The King of Kahel

Tierno Monénembo: My former headmaster, the great Guinean historian Djibril Tamsir Niane! He suggested I take an interest in Olivier de Sanderval during a conference in Niamey. He told me he was "a real character out of a novel."

He didn’t know how right he was!

Question: What authors or books have influenced your writing?

Tierno Monénembo: Everything I read influences me, even the phone book! There are so many jumbled influences on my imagination that it would be very difficult for me to give every one of my mentors his or her due. Let’s start with my grandmother, who never wrote a thing, by the way, but whose tales and legends were my first heritage. Immediately after her come Mongo Beti, Hampathe Ba, Flaubert, Maupassant, Juan Rulfo, Céline, Yambo Ouologuem, Dostoyevsky, Ahmadou Kourouma, Faulkner, Kateb Yacine, and a thousand other geniuses who came from every end of the earth to teach me to dream my own dreams.

In my case, we shouldn’t speak of influence, but of confluence and preference, in the plural.

Question: What research did you do while writing your book?

Tierno Monénembo: I was more or less familiar with the historical context. My research was therefore limited to the life of Olivier de Sanderval, notably his inner and romantic life. Chance led me to his grandson, who is now 83 years old and who generously allowed me access both to the written family archives and, thankfully, to the oral ones. Olivier de Sanderval was not only a legend in his time, but in his family.

Question: Is there any character in The King of Kahel with whom you most identify? Why?

Tierno Monénembo: Olivier de Sanderval himself! I like his intelligence, his splendid sense of pride and solitude, his insatiable curiosity, his courage at the edge of despair, his perpetual dissatisfaction, and his obsessive desire to be unlike anyone of his time.

Question: Have you always wanted to be a writer? What other careers have you pursued?

Tierno Monénembo: When I was a kid, I would rather have become a singer. My schoolmasters told me I had a beautiful voice. Though to be honest I have to admit that I loved to read and that by high school I had filled an old notebook with my own tales.

The writer I became was revealed by the pain of exile rather than the magic of precocious talent found in Mozart or Rimbaud.

Question: How does this book compare to your previous books?

Tierno Monénembo: My previous books were written from inside Africa, its woods, its myths, its chimeras, and its curses. This one was written from inside Olivier de Sanderval. And please don’t see that as some literary trick. This Merlin simply succeeded in casting his spell on me (despite the still-fresh colonial memory that clutters my mind), taking hold of my pen, and writing this book in my place.

And I guarantee you I see no reason to complain about it!

Question: What’s next for you?

Tierno Monénembo: I am currently writing a novel about a character in many ways similar to our King of Kahel. Olivier de Sanderval is a white man who came to Africa to take part in the history of the Fulas. Addi Ba is a Fula who came to France to take part in the history of the white man. During the Second World War, after General De Gaulle’s call, he was one of the first to found a resistance Maquis. Arrested by the Germans, he was executed by a firing squad in Epinal in 1943. Generous and eternal France finally recognized his contribution... in 2003, or sixty years after his comrades.

Still, three streets in France are now named after him.

Ingredients

• 2 cups palm oil
• 3 onions
• 2 hot peppers
• 1 carp and 2 smoked fish
• 1 pile of dried shrimp
• 2 gumbos
• 1 bowl of potato leaves, or ground manioc leaves
• oysters
• 2 Maggi cubes
• 5 pieces of meat

Preparation

First pour 2 cups of water in the pot, put it on the fire, then add the well-cleaned fish and the 5 pieces of meat. Cook the fish for 10 minutes then take it out of the pot. Skin and bone the fish and put it back in the pot, then pour the 2 cups of oil in. Add the 2 smoked fish after having removed their bones. Wash the potato leaves, which have been cut into small pieces, and put them in the pot. Crush the onions and the peppers.

The trick of cooking this dish is to remove enough water from the sauce to make room for the oil, which rises to the surface of the sauce. Cooking for one hour will get you a very good "bourékhè" sauce.

Follow the same steps to prepare this dish with manioc leaves, with the exception that the leaves need to be ground and dried before they are cooked.