From a Colonial to a Postcolonial African Voice: "Amkoullel, l'enfant peul"

Author(s): Ralph A. Austen

Source: Research in African Literatures , Autumn, 2000, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Autumn, 2000),
pp. 1-17
Published by: Indiana University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3820868

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 Amadou

Hampate Ba
From a Colonial to a Postcolonial
African Voice: Amkoullel, Venfantpeul

Ralph A. Austen

rary African culture, there is an implicit understanding that the colonial

In our broad use of the term "postcolonial" to characterize contempo?
experience played a critical role in shaping the identity of societies that
emerged from extensive periods of European rule. We can trace such an
impact directly through a great variety of written African documents pro?
duced under colonialism as well as through various reflections on this expe?
rience by African historians and other thinkers after the attainment of
independence. However, among the fictional works that have entered into
the canon of modern African literature, the topic of colonialism is con-
spicuous for its relative absence.
This hiatus can be explained in part by the chronology of colonial rule,
which did not last long enough for the first generation of major writers in
English and French to reach their full powers much before its demise.2
Some of these early figures?most notably Chinua Achebe, Mongo Beti,
and Ferdinand Oyono?have written on colonial themes. Others, like
Camara Laye, describe situations in the colonial era with virtually no refer?
ence to European rule. More commonly, the focus of African writing is
upon decolonization and its postcolonial aftermath, since these are the
experiences the authors know at first hand.
Amadou Hampate Ba stands out in this context, first of all because he
is older than even such senior francophone figures as Leopold Sedar
Senghor and Birago Diop (who also grew up in the far more established
colonial confines of the Senegal coast) and is considerably older than the
Nigerian literary pioneers, Chinua Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi. Yet it is
Hampate Ba, with his rather limited formal French education, who pro?
duced probably the richest literary account of colonialism in L'etrange des?
tin de Wangrin (discussed elsewhere in this issue). In the memoir of his own
childhood, Amkoulkl, Hampate Ba provides us with not only another classic
account of the lived colonial experience, but also an insight into the
process by which an African scholar and verbal artist could find a voice: first
as a contributor to the colonial project of recording (and even creating)
"tradition" and then to the rendition of his own life through a particularly
effective form of European-language literature.
The title of this book comes from a nickname that Hampate Ba
acquired in his childhood and continued to use later in life.3 It translates as

Vol. 31, No. 3, Fall 2000

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Photo of Amadou Hampate Ba (78 years old) taken in Paris, July 1978. By and
with permission of H. Heckmann.

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 Research in African Literatures

"Little Koullel" and characterizes young Amadou as the apprentice of

Koullel, a storyteller in his Malian home town, Bandiagara. Koullel is
described by Hampate Ba as the epitome of what he calls a "traditionaliste,"
a role he himself took on professionally during the middle years of his life.
This essay will conclude with a closer examination of the model that
Koullel and other traditionalists represent for Hampate Ba's writing about
his own and Wangrin's direct experience of colonialism, writing only
undertaken after the author had reached at least his sixties and retired
from earlier careers as a junior colonial administrator, a researcher wi
IFAN (LTnstitut Francais [now Fondamentale] d'Afrique Noire), an
diplomat. First, however, I wish to deal with the narrative text of Amkoul
as a major exemplar of an African/colonial ? bildungsroman.
At its most manifest level, Amkoullel is a story about childhood and ad
lescence under colonialism. It tells us how the author grew up betwe
1900 and 1921 in various towns of south-central Mali (Bandiaga
Bougouni, Bamako, Jenne, and Kati). We learn about the earlier history
both sides of Hampate Ba's family, about his formal education in Qura
and French schools, about his informal education through figures lik
Koullel, and about his independent childhood and adolescent life, wit
special emphasis on membership in various self-organized youth groups
I refer to this account as a bildungsroman ("novel of education
coming of age") not because I wish to question its veracity, but rathe
because it fails into a genre where the boundaries between fact and fict
are often unclear and not necessarily very significant. More specificall
am calling it a "colonial bildungsroman" because the conditions of com
of age under colonialism raise issues which distinguish writing on this sub?
ject from more familiar versions in Western literature.4
The central theme of any bildungsroman is the passage from chi
hood to the threshold of adulthood. In the colonial variant, this proc
usually culminates in some kind of exile, with its major vehicle being t
alien European school. Such narratives usually expend considerable effo
upon depicting the world left behind as a result of the hero's moveme
the world of the parents (often already located in an urban, partially "mod
ernized" setting, which provides a base for the literacy required to produce
the very work in which it is recalled); and the world of the grandparen
located in a more distant time and space (often an "ancestral village") a
represented as a purer version of "tradition." Along with the distance estab
lished between the author and his familial past, colonial narratives of t
kind often distinguish the path laid out by European education from
another form of acculturation?in African cases initiation rituals and/or
Islamic learning?which would have allowed the hero to attain the kind of
adulthood experienced by the generations before him.
Amkoullel broadly fits this pattern, although its deviations from a
more typical work, such as L'enfant noir, help explain both its immediate
power and the adult career that it presages. Relatively little of this lengthy
work actually deals with European schooling, although that in itself is not
uncommon?the power of the colonial school as an exclusive and alien
gateway to indigenous elite status makes it a difficult subject to confront in

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 Ralph A. Austen 3

critical detail.5 Hampate Ba does, however, provide very extensive accounts

of the struggles surrounding both his entry into, and exit from, the French
educational system; these are critical to both the power of his narrative and
the substantive destiny towards which he moves.
The formal education that young Amadou's parents seek for him and
he himself prefers is not European but Islamic. The route into a school sys?
tem that determines the language of his later self-expression is determined,
like so much else in his early life, by a combination of colonial dominance,
internal Fulbe politics, and Islamic values. A chefde quartier in Bandiagara is
charged by the French administration with providing two children of
notabk families for enrollment in the local European elementary school.
This chief chooses Amadou and his brother out of personal rancor against
their guardian, making sure they understood that the fate to which he con-
signs them will involve total defilement, most vividly represented by the
drinking of alcohol and eating of pork. Amadou's mother makes great
efforts to extricate him from this perceived horror, but it is the boy's
Quranic teacher (and spiritual mentor in later adult life), Cerno Bokar,
who convinces the family to let him pursue European learning.6
Hampate Ba says little about the intellectual aspects of his passage
through the primary and middle grades of the French schools he attended
from the ages of twelve through twenty-one. As will be seen later, it is unlike-
ly that anything he encountered there inspired his later vocation as a writer.
On the contrary, he abandoned this educational system twice, first in 1915,
which forced him to repeat elementary school in 1918-19, and again in
1921, after he passed an exam for entry into the pinnacle of French West
African colonial education, the Ecole Normale (Teachers Training College,
later the Ponty School) at Goree (adjacent to the regional administrative
center of Dakar in Senegal).
Amadou's second break with French schooling comes at the request of
his powerful mother and arouses the ire of no less a personage than the
Governor of Mali (then Soudan Francais). This official punishes the recal-
citrant scholar by sending him "au Diabk," which translates into an assign-
ment as a temporary clerk to Wagadugu in the newly formed colony of
Upper Volta (today Burkina Faso). Wagadugu is far more distant from
Bamako?in spatial terms but especially in travel time?than Goree, so the
account of colonial childhood does terminate in the obligatory exile, com?
plete with a tearful farewell scene between mother and child.
The difference between the exile of Hampate Ba and that of a youth-
ful Camara Laye or a Mohandas Gandhi is that instead of parting for, or at
least in the direction of, Europe, the hero here travels farther into the inte?
rior of his own extended homeland. He goes there, however, not in with?
drawal from European culture but rather as its classically hybrid
representative, a ublanc-noir" administrative auxiliary. Such a career is far
more typical of the early colonial African "educated elite" than advanced
schooling in either Europe or at a rare secondary institution such as the
one in Goree. The level of literacy necessary for bureaucratic work of this
kind has given rise to some autobiographical accounts of great personal

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 Research in African Literatures

interest and historical value (e.g., Kayamba), but these are not works that
provide anything like the narrative and rhetorical power, humor, and
insight we find in Amkoullel
Since Hampate Ba writes in French he must (and does) credit his six
years of colonial schooling for providing him with the basis of his literary
career. But a far smaller part of his early life was spent in school than in
other sites of recreation and learning within Bougouni, Bandiagara, and
Kati. It is these places that contribute at least as much to his "Bildung," his
cultural formation, as does formal French education and they also occupy
the largest part of his autobiography. I will return later to the role of
French, Islamic, and African oral models in shaping Hampate Ba's writing,
but first it is necessary to examine the combinations of European and
African cultures in the life (really, lives) he describes in his memoirs.
I use the term "lives" because during the first 140 pages of this 500-page
text, the author himself does not appear as a sentient character. Hampate
Ba cannot, as do colonial autobiographers like Camara Laye, Wole Soyinka,
or Nirad Chaudhuri, allow the reader to accompany him on a visit to the
rural village of his grandparents. Because of the tumultuous religious wars
that preceded the French occupation of this region of Mali, such villages
are either in very distant Futa Toro or in nearer but now-deserted locations
around Macina/ Hampate Ba thus does his traveling through time rather
than space and devotes the first forty-plus pages of his book to occurrences
before his birth. The context of these events is the jihad of Umar Tall and
its aftermath, but the focus is on the intimate biographies of Amadou's
maternal grandparents and his father, individuals of roughly the same
generation and all Fulbe, but placed on opposing sides of the Umarian
struggle.
Even after Amadou is born, his narrative focuses for another hundred
pages on the complex fortunes of his mother and her second husband,
Tidjani Thiam, the head ofa secondary Tukuleur ruling lineage. These dra?
mas combine internal Tukuleur rivalries with the exigencies of French rule
and result in Tidjani's dismissal from his position as a rural chief and his
imprisonment several hundred miles to the south, in the Bamana
(Bambara)-speaking town of Bougouni.
When Amadou finally enters his own story, it is to be removed (at age
five) from Bandiagara to Bougouni, then to come back to Bandiagara three
years later and, after three initial years of French schooling, to rejoin his
mother and stepfather, who are now at Kati, again in Bambara territory (on
the outskirts of Bamako). Amadou is thus fully at home in the two princi?
pal languages and cultures of central Mali, the Fulbe/Tukuleur of his own
families and the Bamana/Mande of the majority population.8 In both
Bougouni and Bandiagara he attends Quranic school but is forced, by his
recruitment into the French educational system, to leave before he attains
more than a liturgical level of literacy in Arabic.
Amadou also spends a considerable amount of time in what he calls
the "court" (cour) of his stepfather. This site represents the classical urban
and partially deracinated home of most writers of colonial childhood
autobiographies. In Hampate Ba's case, however, it has the additional and

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 Ralph A. Austen

very critical function of defining the terms on which he first apprehends

the verbal performances that he will later transform into both colonial texts
and the postcolonial prose of Wangrin and his autobiography.
The space within Tidjani's compounds where these performances take
place, whether at Bougouni, Bandiagara, or Kati, is literally a cour (court?
yard) but is also a "court" in the broader sense because the people who
gather there recognize Tidjani as their patron. However, it is not a court in
any political or judicial terms, because Tidjani never regains chiefly office
and must thus support his family and clientele by a combination of his and
his wife's inherited cattle, his own labor as an embroiderer of leather (con?
sidered an honorable occupation among the Islamicized Tukuleur elite),
and the trading enterprise of his wife (Amadou's mother). Amadou thus
learns local culture as a first stage of "tradition," i.e., a set of practices dis-
placed by local and colonial politics from their original base of authority
but still carried on within an entirely African setting.
The one context in which the young Amadou comes to witness and par?
ticipate in forms of his own cultural almost entirely uninflected by colo?
nialism is the arena set aside for children and youths. The most formal
event marking this stage of life is early adolescent initiation with one's own
age group through circumcision. A lengthy section of Amkoulkl (279-93) is
thus devoted to the circumcision of Amadou's older brother, Hammadoun.
But the author himself, even more than Camara Laye after him, undergoes
only a belated and truncated version of this ritual (he characterizes it as "a
la sauvette [in semi-furtive haste]," 439-44) .9 The actual operation is done in
isolation at a French clinic, although Amadou's family accepts and cele-
brates the result.
It is in his pre-adolescent role as chief of a waalde (Fulbe age associa?
tion) in Bandiagara that Amadou experiences the most full and auto?
nomous version of the culture he will evoke in his writings. The waalde
operates in the streets of the town without any adult supervision or con?
scious preparation for later life; indeed, Amadou's mother evokes the
pranks carried on by this group as evidence that her son is a juvenile delin-
quent and thus not fit for enrollment in a French colonial school. However,
in the organization of raids on gardens, stylized but real battles with other
"gangs," and an even more stylized courtship ofa female counterpart asso?
ciation, Amadou and his associates do act out the key roles of Fulbe adult?
hood, roles that their actually adult contemporaries are no longer free to
pursue so fully.
The waalde (as well as the equivalent Bamana ton which Amadou joins
during his inter-school late-adolescent years in Kati) thus functions much
like the court of Tidjani Thiam, to present the forms of local culture with?
out most of their practical?and particularly political? reality. Even the
close linkage between age-group associations and initiation is never quite
fulfilled here, first by the interruption of French schooling in Bandiagara
and Jenne, and secondly (when noninitiation becomes an embarrassment
in the ton life of Kati) by the irregular manner in which it is carried out. If
an initiation system represents the collective socialization of a youth cohort
into its culture and Bildung stands for a more individualistic coming of

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 Research in African Literatures

age in modern Western society, the events of Hampate Ba's narrative fall
awkwardly but very richly between the two experiences. The art of this work
must also be understood in such complex terms.
The notion that there is a significant distinction between the writing of
Amkoullel or even Wangrin and Hampate Ba's earlier work on oral tradition
is not one that the author himself seemed to share, or at least admits to
in his autobiography. As will be seen below, we may also see considerable
continuity between these works, but on somewhat different terms than
those presented by the author.
The vocation for which the young Amadou is preparing himself, both
in Amkoullel and its successor volume, Oui mon commandant!, is that of
recording tradition rather than producing original literary works. When
explaining, in the preface to Amkoullel, how he is able to recount distant
aspects of his own life in such detail, Hampate Ba quite explicitly identifies
himself with

people of oral tradition [. . .] trained to observe, to watch and to

listen so well that every event is inscribed in our memory as if in
freshwax. (13)
Such an explanation may not be of much help to literary scholars, but it is
consistent with the chronological relationship between the Bildung
described in Amkoullel and the career (or careers) that immediately fol?
lowed the narrator's coming of age. It is important to keep in mind that
Amkoullel is a memoir in two senses: both in the current literary one, of
recalling the events and contexts of childhood and youth, and in the more
traditional definition, as a work written in retirement to reflect upon a
completed and mainly adult career.10 The memoir of childhood can be
seen as a variant upon the bildungsroman and is usually written early in
adulthood (Joyce, Wright) or at latest in middle age (Soyinka). Hampate
Ba, however, wrote this very vivid account of his early life at some point
between his late sixties and eighties.11 When he finally leaves school and
sets out for distant Wagadugu he may be endowed with a much broader
culture than the ordinary African colonial fonctionnaire, but his European
education has certainly not prepared him for the kind of writing through
which this experience is now depicted.
What such literacy did prepare him for was the inscription of oral
accounts and performances, the major preoccupation of Hampate Ba's
second adult career as a researcher for IFAN. Amkoullel depicts a very
early example of this activity, one that is linked to the subject of his first
"postcolonial" work. In 1912, during his first year at the Bandiagara primary
school, Amadou was called upon by the man whose life he later chronicled
under the name "Wangrin," to assist a French colonial administrator,
Francois Victor Equilbecq, in compiling a collection of West African oral
narratives. The association of Wangrin and Equilbecq has already provided
other commentators with the means both to establish the legendary African

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 Ralph A. Austen

interpreter's historical identity (Chemin12) and to undermine the ethno?

graphic authority of the French official's publication (Ricard, untitled
paper).
Hampate Ba, however, does not express any sense of expose or irony in
this episode, even when he recalls that Equilbecq paid the informants for
each tale "ten to twenty sous, according to its length or significance" (346).
We may read such an account as a condemnation of both the economic and
discursive practices that produced a "colonial library" of knowledge about
Africa. But for Hampate Ba, whose most famous quotation places very
positive value upon the equation of oral African knowledge and libraries,13
it rather appears as both an early European recognition of his own perfor?
mance abilities and a first step towards a necessary program of preserva?
tion. It is no more fitting for commentators armed with the wisdom of
postcolonial theory to simply dismiss colonial or any other early ethnogra-
phy, since it often provides the only material we have for understanding
important aspects of precolonial African culture.14 Nonetheless, for the
creation of a living literature, something is needed beyond the linguistic
capacities of a Wangrin (who, after all, later asked Amadou to write his life
for him). That literary element is already present in Hampate Ba's rendi-
tions of oral traditions (and even to some extent in the collaborative publi?
cation of Equilbecq and Wangrin) but it reaches a new level in works such
as Wangrin and Amkoulkl.
It is not possible within the compass of the present essay (and will prob?
ably not be possible at all until Hampate Ba's full archive along with related
documentation is available for full scholarly examination) to explain how
Hampate Ba arrived at the French-language literary powers displayed in his
later work. This capacity clearly owes a great deal to the author's long "post-
graduate" education in the colonial bureaucracy, in IFAN, and in subse?
quent sojourns in France. The influence of various IFAN mentors (some of
whom are also the co-authors of Hampate Ba's early books), and of his
editor, and literary executrix, Helene Heckmann, cannot be evaluated
here. Nor do we now have much information on the French reading that
Hampate Ba undertook on his own during these decades (he says nothing
about such matters in either volume of his published autobiography). Thus
any analysis of French models for his work must, at best, be speculative and
will only be pursued after consideration of the African and Islamic verbal
arts to which the young Amadou is exposed in the years of Amkoulkl.
Although the primary issue to which the present essay addresses itself
is Hampate Ba's capacity to address immediate colonial experience, he is
more widely and at least as justly recognized as a figure who actually
occupies the often imaginary space that links modern African writing with
earlier practices of "orature." My goal at this point is to suggest which
particular forms of Fulbe/Tukuleur or Mande oral art shaped his autobi?
ographical writing. Such an investigation, however, must be prefaced both
with a disclaimer?I am not sufficiently expert in such forms to make any

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8 Research in African Literatures

very definitive judgements?and a qualification?the kinds of oral perfor?

mance upon which Hampate Ba models himself are themselves already
"colonized" in ways that the author does not always acknowledge.
Hampate Ba was not a literary theorist and, indeed, seem to resist the
very idea that what he produced in either Wangrin or the memoirs should
be categorized as "literature" rather than "learning." Amkoullel even con-
tains a prefatory "N.d.E.' (note from the publisher or possibly editor?
presumably Mme Heckmann) that points out that, "in agreement with the
author," the manuscript had been purged of "numerous expositions on
certain aspects of African culture or sociology" (16). Hampate Ba's consid?
erable ability as a raconteur is explained primarily as a capacity of memory
(see above) and secondly by exposure to iltraditionalistesn such as Koullel.
Before attempting to understand what Hampate Ba means by this last term
and how it helps us to understand the present work, it is necessary to
explore a category of oral performers who occur quite frequently in
Amkoullel and much of Hampate Ba 's other writings, but do not appear to
provide him with a model: griots.
The term "griot" is frequently employed to refer to African verbal art
of any kind, particularly if it is oral or "traditional." In the West Africa of
Hampate Ba, however, the various categories of performers (whether
instrumental or verbal) who fall under this heading belong to clearly des?
ignated endogamous descent groups ("castes") and are associated with spe?
cific genres of music and spoken text (see Austen, In Search of Sunjata).
When Hampate Ba refers to griots he has these groups in mind, although
it is not entirely insignificant that, with his great concern for the details of
local culture, he never uses the terms of specific regional languages such as
the very well-known Mande jeli or jail15 Far from acknowledging griots as
an inspiration for his own renditions of "tradition," Hampate Ba displays
considerable hostility toward them.
There is no direct evidence of such hostility in Amkoullel but early in
the second volume of his autobiography he states quite bluntly that "par
nature j'ai horreur des cris de louage des griots" T have an inborn hatred
for the way griots shout praises' (OC 33). Hampate Ba's major statement
on oral tradition ('The Living Tradition," 1981) devotes only five out of
fifty-seven pages to griots, labeling them as "public entertainers" and not-
ing their generally more limited and less reliable access to "knowledge"
than true "traditionalists." Finally, it is remarkable that of the major oral
texts published by Hampate Ba , none, as far as I know, are transcribed
from the performances of griots. 16
The ethnographic basis for Hampate Ba's distance from griots is that
he was himself of "noble" Fulbe birth and thus should have been the patron
of casted bards rather than their emulator. The many examples of griots
presented in Amkoullel all demonstrate this prescribed pattern, including an
account of Amadou as chief of a Bandiagara waalde (age association) with
a griot appointed to serve beside him and even employed in the classical
manner as a spokesman during the formalities preceding a battle with
another group of boys (295-99). It is not clear whether Hampate Ba ever
maintained a griot in his adult life,17 but in any case it would have been

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 Ralph A. Austen 9

unseemly for him to take on himself the functions of praise singing and
epic performance associated with griots.
Yet, there is some suggestion that Hampate Ba's verbal performances
are somewhat closer to those associated with griots than he would like to
admit. Early in Amkoulkl he makes a somewhat whimsical reference to the
contrast between his own volubility and the taciturn nature of his father
(37); but it is the latter behavior that far better befits men of the Ba warrior
lineage. Most significant is Amadou's close identification with Koullel,
whom he explicitly identifies as a "traditionalist" but whose social status
appears closer to that of a griot.
Hampate Ba tells us very little about Koullel in either volume of his
autobiography, except to indicate his close relationship with the family of
Tidjani Tall and his role as "the origin of my vocation" (OC 47). It is only
from Theodore Monod that we learn about Koullel's own early career as a
Tukuleur jihad warrior from which he appears to have retired into a very
informal position as an entertainer and sage in the court of Tidjani. Koullel
thus does not belong to the Fulbe/Tukuleur equivalent of a jeli caste, but
may well fall into a category of Fulbe "entertainers' whom Hampate Ba else?
where labels woloso (house captives/servants) ('The Living Tradition" 176;
see also Seydou). The fact that the young Amadou derived knowledge as
well as performance skills from Koullel does not contradict this status ambi?
guity; Hampate Ba also uses griots as sources of information (e.g., for the
life of Wangrin), although always distancing himself from their behavior.
Koullel does appear to have more "honor" than a griot, but, as will be seen
below, when Hampate Ba seeks to develop his concept of "traditionalist"
more fully, his references are all to someone else.
Within the text of Amkoulkl, the closest that Hampate Ba comes to
reproducing jeliya, the verbal style of griots, is when he engages in insult.
One of the richest examples of this rhetoric involves exchanges between
himself and the chef de quartier responsible for recruiting him into the
French school system (307-30). After a steady stream of invective from the
chief, the twelve-year-old Amadou turns the table upon his tormentor when
asked by the local French commandant whether he actually wants a
European education. Instead of begging for release, like his fellow
"hostage," Amadou announces that he is eager to learn French so that he
can become a chief and avenge himself upon the "slave" chef de quartier
who has insulted himself and his family. But it is important to note that such
outbursts of what may be read as jeliya occur in a situation very much
defined by colonialism (as is a later exchange of more classical claims to
honor among two "nobles" brought into conflict by the exigencies of
French military discipline [446-65]). It should also be pointed out that in
the performance before the commandant, Amadou is careful to include in
his complaints against the chef de quartier those threats which refer to
Europeans as "drinkers of wine laced with sow's milk".18
What most distinguishes Hampate Ba's positive accounts of his family
from the style of griots' praise or even the Mande epics with which Amkoulkl
has been (I believe erroneously) compared (see Amselle) is the shift in
emphasis from declamations and displays of power to more contemplative

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10 Research in African Literatures

reflections on moral behavior. This morality is often linked to Islam and

may thus have some model in the performances ofjinew, local Islamic bards,
who are not as numerous or well-studied as the mainstream griots. There is
an appearance of such a figure in Amkoullel, attached to the Tukuleur para-
mount chief of Bandiagara. However, the one speech he delivers, after his
patron substitutes his own son for Amadou's brother as a school recruit
(317-18), consists more ofa string of moral precepts blended with panegyric
than an act of contemplation. I will suggest below that the form of moral dis?
course that occurs in key moments ofthe memoir may have some European
sources.

While griots occupy quite a bit of space in Amkoull

devoted to anyone who represents Hampate Ba 's ch
ditionalist. The brevity and ambiguity in the pres
already been noted. A different set of issues arises fr
extended passage (198-202) devoted to another trad
whom Hampate Ba knew only during his very yo
Danfo, a Bambara, was the possessor of both great
siderable local lore, the latter deriving from his r
blacksmith) and a leader ofthe komo power society. Th
provides Hampate Ba with a local term for "tradi
doma, meaning literally a man of knowledge (dom).
more especially, as a child of at most eight, Amado
initiated into the practices and status that would p
understanding of Danfo's erudition.19 Instead, he en
licly performed version of this knowledge, as provide
like himself in his stepfather's court and in the open
What Hampate Ba transfers into writing is thus
"tradition," in the sense that this term implie
abstracted from an earlier functional setting and tran
sentation of the past. I do not mean to imply here
"authentic" moment in the history of any culture
representational repertoire is embedded in fully act
religious institutions. However, in the case of colonial
of European imposition and the perceived distance
the global/modern create a sense of "tradition" fa
most historical settings. Hampate Ba's IFAN career
quent writing was dedicated to presenting such lor
or Europeanized African audience. His autobiograp
experiences by which the conditions for such repr
lished within a colonized but not yet Europeanized
For the inhabitants of this world one impor
European scribal culture and African oracity was I
(332, 338) that his previous Quranic training allowe
the rote memorization and alphabet lessons that co
ments of his first French school classes. Despite la
Quranic studies and learn Arabic, as well as his lead
gious life, Hampate Ba never appears to have attain
advanced works of Islamic learning in their origina

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 Ralph A. Austen 11

1933 he was able to return to Bandiagara for an extended leave of six

months, which he dedicated almost entirely to sessions of oral study with
Cerno Bokar. Here the relationship between European and Islamic learn?
ing was reversed, as Hampate Ba transcribed his Fulbe dialogues with
Cerno Bokar into French, thus producing one of his most important
archives and the basis of several books (Hampate Ba and Cardaire;
Hampate Ba, Vie et enseignement, Brenner, West African Sufi, espec. 444r48).
This is not the place to analyze the Islam of either Cerno Bokar or
Hampate Ba, both of which have been subjected to considerable examina?
tion by more qualified scholars (see Brenner, West African Sufi, "Becoming
Muslim," and "Amadou Hampate Ba, Tijani francophone"; see also
Sanankoua). From a literary perspective, however, it is clear that Hampate
Ba's autobiographical writings were influenced by Cerno Bokar's teachings.
The last section of Oui mon commandant! (341-87) describes the experiences
of 1933 and also includes many extended citations from Cerno Bokar. This
pedagogy does often take the form of narrative and is thus important in
shaping the moral tales that comprise a good deal of Amkoulkl. But it is,
after all, Hampate Ba himself who transcribed and presumably shaped what
we know of Cerno Bokar's teachings, which constitute a unique and highly
ecumenical version of Islam. From a political perspective, this teaching
could be (and was) interpreted both as very dangerous to French rule
(thus leading to Hampate Ba's shift from the administrative service to IFAN
in 1942) and as supportive of later French efforts to sponsor a more
accommodating version of Islam (see Brenner, "Becoming Muslim"). From
a literary perspective, however, the transcriptions and publications based
on Cerno Bokar transcend the categories of "traditional" and "colonial"
without really accounting for the power of Hampate Ba's "postcolonial"
writings.
In the end the effectiveness of Wangrin and Amkoulkl may rest mainly
on Hampate Ba's purely personal gifts as a raconteur. These are gifts that
he recognized in a model such as Koullel and practiced from his childhood
in private, but probably considered closer to "entertainment" than "knowl?
edge." He thus began to employ them in formal written works20 only after
the end of his public efforts as a researcher, diplomat, and teacher of reli?
gion. The appeal of the memoirs is certainly based upon their abandon-
ment of attempts at systematic recall of the various figures and events
significant to the author's conception of the past in favor of what amounts
to a series of stories. Hampate Ba's apology for the inability of "an African
of my generation to summarize" (14) may thus seem disingenuous or at
least superfluous. Yet it is easy to imagine how, in the absence of personal
contact with the narrator, such unedited anecdotes might easily become
quite tiresome. Clearly there has to be some intervention of literary models
that are not accounted for in any of the evocations of griots, traditionalists,
and Islamic learning. One place to look for these models, however cau-
tiously, is in the literature of the French language, which is, after all,
Hampate Ba's main instrument of written self-expression.
Despite the argument in the first section of this essay, we can assume
that Hampate Ba did not compose Amkoulkl with any European or probably

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12 Research in African Literatures

colonial models of the bildungsroman in mind. He makes no reference to

such works and their similar structure can be seen as more the result of the
common trajectories of colonial education and its consequences than of
writers in various parts of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean knowingly
imitating one another. Within this subgenre, Amkoullel is directed far less
consciously at autobiography?at the recording of an inner self or at least
of personal impressions?than comparable works by writers like Camara
Laye or Chaudhuri.
Thus one of the notable features of this book is its capacity to convey
the drama of encounters in a precolonial or early colonial world which the
narrator did not himself experience. There is no reason to question
Hampate Ba's claims that his knowledge of events affecting his grandpar?
ents, his parents, and his stepfather came from oral accounts by older rela?
tives and family retainers. However, the key moments of these lives are
presented in the form of dialogues and speeches that are not very likely to
have been included, at least in their present form, within the responses
to Hampate Ba's inquiries. They are equally unlikely, for reasons already
discussed above, to draw upon the rhetoric of formal African literary per?
formance or Islamic teachings. It is thus possible that Hampate Ba was here
influenced by some European sources. The candidates that come to mind
are classical Greek and Roman histories and seventeenth-century French
theater. The former genre is notably punctuated by orations on high moral
principles that no one could have recorded (e.g., the last words of the
isolated Massada martyrs in Josephus's Jewish Wars).
The dialogue of a Corneille in works such as Le Cid may also have some
influence upon the kind of speeches delivered by Hampate Ba's maternal
grandmother and his father. The former sought to liberate the latter (her
kinsman and eventual son-in-law) from shameful apprenticeship to a servile
butcher, an occupation that he, the last male survivor of a noble Fulbe lin?
eage, has undertaken to hide himself from the Tukuleur conquerors of
Macina. Hampate Ba pere refuses this rescue, even when offered freedom
and wealth by the present Tukuleur ruler. His grounds are that a personal
obligation to the slave who protected him transcends any obligation to live
in the manner dictated by his inherited status. The most "Corneillan" pas?
sage in this episode is then put in the mouth of Anta N'diobdi, Amadou's
grandmother:
"Certes, il est plus honteux d'etre ingrat que d'etre garcon
boucher."
Elle se tourna vers Hampate:
"Va, lui dit-elle, retourne chez Allamodio, sers-le, je l'accepte.
Mon ame en pleurera chaque jour de depit, mais ma raison
sechera les larmes que l'orgueil familial me fera verser. Quand
c'est l'honneur que fail accepter un sacrifice, celui-ci devient sub?
lime. Tu choisis de vivre dans une obscurite opaque alors qu'un
soleil grand et radieux s'offre a repandre sa lumiere sur toi. Puisse
le Seigneur tenir compte de ta conduite et faire sortir de toi des fils
qui rehausseront ton nom!"

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 Ralph A. Austen 13

"Certainly, it is more shameful to be ungrateful than to be a

butcher boy"
She turned towards Hampate:
"Go, she said, return to Allamodio [the butcher], serve him, I
accept it. My soul will weep daily in chagrin over this, but my rea?
son will dry the tears which family prides makes me shed. When it
is honor which makes us accept a sacrifice, it becomes sublime. You
choose to live in dark obscurity when a grand and radiant sun
offers to shine its light upon you. May God take account of your
conduct and bring forth from your loins sons who will once again
elevate your name!" (51-52)
Whatever sources inspired such dialogue?and it is difficult to imagine that
it came from the old nursemaid, Niele, whom Hampate Ba names as his
informant21?the effect is to give a highly "literary" quality to the autobi?
ography. Yet it is a quality that seems far more appropriate to figures
addressing one another within an indigenous African elite setting than the
more "realist" prose in other modern works dealing with similar themes.22
Here Hampate Ba has managed to find a voice that is postcolonial in its lib?
eration from any project of preserving the grand narratives of "tradition,"
yet able to draw on the past without any of the ironies or fantasies of post?
modernism or "magical realism."23
Amadou Hampate Ba holds such a unique place in modern African lit?
erature that it makes little sense to treat him as a model of how to come to
terms with colonialism and its impact on local culture. In his own colonial
research efforts, which need to be further examined, he may be complicit
in the kind of "textual" constructions of African culture that have drawn
criticism to some of the French anthropologists with whom he worked (see
Clifford). But at the very least, he was an active and conscious agent in this
endeavor. Even if we now have to acknowledge that Wangrin is not Hampate
Ba's fictionalized autobiography, there is a common denominator between
the interpreter who becomes the manipulator of his various commandants
and the technical auxiliary who becomes co-author of the works produced
by his European employers and then even rewrites some of them decades
later under his own signature (see Ricard, "La reappropriation"). The most
striking difference, of course, is that Hampate Ba also transforms the life of
Wangrin into something we can still read as a major novel and writes his
own life in a manner that defies generic categorization or facile criticism.
Whether or not Amkoulkl can or should be emulated, it certainly testifies to
the possibility of transforming the alienating experience of colonialism into
a robust form of selfhood and this should be a major inspiration for all
African?and not only African?modern literature.

NOTES

1. I wish to thank Benjamin Soares for his immense help with the work on t
article while excusing him from any responsibility for the outcome.

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14 Research in African Literatures

2. Given the longer duration of British rule in India, one might expect more
colonial literature to have emerged from the Raj, but for reasons not yet fully
clear, the topic seems to be even less prominent here than in the case of
African fiction.

3. It is the signature he uses in his letters to Theodore Monod in the 1940s (see
Brenner, "Amadou Hampate Ba, Tijani francophone").
4. For more extensive discussion of these comparative issues as applied to Camara
Laye's Uenfant noir, see Austen, "Coming of Age" and also Moretti. I have also
been teaching a course on the colonial bildungsroman that extends well
beyond French West Africa and will be glad to supply the syllabus to anyone
who inquires.
5. The major exception is Chamoiseau, Chemin d'ecole, but this is as much a post?
colonial as a colonial work.

6. Brenner ("Becoming Muslim" 470) sees such action as "virtually unheard

in its time, implying that it points toward the ecumenical Islam later pro
gated by Hampate Ba through Cerno Bokar's teachings. Benjamin Soares (p
vate communication) has suggested, however, that accounts of such advi
from Quranic teachers are common in the biographies of Western-educat
Malian Muslims (most of them certainly younger than Hampate Ba).
7. The Tukuleur, a Fulbe-speaking people of northeastern Senegal (Futa Tor
invaded central Mali in the 1860s under the leadership of al-Haj Umar Tal
representative ofthe Tijani Sufi order. This jihad destroyed the two states th
previously dominated the region, Segu and Macina (the latter itself the pr
uct of a previous Fulbe jihad that is the subject of Hampate Ba's first boo
Uempirepeul du Macina).
8. Bandiagara also gave him some access to Dogon culture, which may have in
enced his later work with French anthropologists but is not evoked
Amkoullel.

9. These circumstances need to be taken into account when analyzing t

considerable attention that Hampate Ba devoted, in both his IFAN a
"autonomous" writings, to Fulbe "initiation texts."
10. An African version of this latter genre, describing both a literary and a poli
cal-administrative life, is Diop. OC fails somewhere between the two categori
and it will be interesting to see what the so-far unpublished third volume
Hampate Ba's memoirs is like.
11. The dating is unclear from the relationship between a list of the manuscr
in his archives in 1969 (see Sow) and later accounts by his literary executo
Heckmann.
12. For further confirmation, see Heckmann.
13. "In Africa, every time that an elder dies it is as if a library had burned d
14. For a further discussion, which includes a critical appreciation of Equi
see my "Africans Speak.w
15. It is thus ironic that in the English translation of his 1981 UNESCO histor
cle, "griot," which was then still considered unfamiliar to non-French read
becomes "jeli."
16. These texts are all Fulbe rather than Mande (see bibliography in Devey
the Fulbe have a comparable tradition of praise poetry and epics perfor
by groups with similar status to the jeliw (see Seydou).

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 Ralph A. Austen 15

17. Devey, relying upon unpublished sections of Hampate Ba's memoirs, refers to
a griot playing at his home in Bamako during the latter 1930s, but does not
indicate what this bard's relationship was to the master of the house (62).
18. Another source for this form of speech may be the combative rhetoric of nine?
teenth-century Islamic religious wars, recorded at great length from nongriot
sources by Hampate Ba (IJempire peul du Macina).
19. In his 1981 essay, Hampate Ba also dedicates many pages to Danfo and dom,
indicating a far greater knowledge of komo than he could achieved during his
sojourn in Bougouni. The source of this knowledge and Hampate Ba's more
formal contribution to what we understand as West African culture needs to be

investigated in the records of his IFAN years.

20. Many pieces of them can be found in interviews, occasional articles, o
speeches from earlier years. See Devey's bibliography; see also Heckmann for
further evidence of the oral provenance of the text in the memoirs.
21. Amadou was only three years old when his father died and his parents had
then already been divorced.
22. The obvious comparison here is Maryse Conde's Segou and Les enfants de Segou
serious historical novels with a closely related setting which have enjoyed a well
merited success but nevertheless present their characters in a mode that seems
remote from nineteenth-century Mali. (One of my students has referred to thi
opus as "Gone with the Jihad.")
23. I do not mean by this comparison to denigrate writers who fall into these more
familiar postcolonial categories. For an appreciation of work on the Mande
world in this vein, see the discussion of Ahmadou Kourouma in Austen,
"Historical Transformation of Genres" 84-85.

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