arrived at the school, Ferdinand took up with them and tried to extort money from Salim with a scheme involving a stolen ledger from the school. Salim felt threatened by the boys’ behavior, though he acknowledged that no laws or regulations were in place to protect him from the cruelty of others.

Analysis: Chapter 3

Salim has a clear bias against Africans, as evidenced by the way he discusses Ferdinand and the “warrior boys” with whom Ferdinand took up. When Zabeth first brought her son to town, Salim sensed a remoteness in the boy’s personality that made him difficult to read, despite his apparent politeness. Salim suspected that this distance concealed a mocking attitude, which made him feel slightly uncomfortable around Ferdinand. Salim elaborated on this suspicion when he compared Ferdinand’s face to that of a wooden African mask, at once aesthetically distinguished yet also concealing the identity of the person who wears it. Ferdinand’s inscrutability provoked anxiety in Salim, which suggests an underlying—though also unwarranted—fear of the African youth. Salim’s anxious relationship with Ferdinand grew more acute when the boy became friends with so-called “warrior boys” from a nearby tribe. In an effort to fund their education, the boys came up with a plan to get money from Salim. Despite the trickery involved, the boys made no threats against Salim. Yet Salim responded with panic, assuming the boys might resort to violence. Salim’s snap judgments clearly indicate his racist bias against Africans.

Charged by Zabeth to keep tabs on her son, Salim took an interest in the development of Ferdinand’s changeable personality. Salim knew that educated Africans would have a central role to play in the newly independent nation, and he saw Ferdinand as someone who had started on the respectable path to becoming a civil servant. In light of this knowledge, Salim found it alarming that Ferdinand had such an unstable personality. Ferdinand frequently mimicked the behaviors of his teachers, and he acted the part of Salim’s shop assistant when Zabeth was in town. The way Ferdinand moved so fluidly between different personalities struck Salim as a sign that the boy lacked a stable center and that he simply mirrored the actions and attitudes of others—especially those of his foreign teachers. The apparent emptiness of Ferdinand’s personality worried Salim. If Ferdinand did manage to become a civil servant, his lack of a stable identity would make him easy to manipulate and therefore dangerous.

Salim demonstrates a hypocritical aspect of his personality when he describes having sex with African women and covering it up out of shame. Salim’s bias against Africans, discussed above, clearly extends to African women. Despite sleeping with them, he treats such liaisons as dishonorable, as if they would insult his cultural heritage. His tendency to use African women to satisfy his sexual desires but then immediately dismiss them and his own behavior as an affront to his identity marks Salim as a hypocrite. Salim inherited this hypocritical attitude from his family, who strongly privileged racial purity. Because of this history of racism, Salim feels ashamed of having sex with African women. Yet Salim’s shame reveals a layer of irony because in Chapter 2, Salim criticized his own family’s hypocrisy. Despite their concerns about racial mixing, members of his family clearly had sex with the African people they enslaved and produced many mixed-race children, including Metty. Salim might judge his family for their hypocrisy, but he fails to see how his own attitudes and behaviors are equally hypocritical.

Chapter 3 introduces the idea of a “new Africa” emerging in the wake of political independence. The end of direct European rule across the continent inaugurated a future for Africa that remained open-ended and full of possibility. Yet because this “new Africa” was still in the process of being born, it remained little more than an abstract idea, one that Salim believed could not account for the changing social and political realities on the ground. Salim underscores this contradiction between ideal and reality when he recounts a time when Ferdinand asked him what he thought about “the future of Africa.” Salim suspected that Ferdinand’s idea of the continent came from a map of Africa rather than from his own experience as someone who had lived with and moved between different African tribes. When pressed, Ferdinand had little practical knowledge of what went on in the outside world. Yet he knew he was being groomed to inherit political responsibility for that world, which made his idea of the new Africa fundamentally shallow and self-serving. As Salim concludes: “the future of Africa was nothing more than the job he might do later on.”