It weds the oralculture of his unlettered mother (the dedicatee of all his books) to an omnivorous bibliophilia encouraged by his stepfather, a hotel receptionist in Pointe-Noire on the Atlantic coast.
But it's a measure of the dominance of oralculture over the printed word both here and in the rest of Africa that Ivory Coast's leading book shop chain says it's only sold four thousand copies of Houphouet Boigny's Imaginary Plots.
They bear testimony to the transformation of an essentially oral southern African culture, through the assimilation of the Portuguese language and its repercussion on both Portugal and Brazil.