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The Lieutenant of Kouta is the first novel in Massa Makan Diabaté's award-winning trilogy. It tells the story, part tragicomic and part hagiographic, of an African lieutenant in the French Army who returns as a decorated hero from the battlefields of World War II to the town of Kouta. The novel offers a rich and nuanced representation of Mali on the brink of independence in the late 1950s; it is a tapestry of traditional Mandinka society and the French colonial apparatus, illustrating the dynamic interplay between the two. This text is, ultimately, a story of a man's transformation coinciding with that of his country.
About the author
Massa Makan Diabaté (1938-1988) was a Malian author and griot. His trilogy of novels--
Le lieutenant de Kouta, Le coiffeur de Kouta, and
Le boucher de Kouta--won the 1987 Grand prix international de la Fondation Léopold Sédar Senghor.
Shane Auerbach is a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a visiting instructor at Carleton College. His research focuses on microeconomic theory and industrial organization.
David Yost received his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His short stories have appeared in more than thirty magazines, including
Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and
The Sun, and he is an editor of the anthology
Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy.
Summary
Chérif Keïta and Shane Auerbach, it tells the story, part tragicomic and part hagiographic, of an African lieutenant in the French Army who returns as a decorated hero from the battlefields of Europe to Kouta, a fictionalized version of the author’s own birthplace, the Malian town of Kita.
