Ousmane Socé Diop's novel, Mirages de Paris, is not the first francophone African text to base its structure on intercontinental travel. That honour most likely belongs to Force-bonté, Bakary Diallo's autobiographical-inspired account of a Senegalese tirailleur published in 1926. However, whereas Force-bonté is largely acknowledged to be a panegyric to the French colonization of West Africa, Socé's text is crucial to establishing the fundamental link between travel and exile that informs the psychological drama of so many subsequent African accounts of journeys (to France, in particular, but also to other Western destinations). What is also especially unusual about Mirages de Paris is the identity of its travelling protagonist, Fara. As was already mentioned, where African journeys to the West are concerned, it is professional and domestic identities that tend to be highlighted and any affinity to the figure of the traveller is either ignored or underplayed. Fara, on the other hand, is not a soldier, civil servant, spouse, student or labourer. Instead, his journey to Paris takes place against the background of the 1931 Exposition Coloniale, an event one commentator has described as the apotheosis of French colonial history. The Exposition, to which Socé devotes only a brief chapter, is key to the novel's plot as it provides the setting for Fara's meeting with Jacqueline Bourciez, the young French woman who will eventually become his lover and the mother of his child.