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LITERATURE / AFRICAN THOUGHT
DOCUMENTARY DOSSIER
Les Gardiens du Temple
From the subject to the postcolonial state
Mérisphère — 6 October 2026
KEY REFERENCE1995
The second novel shifts towards the independent state and its elites part of the question opened by Ambiguous Adventure.
The coloniser is no longer at the centre. The state is independent; elites trained in the modern school must govern societies whose forms of legitimacy do not always coincide with those of inherited institutions.
Two trajectories
| Jérémie Laskol | As the first president of the young Republic, he embodies the possible distance between a Westernised elite and part of the society it governs. |
| Salif Bâ | A Muslim Fulani, agricultural engineer and later governor, he brings acquired knowledge into contact with local knowledge and realities. |
| 2013 | Kane explicitly links Salif Bâ to Samba Diallo and describes another possible outcome. |
| Mandela | Kane associates Nelson Mandela with Guardians of the Temple and calls him a “guardian of the temple”. |
Knowledge in public action
The problem is no longer only how an individual remains himself after receiving the knowledge of the other. It concerns the way that knowledge enters public action without making the ruler a stranger to the society upon which he acts.
Mandela in Kane’s reading
Asked in December 2013, a few days after Nelson Mandela’s death, Kane chose Guardians of the Temple to interpret his path: study, political struggle, exercise of power, departure from the presidency and stature as a “national conscience”.
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