Scarlet Song does not ever attain the same level of artistry as Mariama Ba’s debut novel and Noma Award winner So Long a Letter. However, it is one of those books that you can’t help but admire; first for the conditions under which it was written (Mariama was aware that she was terminally ill when she wrote it), but ultimately for the ambition of the novel.

She uses the love story of Ousmane – a boy from the poor side of town made good, and Mireille – the daughter of a French diplomat who Ousmane meets in High School, to explore the conflicts of culture, colour and wealth that are the legacy of post-colonial Africa. Within the same oeuvre she also explores Negritude: the concept avidly championed by Senegal’s Senghor and, as she did so unforgettably in So Long a Letter, the treatment of women in society. Indeed, the weaknesses of this book stem precisely from the fact that Mariama Ba has internalised her culture’s conception of what a woman’s place should be and it crops up in the plot where it has no business. She is so keen to give Ousmane a virgin bride that she writes of Ouleymatou, “for years he had been the only man she found worthy of her virginity, jealously preserved for the awakening to the sound of the tom tom, the morning after her wedding night… she had always managed to sail intact through the troubled waters of desire, until her marriage.” Having written earlier about Ouleymatou’s husband “whose scratched face told all and sundry that his young wife had refused him conjugal rights,” we are left with a virgin well-versed in the arts of seduction. Tantalising, but unwieldy; Ousmane copulating with a virgin is hardly a matter of concern at this stage when larger issues are being played out in the plot.

Otherwise Ba is as observant on the intricacies of human relationships as always. From Mireille’s father’s concealed bigotry, to Ousmane’s mother’s resentment of the lack of power she has in his marriage, she handles human emotion with a sharp delicacy.

In the end, fraught with the pressures of their differences and the inflexibility of their approach to marriage, Ousmane and Mireille’s love affair nurtured from high school, through a long separation during university to eventual marriage in Paris and settlement in Dakar, unravels and leads to a shocking conclusion.

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"Her parents’ reaction did not surprise her… Between preaching the equality of all men and practising it there was an abyss fraught with peril, and they were not equipped to make this leap.”