This tale romances the adventures between 1900 and 1935 of a friend of the author, double figure, courageous and sly adventurer, unscrupulous adversary and magnanimous winner, who clears his way to fortune as long as it does not turn, in French West Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. To draw this portrait, the author has combined the rigor of Malian oral tradition and contemporary methods of ethnography.