In effect, he had three villas and three wives, but where was his real — Ousmane Sembène

"Today, I will bring back something to eat."

"It is worth knowing something about the life led by urban polygamists. It could be called geographical polygamy, as opposed to rural polygamy, where all the wives and children live together in the same compound. In the town, since the families are scattered, the children have little contact with their father. Because of his way of life the father must go from house to house, villa to villa, and is only there in the evenings, at bedtime. He is therefore primarily a source of finance, when he has work. The mother has to look after the childrens education, so academic achievement is often very poor."

"In our country, this so-called gentry, imbued with their role as master—a role which began and ended with fitting out and mounting the female—sought no elevation, no delicacy in their relations with their partners. This lack of communication meant they were no better than stallions for breeding. El Hadji was as limited, short-sighted, and unintelligent as any of his kind."

"I told you yesterday, Rama, that I couldn’t do anything more for you, or for any of the striker’s families."

"Today, for the first time in three months since he had slapped her on the afternoon of his wedding, they had had a serious conversation. Rama had been the only one who dared oppose the marriage. Pity she was a girl. He would have been able to make something of her had she been a boy."

"Just as nature re-imposes its life on ruins with small tufts of grass, the ancestral atavism of fetishism was being reawakened in El Hadji."