them are thus exposed in their complex and multiple mutual complicities. 'Witness the splendor of its art - the true face of Africa in the grandiose empires of the MiddleAges, a society marked by wisdom, beauty, prosperity,order, nonviolence, and humanism, and it'shere that one must seek the true cradle of Egyptian civilization. Ironically, all this earns Shrobenius a two-fold benefit on his return home. He mystified his peoplewell enough to get them to raise him enthusiastically to a lofty Sorbonnical chair. He also exploitedthe sentimentality of the coons, who were only too pleased to hear from the mouth of a white manthat Africa was the womb of the world and the cradle of civilization. The ordinary blacks thus gladlydonated masks and art treasures by the tons to the acolyte of 'Shrobeniusology'. Ouologuem then goes on to precisely articulating the interconnections of Africanist mystificationswith tourism and the production, packaging, and marketing of African art works. An Africanist school harnessed to the vapors of magico religious cosmological, and mythicalsymbolism has thus been born: with the result that for three years men flocked to Nakem-..middlemen, adventurers, apprentices, bankers, politicians, salesmen, conspirators - supposedly'scientists,' but in reality enslaved sentries mounting guard before the Shrobeniusologicalmonument of Negro pseudo symbolism. Already it had become more than difficult to procure old masks, for Shrobenius and themissionaries had had the good fortune to snap them all up. And so Saif - had slapdash copiesburied by the hundredweight or sunk into ponds, lakes, marshes, and mud holes, to be exhumedlater on and sold at exorbitant prices to unsuspecting curio hunters. These three-year-old maskswere said to be charged with the weight of four centuries of civilization. Ouologuem in this way forcefully exposes the connections in the international system of artexchange, the international art world, and the way in which an ideology of disinterested aestheticvalue - the 'baptism' of 'Negro art' as 'aesthetic' meshes with the international commodification ofAfrican expressive culture which requires the manufacture of Otherness . [ Appiah, KwameAnthony] There is Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, a child of poverty who takes advantage of Frenchschooling and achieves academic success through advanced studies in France. There also heexperiences failure . He discovers the particularly inescapable long reach of Saif. On his returnhome his thoughts of a triumphant return were broken by his discovery that he and his countrywere again being manipulated by the ruling Saif. Some hope however comes from the brief concluding section 'Dawn'. Abbe Henry, the hunchbackpriest obsessed by the tragedy of the Blacks, half-crazed with the christian duty of love is humblybeautiful as the despair of a Christian soul is now a bishop. The last section consists almostentirely of a dialogue between Abbe Henry and Saif, both philosophical discourse and powerstruggle. This Saif appears vanquished, but Ouologuem reminds us: one cannot help recalling that Saif, mourned three million times, is forever reborn to historybeneath the hot ashes of more than thirty African republics,