La savane et la réserve dans les romans d’aventures écologiques pour enfants : l’imaginaire de la nature originelle au service d’une introduction au colonialisme

The topos of the virgin and wild sub-Saharan landscape has been conveyed by a long European literary tradition. While it gave rise to fantasies of conquest during the colonial era, the imaginary of an original African landscape is nowadays taken up in children's literature, through adventure novels that feature heroes protecting wild animals against human threats.This article shows to what extent the landscape topos of Edenic African nature serves in these ecological adventure novels as a starting point for an indirect critique of colonialism, and to what extent this critique is limited.