A Review of Xala, a Novel by Sembene Ousmane

African literature often tends to portray different themes that are directly connected with the traditional beliefs of African communities. This is vindicated in the works of native Africans writing about Africa as well as non-Africans involving different portrayals of Africa in their works.

It would not be a misrepresentation of facts to point out that the most influential literature portraying Africa and its traditional beliefs first took centre stage in the wake of the end of colonialism, where colonial masters handed over power to native Africans to take over the leadership of their respective states and map the way forward for themselves.

Matter-of-factly, colonialism became the inspiration for most literary writers, both African and non-African. Much as African writers mostly drew their inspiration from the corrupting influence of colonialism and have consistently fought to “preserve” the reality of colonialism in their works, perhaps so that history should not be twisted, some have taken another twist and have concentrated on portraying the hangover of colonialism that keeps haunting most African states.

This is where the leaders masquerade as Africans while in actual sense they are characteristically the same ones who exploit their fellow kinsmen and engage in the very same “corrupting” influence of power that was typical of the colonialists.

In Xala, Sembene Ousmane, a Senegalese, is mostly concerned with using the supernatural as a liberating tool for the oppressed and a punitive strategy for the oppressors. Though the type of plot in the novel is that of social realism, the notion of the supernatural occupies the whole flow of events in the novel such that everything else revolves around it.

Xala is a story of El Hadji Kader Beye, a Muslim businessman living in Dakar, Senegal, who suffers a terrible misfortune after his third marriage, after being struck by a xala which is translated by Ousmane himself as “impotence”. El Hadj fails to consummate his marriage and becomes an object of ridicule. He is to learn later that the beggar who sings daily outside his office is the one who engineered the impotence because he oppressed him some time back.

The novel attempts to portray the exploitation that the local Senegalese were going through while at the same time prophesying that such exploitation would soon be over and the oppressed would finally tramp over the oppressors. El Hadj can be taken as a symbol of the elite or the working class who oppress the poor; the beggar the whole fraternity of the poor; and the impotence a symbolic representation of the poor’s means of struggle.

El Hadj’s rapid fall from the sublime to the ridiculous is what controls the plot of the novel, and this fall which is necessitated by some supernatural influence of the xala which is beyond natural science, symbolizes the triumph of the oppressed over the oppressors. These oppressors are taking away the land of the poor, as it is seen where El Hadj grabbed a piece of land from the beggar.

Since in the novel, the influence of the supernatural is on the estate of marriage where it causes so much anarchy at the end, reaching the point where El Hadj is deserted by his wives and children while the beggar and his colleagues take over El Hadj’s property, it can also be intimated that this marriage symbolizes the structures that are there that are used to oppress the poor. And these structures are supposed to be destroyed so that the poor reclaim their positions in society.

The xala also works as a deterrent of undesirable behaviours where because of it, El Hadj spends a lot of money in trying to heal himself of the impotence. Yet, it is someone close to him – the beggar – who has brought the misfortune in his new marriage. The spending is basically aimed at impoverishing him.

All in all, Xala is one of the best African novels ever written. And among Francophone African writers, Ousmane is unique because of his working class background and limited primary school education. These two aspects might have provided for him the context within which to write and the understanding of different classes of people: the working and the non-working class; the poor and the rich; the oppressors and the oppressed; and the educated and the uneducated. Thus, as one reads the novel, it endears itself to him/her because of its diversity.