Xala

Xala opens with a Senegalese man, also the president of the businessmen’s group, being promoted for the first time to the presidency of Senegal’s Chamber of Commerce. The action is symbolic of Senegal’s transformation into an independent nation, able to self-determine its fate and handle its own financial affairs. The economic transition, which coincides with El Hadji’s wedding to his third wife—a ceremony designed to indicate both his wealth and virility—is, like the marriage, a fruitless event. Just as El Hadji’s impotence is a metaphor for the ineffectuality of the nation’s Indigenous leaders, the Chamber of Commerce and the businessmen’s group, which appear to be the same agency, act at the whims of European governments. The nation’s banks still operate under French control and, as El Hadji notes during his downfall, he and the other Black businessmen exist only because they are willing to do Europe’s bidding in exchange for whatever leftovers their former colonizers bestow to them. Sembène wrote this satirical novel, not only to poke fun at the weakness of African leaders, but to illustrate the ways in which they had disappointed the people whom they were elected to serve. West African countries would never achieve full independence, he contended, as long as those in power not only worked in concert with former colonizers but also continued to espouse the colonizer’s values.

El Hadji, like his devoutly Catholic father-in-law, Papa John, epitomizes assimilationist values. He wears European-made suits, rides around Dakar in a Mercedes-Benz, dines in French restaurants, and drinks only mineral water. Sembène draws the reader’s attention, particularly, to El Hadji’s avoidance of Senegalese food and water. During a visit to Oumi N’Doye, she announces that she is out of mineral water and mockingly offers that El Hadji can drink from the tap, knowing that he would never do so. Instead, he has his chauffeur, Modu, bring in an ice-hamper full of mineral water.

More poignantly, when El Hadji and Modu visit the healer, Sereen Mada, in a distant village, El Hadji refuses to drink water from the calabash that a young woman brings them, despite Modu’s insistence on the water’s purity. El Hadji observes the roots floating at the top of the water—evidence that the water comes directly from his homeland—and rejects it. Similarly, he also rejects eating the mutton and couscous that the men are offered as an evening meal, despite his hunger. The irony of this is that El Hadji is eager consume the products of his homeland to help him restore his erection, as he believes more in the properties of magic than of medical science, but he associates the food and drink of his land with cultural regression and a lower-class standard. His second wife, Oumi N’Doye, thinks similarly. To entice El Hadji, she serves him French-style meals. This is meant to signify her relation to El Hadji’s cultural standards and her relative sophistication compared to his other two wives. Cultivation is, thus, associated with all things European. Like his former colonizers, El Hadji only taps into nativist traditions to restore his sexual energy, believing, as they did, that Africans understand the sensual arts better than the West.

Having abandoned his revolutionary principles for material comforts, it is his eldest child and daughter, Rama, who now works to throw off the cultural remnants of colonial rule. Her focus is on restoring Wolof as the national language. When her father one day asks her about this work, she describes the adoption of French as Senegal’s official language as “an historical accident” (85). There is something slyly flippant in her description of 65 years of colonial rule as an “accident.” It is as though she refuses to further empower the French by admitting that they were able to overtake her country through concerted efforts and military might. Her resistance to the French language is seen earlier in the novel, when she is pulled over on her motorbike by a police officer and pretends not to know the language, despite it being a requirement for gaining a driver’s license. Her insistence on speaking to the officer in Wolof is a subtle bit of subversion, but in the context of forming an alliance with the officer. Her purpose is to get him to see Wolof as their common language and as the language to embrace in all contexts.

The acceptance of French as the language of formality is addressed again during El Hadji’s visit to the bank manager. The men attempt to establish a filial relationship in Wolof, but for naught: The bank manager, despite being Senegalese, understands little of his native language. Having trained in Paris, he reverts back to the French language for safety and, certainly, to discuss business matters. Thus, Sembène depicts Wolof as a language that the Senegalese, even during the postcolonial years, associated with informality and friendliness, while French remained the language in which they studied and discussed commercial and governmental affairs. Thus, Rama’s work is about getting the Senegalese to take their own language seriously, both because the uneducated had little access to it (only a third of the Senegalese people spoke it), and to help her people learn the self-respect that they would need to progress in the postcolonial years.