The Continent of Everything and Practically Nothing (The Africa List) - Softcover

Tchak, Sami

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1803096322 ISBN 13: 9781803096322

Publisher: Seagull Books, 2026

Synopsis

A Togolese novel that delivers a rich, intimate portrait of a scholar whose life is inextricably bound to Africa.

For the French ethnologist Maurice Boyer, Africa isn't just a place; it’s a mirage, an enigma, a mirror reflecting his desires and doubts. The fieldwork he undertook in Tèdi, Togo, where he lived for years among the Tem people and tried to understand their customs and rituals, has left him with questions that have lingered: Who was a friend and who was a foe? Which stories were true and which were illusions? As decades pass and the roles of Aurélie, his wife, and Safi, his former student, begin to shift, Boyer finds himself wrestling not only with his own choices but with the legacy of knowledge itself.

Through the lens of this profound postcolonial quest, Sami Tchak explores Africa’s rich, complex reality through this intimate story of a scholar reconsidering his own understanding of culture, ethnology, and history. The Continent of Everything and Practically Nothing asks whether assembling more data can truly capture the complexity of a continent, and explores how academic ambition, history, and emotion shape how we understand the world, and how we live in it.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Togo in 1960, Sami Tchak is a celebrated novelist and essayist best known for his novel Hermina. Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator of French literature, including works by the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Dardenne brothers, the queer writers Jean Genet and Hervé Guibert, and the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza.

Edition details

• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1803096322
• ISBN 13: 9781803096322
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 290