President Koyaga is a master hunter… and a dictator of the worst kind. During a purificatory ceremony in six vigils, a griot of the hunters and his answering machine tell him his own life, all his life, without omitting the parts of shadow and blood. Koyaga was born in the tribe of naked men. He fought in the Indochina war. Then he took the head of the Gulf Republic by using witchcraft and assassination. Accompanied by his damned soul Maclédio, who saw him as his man of destiny, he traveled through Cold War Africa, taking lessons from his colleagues in despotism. It will hardly be difficult to recognize in the passage Houphouët-Boigny, Sékou Touré, Bokassa, Mobutu… to speak only of the non-living. Back home, thanks to the wonderful powers conferred on him by his mother's meteorite and his marabout's Koran, he triumphs over all his enemies, thwarts all plots. Until the day of the last conspiracy when, passing himself off as dead, he loses track of the mother and the marabout ...
 With devastating humor and a singular power of evocation, the story mixes men and wild beasts in a fierce struggle, combines tale with historical chronicle and overturns many received ideas about the close relationship between magic and politics. global.
 Ahmadou Kourouma was born in 1927 in Ivory Coast and died in 2003 in Lyon. He received the 1999 Inter Book Prize for Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Beasts and the 2000 Renaudot Prize for Allah is Not Obliged.