Latin Mottos (Placards) Symbol Analysis

The prescience and historical irony of the various Latin mottos and placards that Salim encounters symbolize the dangers of ignoring the past and history’s tendency to repeat itself. When Salim first arrives in the town at the bend in the river, he comes across a placard beneath a statue by the town’s docks engraved with the Latin words “miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi,” which Father Huismans later translates to mean “he approves of the mingling of the peoples and their bonds of union.” The motto is appropriate, as the town was a trade hub and used to attract a diverse range of people, converging to trade ideas and goods. But as Father Huismans goes on to explain, the phrase is actually a reversal of a line from the Roman epic poem The Aeneid, wherein the hero Aeneas intends to settle in Africa but is warned away by the gods who disapprove of said “mingling.” The motto was therefore revised to serve the interests of European colonists who settled the area, despite its original meaning almost foretelling the eventual collapse of colonial interests in Africa as a whole. Likewise, the motto for the lycée is “semper aliquid novi,” meaning “out of Africa, always something new,” which seems to promote the President’s idea of the “new African.” Yet ironically, by the end of the novel, the President only succeeds in recreating the tyrannical and unstable conditions of colonial Africa. This is in part due to his willful ignorance and appropriation of Africa’s history in the pursuit of power, echoed in the appropriation of this Latin axiom—after all, its tone can also be read sardonically, to indicate cyclicality rather than progress. Taken together, the mottos ironically foreshadow the initial failure of postcolonial Africa and symbolize how those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it.