Camara Laye wrote The Dark Child while he was a student in France, to ease his homesickness by recalling his youth in West Africa. Laye was born January 1, 1929, in Kourassa, French Guinea, and became the eldest son of 12 children fathered by Camara Komady, a leading blacksmith in the region. At 15, Laye traveled to the colonial capital, Conakry, to study at a technical college, and four years later left his homeland on a scholarship to study in France. When his scholarship was not renewed, he found work in France. He took a job at the Simca auto factory and with the French railroad, pursuing his studies in night classes. It was during this period that Laye wrote The Dark Child: “Living in Paris, far from my native Guinea, far from my parents . . . I bore myself in thought a thousand times to my country, close to my people . . . and then, one day, I began to write” (Laye in King, p. 14). The resulting memoir recounts his youth from the early 1930s to the late 1940s. A seminal work in African literature, The Dark Child was the first to convey in French to European readers the experience of growing up in Malinke society in colonial Guinea.
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