Comrade Papa

A Financial Times Best Book of 2024: Fiction in Translation

International Booker-nominated satirist GauZ’ returns with a panoramic journey into the colonization of the African interior.

Mourning the recent deaths of his parents, a young white man in nineteenth-century France joins a colonial expedition attempting to establish trading routes on the Ivory Coast and finds himself caught between factions who disagree on everything—except their shared loathing of the British.

A century later, a young Black boy born in Amsterdam gives his account, complete with youthful malapropisms, of his own voyage to the Ivory Coast, and his upbringing by his father, Comrade Papa, who teaches him to always fight "the yolk of capitalism."

In exuberant, ingenious prose, GauZ' superimposes their intertwined stories, looking across centuries and continents to reveal the long arc of African colonization.