Bâ's narrative work of 'recomposition' relies upon an epistemological assumption of coherence very similar to that used by the author to reconstruct the history of Fulfulde Empire in Macina:

Au moment de l'écriture de l'ouvrage, je dus procéder à un nécessaire travail de montage et de coordination des différents témoignages et introduire partout où c'était nécessaire des textes de liaison, afin de donner à l'ensemble du récit un enchaînement cohérent. Ce fut là, à part le travail de traduction et de mise en forme, bien sûr, l'essentiel de mon apport personnel, ainsi que, par endroits, les descriptions des lieux. (Bâ 1992: 361).

[When I was writing this book, I had to carry out to an essential work of montage and coordination of the different testimonies, and also introduce wherever it was necessary linking texts in order to give to the whole narration a coherent structure. That was, apart from the work of translation and imposition, of course, the bulk of my personal contribution, as well as, here and there, descriptions of places]

Such an assumption implies a theoretical re-elaboration or translation of the collected oral material into unified yet non totalitarian whole. This material is mostly composed of contradictory testimonies – be they those of Macinankes and Toucouleur, or those of the detractors and defenders of Wangrin – needing to be objectively assessed. The requirement of objectivity thereby provides a conciliatory solution to the narrative conflicts of interpretation. Besides, Bâ's strong claim for historical objectivity invalidates all attempts to reduce L'Étrange destin de Wangrin to a mere novel. Such a mistake can be explained by two reasons: firstly, western thought is unable to envision any continuity between the real and supernatural worlds; secondly, the ethnographer's discipline is confused with the author's creative genius. However, it is not possible to disconnect the text from the network of its underlying testimonies in order to 'capitalize' it solely in the phenomenological consciousness of the author. In other words, the narrative space of L'Étrange destin de Wangrin is conclusively Bâ's fertile imagination; it is, first and foremost, the intersubjective network of oral testimonies from which the novel proceeds.

Bâ's narrative gesture and Wangrin's ruse come from the same 'microscopic' knowledge of both the coloniser and colonised's discourses and territories. Such a knowledge contrasts with the coloniser's macroscopic one whose aim is to extend, in a narcissistic way, its own political, economical, sexual, etc, domination. In contrast to the latter, the former rely on an immanent knowledge of Africa informed by an intimate perception of its inner complexity. This understanding can be related to that of the "traditionalist" who, according to Bâ, is: