David Diop (2) (1966–)

You're a Senegalese soldier in the First World War, brutally thrown into the front line: because France's black colonial fighters were routinely regarded as expendable in this savage conflict. Your lifelong friend is mortally, agonisingly wounded: he begs you to put him out of his unbearable pain and slit his throat. You can't. You don't. You stay with him until he eventually, and distressingly dies.

This is Alfa's story. With his friend Mademba's death comes overwhelming guilt, and a need to avenge it. He devotes himself to a savage campaign to single out enemy soldiers to disembowel, and remove their hands as a kind of talisman. This is the beginning of his slow descent into madness, as his fellow soldiers come to regard him not with admiration, but with fear. Is this man a sorcerer, a demon? And is his behaviour surprising when we realise, as Alfa eventually did, that his friend died in the defence of a regime which regarded him and his compatriots as expendable ?

Alfa is removed from the front line. This is when we learn his back story, the reason for the bond between the two men, and witness his disturbed mind spiral out of control.

A powerful, bleak novella giving a voice to the often unrecognised contribution of colonial soldiers to France's Great War.… (mere)