Amadou Hampâté Bâ

Mali (1900–1991)

Writes in French

Amadou Hampâté Bâ was born in 1900 in Bandiagara (Mali). He is often evoked as the sage of African literature. Hampaté Bâ possessed an in-depth knowledge of Malian and West African cultures, coupled with training in colonial school. The descendant of a powerful Fulani family, he was initiated into an ancestral cultural heritage. He also attended the Koranic school of Tierno Bokar, to whom he would later dedicate a book, before joining the “Ecole des otages,” which trained colonial auxiliaries from noble families. He was assigned to work in Ouagadougou and other cities where he began to collect oral histories. The conservation and transmission of this heritage was the mission of Hampâté Bâ’s whole life. First, at the French Institute of Black Africa in Dakar with Théodore Monod, then at the Institute of Human Sciences in Bamako after the independence of Mali in 1960, he used the modern tools of history and ethnology to the benefit of African cultures. He also was elected to the Executive Board of UNESCO. There, he pronounced his famous phrase to defend oral heritage: “in my country, every time an old man dies, a whole library has burned down.”. Albeit presented as mere transcription of traditional tales, Hampâté Bâ’s works have a great literary quality. In addition to his essays on African culture (L’Empire peul du Macina, Aspect de la civilisation africaine), he wrote numerous collections of tales, and novels such as L’étrange destin de Wangrin, awarded the Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire in 1974. His memoirs, completed shortly before his death in 1991, were published posthumously in two volumes (Amkoulel l’enfant peul and Oui mon commandant!).