The paper responds to a challenge that Saidou Moussa Ba’s co-author Alessandro Micheletti set to prospective students of La promessa di Hamadi: to go back to Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s classic novel L’aventure ambiguë in order to search for a clarification of Ba’s tale. Both novels tell the tale of a main protagonist who journeys to a European land and has to develop narratives for survival. I compare the two journeys and the two narratives as suggested, and argue that Kane’s Samba arrives at his own theory of survival for the cultural hybrid before being called home by his father. He refuses to blindly follow tradition, but he is exterminated by a crazy culturalist. Similarly, Ba’s Hamadi reveals that he has also experienced some anguish regarding the loss of his “self” whilst continually embroiled in a “foreign culture” but has developed a theory of chameleonism to combat this, only to be assassinated by an Italian mafioso. Thus I argue that La promessa di Hamadi translates the concerns of a 1960s African novel onto the terrain of contemporary Europe, insisting on the desire for creative cultural models by young immigrants and the difficulty in surviving via these. I contend that the moral of La promessa di Hamadi could be that the chameleon model stands, as long as it is imagined on both “sides”, by citizens and by immigrants. Ba ends Hamadi’s story by wishing there were more room for chameleons: a damning critique of the state of hospitality in 1990s Italy.