Violence and the Wandering Motif in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas obligé and Alex la Guma’s A Walk in the Night

Abstract

This article studies the impact of violence on characters’ wandering in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas obligé and Alex la Guma’s A Walk in the Night. After passing in review scholars’ position on violence and journey in fiction, it analyses first how  in Allah n’est pas obligé,  an orphaned child searching for an aunt to take care of him  embarks on wanderings in war-torn countries and gets dehumanised in the process. It then examines how, in A Walk in the Night, apartheid leaves characters from both the black and the white races unsettled in their prison-like District Six. The differences observed  are only  superficial because, in the main, the two novels meet on the feeling of loss and the aspiration for change which violence instils on characters and which is expressed physically by the latter’s wanderings.

Keywords: violence, war, journey, child soldier, apartheid, dehumanization