Human Journeys and the Quest for Knowledge in African Writing

In Human Journeys and The Quest for Knowledge in African Writing, Adrien Pouille aims to expand the conversation on what human journeys may signify in the African context with several oral and modern narratives. As one of the main informants about African migration, popular journalism has propagated a traumatic and materialistic view of African temporal and spatial movements. Such a reductive conception of the African journeys can also be found on the continent, where leaving home, to the West in particular, may be viewed by many as a quest for nothing more than economic prosperity. Reading African journeys as distressed and financially motivated adventures contradicts the polysemic significance accorded to human journeys in the African narratives examined in this monograph. It also precludes a full understanding of what travelling may mean in the various cultures found in Africa. This highly original book seeks to address this lack of knowledge.