The period immediately prior to and following African independence has been identified as key to the development of African textualizations of travel. From the 1930s, increasing numbers of francophone sub-Saharan Africans began to travel to the metropolitan centre, and this journey would form a central structural device and thematic preoccupation in several major texts from the 1950s and 1960s. However, Un Nègre à Paris, Bernard Dadié's account of his July 1956 trip to Paris, and also later accounts of trips to New York and Rome differ considerably from other key texts of the intercontinental travel experience of this period. In general, novels such as Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'Aventure ambiguë, Ousmane Sembene's Le Docker noir and, as we have seen, Aké Loba's Kocoumbo, l'étudiant noir seem to retain a fundamental connection with the earlier Mirages de Paris by positing as central to the African encounter with Europe experiences of racism, loneliness and alienating cultural encounters. Certainly, Dadié does not deny the significance of ethnicity to his travel experience and is not immune to the racism encountered by other African travellers. However, the Ivorian author's narratives are dominated by an unmistakable light-heartedness and genuine sense of wonder at the traveller's discovery of a ‘new’ culture.

If the period mentioned above is crucial to understanding a particular development in African accounts of intercontinental travel, this can also be explained, of course, by the socio-political context of impending or recently achieved independence.