Summary Of African Prose Xala By Sembene Ousmane

IJMB Literature Xala By Sembene Ousmane

The book opens with a meeting with Senegalese businessmen celebrating their independence from colonialism. One of the men, El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye (“El Hadji”), invited the others to his wedding party later that day. This wedding is to be his third, earning El Hadji the traditional distinction of “captain,” a polygamist status that indicates wealth and success.

Before he goes to the house of his third wife to celebrate, however, he needs to pick up his other two wives, who live in their own villas with money-hungry children. His first wife, Adja, is a more conservative and religious woman who respects local Senegalese traditions, but his second wife, Oumi, is a more “modern” woman who admires foreign customs and the French language. Both women are extremely jealous of each other, and they are each jealous of El Hadji’s third wife.

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El Hadji’s third wedding was arranged by Yay Bineta, an aunt of the bride (a relation also known as Badyen). Unable to find a husband of her own due to the fact that she was twice widowed (local traditionalists have thus marked her as a very unlucky woman, destined to claim a third victim), she manipulated El Hadji over a long period of time until he eventually was coerced into marrying her niece, N’Gone, an uneducated yet beautiful woman who otherwise would not have been able to provide for her family.

IJMB Literature Xala By Sembene Ousmane

After the party, when it is time for husband and wife to proceed to the nuptial chamber, Yay Bineta asks El Hadji to perform some traditional rituals to boost his potency. El Hadji, however, declines as he does not believe in supernatural hocus-pocus. The next morning, El Hadji confesses to the Badyen that he could not perform as expected, and word soon begins to spread of El Hadji’s Xala (meaning impotence).

Humiliated by being the talk of the entire town, El Hadji concludes that one of his other wives put a curse on him out of jealousy. He suspects that his second wife Oumi is behind the curse, but he cannot find any hard evidence. Trying to find a cure to the ailment plaguing him, he visits a range of healers and neglects his business. One of the seers discovers that someone close to him cursed him. Meanwhile, El Hadji grows more and more isolated and skittish, neglecting his family and failing to be mentally present in any of his various interactions. Eventually, El Hadji runs out of money and is unable to provide for his wives and employees.


With the help of his driver, however, he finds a healer named Sereen Mada who lifts the curse. Despite this momentary salvation, after the check he gives to Sereen Mada bounces, the healer restores the curse. Eventually, the other businessmen expel him from the Chamber of Commerce in an attempt to save their reputation, since El Hadji has defaulted on a wide variety of loans and failed to pay back the National Grain Board for some rice he had earlier purchased and resold. Forsaken by his colleagues and wives, El Hadji is eventually left even more isolated than he initially found himself when afflicted with Xala.

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