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 T�di, 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 Aur�lie, 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 the Authors

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, including books by the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Dardenne brothers, the queer writers Jean Genet and Herv� Guibert, and the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza.

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