Dystopia
Philip A. Ojo

• ...The story is narrated with such passion that it arouses the reader’s sympathy.  This is particularly true because the reader can easily ... appreciate the need to fight against life-threatening traditions, and deteriorating economic and social conditions ... This bold presentation of social life in Africa is ... an invaluable addition to the libraries of scholars and students of Francophone literature in particular, and African studies in general ...
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The Oppressive Boot is not Black or White
Ramonu Sanusi

• ...Literature from Burkina Faso has simply not enjoyed the canonical status that texts produced say in Cameroon, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Congo ... have enjoyed for decades. Yet, Burkina Faso has a number of good writers ... Patrick Ilboudo, whose remarkable novel, Les Vertiges du trône, deserves a space in the critical output on Francophone Africa’s “dictatorship novels” otherwise referred to as “the power durée novels” ...
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Sonship and Chaos
Robert Alvin Miller

• Moussa Konate’s Fils du chaos lends itself to a process of rereading, a first reading as socio-cultural representation and a second reading based on its suggestive and self-questioning narrative framework. While the second reading does not necessarily deny or erase the life-image displayed in the first reading, it does focus the reader’s attention on the mediate character of this image, on the historical roots of  past events in our present memory and on the uncomfortable relationship between postcolonial educated classes and their remembered experience of an earlier period perceived as something closer to traditional socialization ...
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