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Afterward Alfa goes out alone at night, captures German soldiers, guts them as Mademba was gutted, and brings back each man's severed hand still holding its rifle. He collects seven hands before his comrades and officers turn on him.
The colonial army deliberately cultivates a 'savage African' image, sending tirailleurs over the top screaming with machetes to terrify the enemy, and it praises that savagery while it serves the attack. When Alfa practices the same savagery on his own initiative and without orders, it becomes madness and sorcery in the eyes of his officers and comrades. Violence is judged by who controls it rather than by what it does, and the man shaped into the stereotype is punished for embodying it on his own terms.
Alfa comes to see his refusal to kill the dying Mademba as a failure of humanity disguised as obedience, the choice of a man who let external rules think for him. His later acts invert that failure: he tells his victims he will kill them when they plead to be released from their agony. Guilt over a mercy he denied is displaced onto strangers, so the moral lesson he learns becomes the engine of his atrocities.
The novel treats mourning as incorporation rather than separation: the bereaved takes the lost person inside himself until the boundary between the two selves dissolves. Alfa's narrating voice increasingly speaks with and for Mademba, and the fusion leaves it unclear whose consciousness is telling the story. Read this way, madness from grief is an identity that has made room for two. It is not simply a loss of reason.