Background

Amadou Hampate Ba was born in 1900 to an aristocratic Fula family in Bandiagara. After his father's death, he was adopted by his mother's second husband, Tidjani Amadou Ali Thiam of the Toucouleur ethnic group.

Education

From the time of his youth, Mr. Ba was a student and disciple of an extraordinary Malian Sufi master, Tierno Bokar. Later Amadou Ba wrote a book about his teacher Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar: Le sage de Bandiagara, which has finally been translated into English.

In 1915, he ran away from school and rejoined his mother at Kati, where he resumed his studies.

Career

Ba Amadou started to work in the colonial administration in Burkina Faso in 1922. He held several posts and worked there until 1932. In 1933 Ba Amadou took six months' leave in order to visit his spiritual leader Tierno Bokar. Then he worked for ten years in the colonial administration in Bamako. Ba Amadou spent decades researching and recording Fula history, culture, and oral tradition. In 1942, he was appointed to the IFAN, French Institute of Black Africa in Dakar, where he made ethnological surveys. Ba Amadou traveled throughout West Africa to gather information about local stories and customs. Ba Amadou assembled a vast personal archive that he would draw from throughout his decades-long writing career. In 1955 he published his first book L’Empire peul de Macina.

In 1951, he was eventually named to the UNESCO executive council. In 1960, Ba Amadou founded the Institute of Human Sciences in Bamako and became Mali’s ambassador to Côte d’Ivoire. He also made a contribution to the establishment of a unified system for the transcription of African languages in 1966. In his early career, he moved to the Marcory suburb of Abidjan, where he worked on classifying the archives of West African oral tradition. He published his famous novel The Fortunes of Wangrin in 1973.

Achievements

• Ba Amadou was known as Malian diplomat and author of the second half of the twentieth century. His fiction and non-fiction books in French are widely respected as sources of information and insight on West African history, religion, literature, culture, and life. Ba Amadou made a significant contribution to the establishment of a unified system for the transcription of African languages
  
  His book L’Etrange destin de Wangrin (The Fortunes of Wangrin) won the Grand Prix de Littérature d’Afrique Noire in 1974 and was translated in English in 1987.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar

    (This easy-to-read book tells the story of Tierno Bokar (1...)

    1980
  • The Fortunes of Wangrin

    (Translated by Aina Pavolini Taylor with an Introduction b...)

    1987
  • L'empire peul du Macina

    (By Amadou Hampate Ba.)

    1984
  • Kaidara

    (By Amadou Hampate Ba.)

    1988

Views

Quotations: "In Africa each time an old person dies, it’s a library that burns down".

Membership

Amadou Hampate Ba was a member of UNESCO's executive board from 1962-1970.

• The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization , Paris

  1962 - 1970

Connections

Amadou Ba wasn't married and had no children.

foster-father:

Tidjani Amadou Ali Thiam

References

• African Francophone Writing: A Critical Introduction African writing in the Francophone literary world explores the work of important classic and contemporary African writers from the 1950s to the present who, until recently, have received little critical attention.
  1996
• Faces of Islam in African Literature
  1991
• African Novels and the Question of Orality The search for oral origins in African literature is a quest for African authenticity. In a critique and revision of the conceptual category of orality as it has been understood and used by scholars, Julien stresses the transformation of narrative genres as an index of sociopolitical relations and authorial vision.
  1992