Amadou Hampâté Bâ

Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1901 – 15 May 1991) was a Malian writer, historian and ethnographer of the Fula people, born at Bandiagara in what was then French Sudan. ^{1 2}

As a boy he was formed by two schools at once: the Qur'anic school of Tierno Bokar, a dignitary of the Tijaniyyah Sufi brotherhood whose disciple he remained for life, and the French colonial classroom. ^{1 3}

He devoted his career to collecting, transcribing and defending the oral traditions of West Africa, first at the French Institute of Black Africa in Dakar and then in independent Mali, and he carried that cause into UNESCO, where his saying that the death of an old man is the burning of a library became famous around the world. ¹

Bâ was born into an aristocratic Fula family at Bandiagara, the largest town of the Dogon country and the former capital of the precolonial Masina Empire, at a time when the area formed part of French Sudan within French West Africa. ¹

After his father's death he was adopted by his mother's second husband, Tidjani Amadou Ali Thiam, of the Toucouleur people. ^{1 3}

He first attended the Qur'anic school run by Tierno Bokar, a dignitary of the Tijaniyyah brotherhood, then transferred to a French school at Bandiagara and then to one at Djenné. ¹

In 1915 he ran away from school and rejoined his mother at Kati, where he resumed his studies. ¹

In 1921 he refused entry to the école normale at Gorée, and as a punishment the colonial governor posted him to Ouagadougou in a clerk's role he later described as that of an "essentially precarious and revocable temporary writer". ¹

From 1922 to 1932 Bâ held a series of posts in the colonial administration in Upper Volta, and from 1932 to 1942 he served in Bamako. ¹

In 1933 he took six months' leave to visit Tierno Bokar, his spiritual leader — the teacher of his childhood, to whom he returned across his life. ^{1 3}

In 1942, thanks to the director Théodore Monod, he was appointed to the Institut Français d'Afrique Noire (IFAN) in Dakar, where for fifteen years he made ethnological surveys and collected the traditions of the region; that research later produced his historical study L'Empire peul du Macina (1955). ^{1 3}

In 1951 a UNESCO grant took him to Paris, where he moved in the Africanist circles around Marcel Griaule. ¹

When Mali became independent in 1960, Bâ founded the Institute of Human Sciences in Bamako and represented his country at UNESCO's general conferences. ^{1 3}

In 1962 he was elected to UNESCO's Executive Board, on which he served until 1970, and in 1966 he helped establish a unified system for the transcription of African languages. ^{1 3}

His most famous words belong to this campaign: in his 1960 address to the UNESCO General Conference he declared that he considered the death of each traditionalist "the burning of an unexploited cultural fund", and the better-known formulation — that in Africa, when an old man dies, a library burns — emerged in a 1962 exchange at the Executive Board. ¹

In 1971 he moved to Marcory, in Abidjan, to classify the archives of oral tradition he had accumulated over a lifetime and to write his memoirs, Amkoullel, l'enfant peul (1991) and Oui mon commandant! (1994), both published after his death. ¹

His historical and ethnographic works include L'Empire peul du Macina (1955), on the Fula empire of Macina, and Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar, le sage de Bandiagara (1957, rewritten 1980), the life and teaching of his master, published in English as A Spirit of Tolerance. ^{1 3}

His tales and literary works include Kaïdara, récit initiatique peul (1969), a Fula initiatory tale; L'étrange destin du Wangrin (1973), the picaresque story of a colonial interpreter, which the English article records as winner of the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire in 1974; L'Éclat de la grande étoile (1974); Jésus vu par un musulman (1976), presenting Jesus as seen by a Muslim; Petit Bodiel (1977); Njeddo Dewal, mère de la calamité (1985); and La poignée de poussière (1987). ¹

The Arabic article records his membership of the Académie des sciences d'outre-mer. ⁴

This section reports what the sources record of Bâ's belief and affiliation, without a verdict from the museum.

Bâ's first schooling was at the Qur'anic school of Tierno Bokar, whom the English article describes as a dignitary of the Tijaniyyah brotherhood; in 1933 he took leave from his administrative post to visit Bokar, described there as "his spiritual leader", and he later wrote Bokar's biography. ¹

World Wisdom, the publisher of the English translation of that biography, states independently of Wikipedia that "from the time of his youth, Mr. Bâ was a student and disciple of an extraordinary Malian Sufi master, Tierno Bokar". ³

The Arabic article presents the same relationship from the other side, calling Bokar a master of Sufism in Mali and Bâ his pupil from his youth. ⁴

On these attestations the museum records his affiliation as Sufi, in the Tijani line of his teacher. No source consulted names a legal school (madhhab) for him, so none is recorded; his own writing includes a book presenting Jesus "seen by a Muslim", and his later years were spent, in the words of the school in Mali that bears his name, working for dialogue between his Muslim faith and other religions. ^{1 3}

Bâ died at Abidjan on 15 May 1991, the date given by the English article's lead, by Wikidata and by his publisher's page; the variants found in the sources are recorded in the museum's data record. ^{1 2}

• English Wikipedia article "Amadou Hampâté Bâ" (revision 1347089651); Arabic Wikipedia article «أمادو همباطي با» (revision 76542242); Wikidata item Q452299; World Wisdom author page for Amadou Hampâté Bâ.
• The sources conflict on his birth year (1900 in the English article's lead and the Arabic lead; 1901 in the Arabic infobox and the BEROSE encyclopaedia; 1899 in a second Wikidata claim) — the record follows 1901 at year precision. They also conflict on his death day (15 May in the English lead, Wikidata and World Wisdom; 13 May in the English infobox; "15 March" in the Arabic infobox) and on the year of Wangrin's Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire (1974 in the English article; the Arabic infobox lists the prize under 1991). Each conflict is recorded in the data record rather than silently resolved.