The Senegalese-French novelist David Diop and his translator Anna Moschovakis won the 2021 International Booker prize for At Night All Blood Is Black, about west African soldiers in the first world war. Set in 18th-century Senegal, Beyond the Door of No Return, superbly translated by Sam Taylor, fictionalises the real-life French naturalist Michel Adanson’s brush with the slave trade.
In Diop’s narrative, Adanson leaves his notebooks for his daughter Aglaé to find after his death in 1806. They describe his travels through Senegal some 50 years earlier. A village chief tells the botanist about his niece, Maram, who had been sold into slavery. Remarkably, she’d escaped that “impossible land… where, for slaves, there is no return” and found refuge in the Cape Verde peninsula. His curiosity piqued, Adanson sets off to find Maram with his guide, 15-year-old Ndiak, who teaches him Wolof.
