Dreams of Dakar, 1973: Reading Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo's "El sueño" with Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki Bouki

In 1973, the Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty and the Equatorial Guinean author Donato Ndongo Bidyogo created works of art that bear striking points in common. Mambéty's film Touki Bouki [Journey of the Hyena] (Wolof and French) and Ndongo's short story "El sueño" 'The Dream' (Spanish) do not share the same genre, language, or country of origin. Yet both works relate the tales of marginalized protagonists who seek to realize an elusive dream of material wealth and social triumph in Paris, France. Both works problematize seeming-opposite categories of being, including awake and asleep, self and other, Africans who live far from their birthplace and Africans who choose to remain. A comparative study of the two works yields a composite image of post-independence African zeitgeist of the early 1970s, particularly a sense of disillusionment shared by many among the generation born after World War II.