4 ideas
Samba Diallo, a noble Diallobé boy devoted to his harsh Quranic teacher Thierno, who burns and beats him to discipline his faith, is sent to the French school after a clan council debates it, and later to Paris to study philosophy. In Paris his faith dries up into abstraction. When he returns home he cannot bring himself to pray at his dead teacher's grave, and the Fool, a traumatised veteran of Europe's wars, stabs him to death there.
The Most Royal Lady argues that the Diallobé must send their children to the foreign school even though it will kill in them what the elders love. The conquerors won by force rather than by being right, and a people that refuses their knowledge will stay defeated. Survival therefore requires deliberately sacrificing part of one's identity to acquire the victor's means, while knowing the cost cannot be controlled.
Colonial conquest runs on two instruments. The cannon compels bodies, and the school attracts minds. The school is the more durable weapon because it makes conquest permanent: the colonised come to desire the conqueror's forms of thought, so domination continues through their own consent after the violence stops.
Samba does not experience his two formations as two resources he can choose between; he says he has 'become the two' and finds no separate self left to do the choosing. In his case the mixture leaves him stranded rather than enriched, because each formation has unsettled the certainties of the other.