Comrade Papa

International Booker-nominated satirist GauZ' returns with a panoramic journey into the colonization of the African interior.

In an attempt to avoid life as a factory worker, Dabilly, a young white man in late nineteenth-century France, seeks colonial adventure in Africa. Still mourning the recent deaths of his parents, he joins a beleaguered French general trying to set up trading routes on the Ivory coast which, in 1880, is still untouched by colonization.

A century...
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International Booker-nominated satirist GauZ' returns with a panoramic journey into the colonization of the African interior.

In an attempt to avoid life as a factory worker, Dabilly, a young white man in late nineteenth-century France, seeks colonial adventure in Africa. Still mourning the recent deaths of his parents, he joins a beleaguered French general trying to set up trading routes on the Ivory coast which, in 1880, is still untouched by colonization.

A century later, a young Black boy born to communist parents in Amsterdam starts learning about his heritage. When he arrives in Cote d'Ivoire to visit his grandmother and uncover more about his ancestry, he discovers surprising traces of an ancestor he never knew existed.

Superimposing these two coming-of-age stories, GauZ' plunges the reader into the lives of two very different people and reveals the long arc of African colonization. In exuberant and ornate prose, translated by award-winning Frank Wynne, Comrade Papa is a remarkable, enlightening postcolonial consideration of the soul, and what it means to search for fulfillment.