Amadou Hampâté Bâ

Amadou Hampâté Bâ (January or February 1900 or 1901 in Bandiagara, Mali - May 15, 1991 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast was a Malian writer and ethnologist.

Contents

1 Biography

2 Bibliography

3 Quotes

4 Links

Biography

Amadou Hampâté Bâ was born to an aristocratic Peul family in Bandiagara, the largest city in Dogon territory and the ancient capital of the Macina Empire. After his father's death, he was adopted by his mother's second husband, Tidjani Amadou Ali Thiam of the Toucouleur ethnic group. He first attended the Qur'anic school run by Tierno Bokar , un dignitaire de la confrérie tidjaniyya, then was transferred to a French school at Bandiagara, then to one at Djenné. In 1915, he ran away from school and rejoined his mother at Kati, where he resumed his studies.

In 1921, he turned down entry into the école normale in Gorée. As a punishment, the governor appointed him to Ouagadougou with the capactiy of a "essentialy precarious and revocable temporary writer. From 1922 to 1932, he filled several posts in the colonial administration in Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso and from 1932 to 1942 in Bamako. In 1933, he took a six month leave to visit Tierno Bokar , his spiritual leader.

In 1942, he was appointed to the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) in Dakar thanks to the benevolence of Théodore Monod , its director. At IFAN, he made ethnological surveys and collected traditions. For 15 years he devoted himself to research, which would later lead to the redaction of his work "L'Empire peul de Macina". In 1951, he obtained a UNESCO grant, allowing him to travel to Paris and meet with intellectuals from "Africanist" circles , notably Marcel Griaule.

With Mali's independance in 1960, Bâ found the Institue of Human Sciences in Bamako, and represented his country at the UNESCO general conferences. In 1962, he was elected to UNESCO's Executive Council, and in 1966 he helped establish a unified system for the transcription of African languages.

His term in the Executive Council ended in 1970, and he devoted the remaining years of his life to research and writing. He moved to Abidjan, and worked on classifying the archives of West African oral tradition that he had accumulated throughout his lifetime, as well as writing his memoirs (Amkoullel l’enfant peul and Oui mon commandant!, both published posthumously).

Bibliography

L’Empire peul du Macina (1955, new edition in 1984)
Vie en enseignement de Tierno Bokar, le sage de Bandiagara (1957, rewritten in 1980)
Kaïdara, peul tale (1969)
L’étrange destin du Wangrin (1973, grand prix de littérature d’Afrique noire 1974)
L'Éclat de la grande étoile (1974)
Jésus vu par un musulman (1976)
Petit Bodiel (conte peul) et version en prose de Kaïdara (1977)
Njeddo Dewal mère de la calamité (1985, peul fantasy tale)
La poignée de poussière, contes et récits du Mali (1987)
Amkoullel, l’enfant peul (mémoires I, 1991) and Oui mon commandant ! (mémoires II, 1994) were published posthumously

Quotes

En Afrique, quand un vieillard meurt, c’est une bibliothèque qui brûle. — "In Africa, when an old man dies, it's a library burning." 1960 at l'UNESCO.

Les peuples de race noire n'étant pas des peuples d'écriture ont développé l'art de la parole d'une manière toute spéciale. Pour n'être pas écrite, leur littérature n'en est pas moins belle. Combien de poèmes, d'épopées, de récits historiques et chevaleresques, de contes didactiques, de mythes et de légendes au verbe admirable se sont ainsi transmis à travers les siècles, fidèlement portés par la mémoire prodigieuse des hommes de l'oralité, passionnément épris de beau langage et presque tous poètes ! 1985. — "The people of Black race, as they are not peoples [with a tradition of written literature], have developped the art of speech in a most special manner. While it is not written, their literature is not less beautiful. How many poems, epics, historic and chilvalrous narratives, didatic tales, myths and legends of egregious [literary style] have so been transmitted through centuries, carried by the prodigious memory of the men with an [oral tradition's], passionately in love with beautiful language and almost all poets."

Je suis un diplômé de la grande université de la Parole enseignée à l’ombre des baobabs. — "I graduated from the great university of the Spoken Word taught in the shade of baobab trees."