Xala by Ousmane Sembène

early morning and at dusk, worked on the imaginations and simple minds of the local people. Aggressive, stunted trees, bristling with thorns, marked the boundaries of the fields. The paths met, separated and ran parallel to each other towards the villages and the wells. The majestic silk-cotton trees, with their crazy roots running along the ground, formed a succession of enclosures.
    The car turned off the tarred road and onto a dirt track. El Hadji wound up the windows. The winding track ran between a double hedge of ngeer trees. At the end of it they came to a small village. It was midday. People were asleep under a silk-cotton tree. Hearing the sound of the engine some looked up, wondering. The more daring approached it. The children admired and commented.
    Modu spoke to an elderly peasant with a pock-marked face and wearing a simple caftan. The peasant flung his arms about in all directions as he spoke, as if he couldn’t find his hands. Another peasant, a very tall man with a worn face, joined them. Modu returned to the car and spoke to El Hadji.
    â€˜Sereen Mada has gone to live in another village. To reach it we shall have to hire a cart.’
    â€˜What for?’ asked El Hadji, who had remained in the car.
    â€˜The village is in the middle of the plain. A car couldn’t get to it.’
    â€˜All right,’ agreed El Hadji, climbing out of the Mercedes and looking around him. He exchanged greetings with the villagers. He was subjected to a minute inspection. ‘It is someone important,’ he heard them saying. He was invited to take a seat on the tree-trunk that served as a work-bench.
    The man with the pock-marked face came back with a cart. The horse was extremely thin and had a brown coat covered with sores that had been smeared with blue. The driver invited the ‘boss’ to sit next to him. Modu sat behind, with his back to the direction in which they were going. After a while the driver began chatting to Modu. They found they had mutual acquaintances. The peasant hated the town because of all the machines. ‘It is a rhythm of madness,’ he said. Sereen Mada was the local celebrity. A man of knowledge. He only worked for ‘bosses’. In fact one of them had tried to get him to go to the town with him, to keep him there for his personal use. ‘Can you imagine such selfishness?’

    El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye had shooting pains in his head. He was wet through with perspiration. The midday sun poured its heat onto him. He had to keep wiping his face with his fine linen handkerchief. The waves of heat rose in a misty vapour to the empty sky, torturing his eyes that were unaccustomed to it.
    The horse went at a snail’s pace, encouraged by the driver who at every step it took announced:
    â€˜We haven’t much further to go.’
    Then, as they emerged from a ravine, they saw conical thatched roofs, grey-black with weathering, standing out against the horizon in the middle of the empty plain. Free-ranging, skinny cattle with dangerous-looking horns fenced with one another to get at what little grass there was. No more than silhouettes in the distance, a few people were busy around the only well.
    The driver of the cart was in familiar territory and greeted people as they passed. Sereen Mada’s house, apart from its imposing size, was identical in construction with all the others. It was situated in the centre of the village whose huts were arranged in a semi-circle, which you entered by a single main entrance. The village had neither shop nor school nor dispensary; there was nothing at all attractive about it in fact. Its life was based on the principles of community interdependence.
    They were received with the customary courtesy of this society, all the more so as his European dress meant that El Hadji was a stranger and a man of wealth. They were led into a hut which was unfurnished except for spotlessly clean mats laid on the ground. A second door