The Continent of Everything and Practically Nothing

A Togolese novel that delivers a rich, intimate portrait of a scholar whose life is inextricably bound to Africa.

For French ethnologist Maurice Boyer, Africa is more than a place—it’s a dream, a puzzle, a mirror reflecting his desires and doubts. His years of fieldwork in Tèdi, Togo, where he lived among the Tem people and tried to illuminate their customs and rituals, marked him profoundly. Who was a friend and who was a foe? Which stories were true and which were illusions? As the years pass and the roles of Aurélie, his wife, and Safi, his former student, come into sharper view, Boyer finds himself wrestling not only with his own choices but with the legacy of knowledge itself. 

In a novel framed as a profound postcolonial quest, Sami Tchak explores Africa’s rich, complex reality through this intimate story of a scholar wrestling with his own understanding of culture, knowledge, and history. The Continent of Everything and Practically Nothing grapples with whether assembling more data can truly capture the complexity of a continent, exposing how academic ambition, history, and emotion shape scholarship.