Yambo Ouologuem

On 22 August 1940, Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem was born in Bandiagara. His first novel, 'Le devoir de violence' (English: Bound to Violence, 1968), won the Prix Renaudot.

Yambo Ouologuem was born an only son in an aristocratic Malian family in 1940 in Bandiagara, the main city in the Dogon region of Mali (then a part of French Soudan). His father was a prominent landowner and school inspector. He learned several African languages and gained fluency in French, English, and Spanish. After matriculating at a Lycée in the capital city of Bamako, he went to Paris in 1960, where he studied sociology, philosophy and English at Lycée Henry IV and from 1964 to 1966 he taught at the Lycée de Clarenton in suburban Paris, while studying for a doctorate in sociology at the École Normale Supérieure.

His major work, Le devoir de violence (1968), resulted in controversy and a continuing academic debate over charges of plagiarism. In 1969, he published out a volume of biting essays, Lettre à la France nègre as well as an erotic novel, Les mille et une bibles du sexe, published under the pseudonym of Utto Rodolph. After the plagiarism controversy over Le devoir de violence, Ouologuem returned to Mali in the late seventies. Until 1984, he was the director of a youth centre in the small town of Sévaré near Mopti in central Mali, where he wrote and edited a series of children's textbooks. He is reputed to have led a secluded Islamic life as a marabout until his death on 14 October 2017 in Sévaré, aged 77.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Selected publications

Les mille et une bibles du sexe / Yambo Ouologuem. - La Roque d'Anthéron : Vents d'ailleurs, 2015

In search of Yambo Ouologuem / Christopher Wise. - Vlaeberg, South Africa : Chimurenga Magazine, [2011]

Où est l'Eldorado? / Jean-Frédéric de Hasque. - [Brussel] : Michigan Films, [2009]

The Yambo Ouologuem reader / Yambo Ouologuem; Christopher Wise. - Trenton NJ : Africa World Press, [2008]

Yambo Ouologuem : postcolonial writer, Islamic militant / Christopher Wise. - Boulder, Col. : Lynne Rienner, 1999

The Penguin book of modern African poetry / Gerald Moore; Ulli Beier. - New York : Penguin, 1998

Poems of black Africa / Wole Soyinka. - London [etc.] : Heinemann Educational, 1975

Lettre à la France nègre / Yambo Ouologuem. - Paris, 1969

Le devoir de violence : roman / Yambo Ouologuem. - Paris : Éditions du Seuil, [1968]

Yambo Ouologuem, The Duty of Violence, Part One / Lecture by Christopher Wise, 25 November 2020

Timeline of Malian novelists via DBpedia and Wikidata