UNESCO Courier, Jan, 1992
Amadou Hampate Ba, the man who was known as the “living memory of Africa”, was born into an aristocratic Peul family in Mali at the dawn of the twentieth century—he liked to say that he was “one of the eldest sons of the century” —and was a member of UNESCO's Executive Board between 1962 and 1970. He died on 15 May 1991 at Abidjan (Cote d'Ivoire).
Some people at UNESCO still cherish the memory of this warm-hearted, smiling man, who always wore a full-length embroidered garment and was addressed by many as “Papa”. The saying with which he will always be associated, that “In Africa, when an old man dies, a library disappears” —has become so famous that it is sometimes quoted as an African proverb.
Perhaps few still remember the occasion on which it was uttered. It was in 1962, at a meeting at which the rescue of the great pharaonic monuments of Nubia, threatened by the waters of the Aswan High Dam, was being discussed. After expressing his pleasure that UNESCO was endeavouring to save artistic treasures of universal value, Amadou Hampate Ba explained that other monuments existed in Africa that were just as precious for the cultural heritage of mankind, but were unfortunately far more fragile and perishable. These monuments were the great repositories of ancestral African lore who were not being replaced and whose knowledge would probably die with them. “In sixty years,” he said, “the Nubian stone monuments, even if water-logged, will still be there, but our last great 'illiterate scholars' will have gone for ever, and their knowledge with them.”
Throughout his time as a member of the Executive Board he pressed for the systematic collection of these oral teachings and for the rescue of African oral traditions, not only because of their cultural value but also because they enshrine a vast sum of historical, religious, philosophical, scientific and literary knowledge. He liked to quote this phrase by his philosophical master, the Sufi mystic Tierno Bokar: “Writing is one thing and knowledge is another. Writing is the photographing of knowledge, but it is not knowledge itself. Knowledge is a light which is within man. It is the heritage of all the ancestors knew and have transmitted to us as seed, just as the mature baobab is contained in its seed.” Amadou Hampate Ba was one of those who made the greatest contribution, notably at UNESCO, to winning world-wide recognition for the cultures of Africa.
It is less well known that Amadou Hampate Ba often proved to be an outstanding conciliator on UNESCO's Executive Board. He would defuse tense situations by telling an apposite African story in which his audience could recognize themselves. He was capable of engineering a unanimous vote when a few moments before the divergence between different veiwpoints had seemed insurmountable.
Willingness to hear and respect the other person's point of view, a desire to seek mutual understanding through dialogue, hatred of intolerance-these were the outstanding characteristics of Amadou Hampate Ba. He was a great African humanist, or rather, simply a great humanist, since he transcended frontiers: “When we are tuned in to the universal,” he said, “we shall have earned the right to call ourselves human beings and be worthy of our place in the concert of nations.”
Nothing in his early life seemed to earmark him for a role in international affairs. In childhood he received a traditional education, Islamic and African, Peul and Bambara. His automatic entry into French education at the age of twelve took him along a new path. Who knows where it would have led if, at a time when he was preparing to enter the William Ponty college of education on the island of Gorée (Senegal), his mother had not ordered him to go no further with his studies in French, “which had gone on quite long enough”. He bowed to her wishes and refused to join the pupils who were leaving for Gorée, with the result that the colonial authorities sent him to distant Ouagadougou, where he occupied a junior post a “temporary writer employed on a highly precarious basis.” Nevertheless, he achieved advancement. By 1933 he was senior secretary at the town hall of Bamako and occasional interpreter to the Governor of French West Africa.
His career took a new turn in 1942 when he was appointed to a post at the French Institute of Black Africa where he worked with the founder of the Institute, Theodore Monod. Ever since he was a child, he had collected oral traditions wherever he had gone, but now he could do so his heart's content as part of long-term ethnological, historical and linguistic research in the field. He published many articles and a longer study, L'Empire peul du Macina, a work entirely based on the oral tradition.
In 1951, Theodore Monod obtained for him a UNESCO scholarship which enabled him to spend a year in France, where he established firm friendships with scholars such as Marcel Griaule, Germaine Dieterlen and Louis Massignon, who specialized in African and Oriental studies. Subsequently, he returned to France each year and gave a series of lectures at the Sorbonne on Peul culture and civilization. With Germaine Dieterlen he published Koumen (1961), a major anthology of Peul initiatory stories.
In 1958, when Mali became independent, he founded the Institut des Sciences Humaines at Bamako. In 1960 he represented his country at UNESCO's General Conference and in 1962 was elected to UNESCO's Executive Board. In the same year he became Mali's ambassador to Cote d'Ivoire and remained in this post as long as his country, which had broken with Senegal when the Federation of Mali broke up, needed access to the sea via the port of Abidjan. Four years later he resigned to devote himself entirely to his mission as “a man of cultural and religious dialogue”.
He began to publish a flow of works, saving from oblivion some of the finest examples of Peul oral literature including Kaidara, L'Eclat de la grande étoile, Petit Bodiel, Njeddo Dewal, mère de la calamité, and La Poignée de poussière (contes et récits du Mali). In 1974 he was awarded the Grand Prix Littéraire d'Afrique Noire for his most famous work, L'Etrange destin de Wangrin. He also catalogued his vast collection of manuscripts, the outcome of half a century's research into African oral traditions. When they have been reproduced on microfiche and a number of works relating to them have been published, they will be made available for consultation by researchers at libraries in Paris and in Africa.
The death of Amadou Hampate Ba is a great loss for the world of African culture and for all those who knew and loved the man. However, his ideas live on in his works and, remarkably, in his memoirs, the first volume of which, recently published under the title Amkoullel l'enfant peul (Actes-Sud, Paris, 1991) is a unique account of colonial Africa at the beginning of this century as seen through the eyes of a child.