This epic - part history, part legend - is a great adventure story.

Written in the form of a diary, kept by the Cameroonian houseboy Toundi, this book looks at Toundi's innocence and his awe of the white world of his masters.

In 1947 the workers on the Dakar-Niger Railway came out on strike. Throughout this novel, written from the workers' perspective, the community social tensions emerge, and increase as the strike lengthens. The author's other novels include Xala and Black Docker .

On a Venetian night shortly before Christmas, a man is killed in a scuffle in Campo San Stefano. The closest witnesses to the event are the tourists who had been browsing the man's wares before his death. Officially termed a venditore ambulante or extracomunitario, the dead man was working as a vu cumpra, one of the Black Africans purveying goods.

A satire about the downfall of a businessman-polygamist who assumes the role of the colonialist in French-speaking Africa.