Yambo Ouologuem

Yambo Ouologuem (born August 22, 1940, Bandiagara, Mopti region, French Sudan [now Mali]—died October 14, 2017, Sévaré, Mali) was a Malian writer who was highly acclaimed for his first novel, Le Devoir de violence (1968; Bound to Violence), which received the Prix Renaudot. With this work, Ouologuem became the first African writer to receive a major French literary award.

Ouologuem was born to a ruling-class family and attended local schools in addition to a lycée in Bamako, Mali. He received degrees in philosophy, literature, and English in Paris in 1962. He also studied for a doctorate in sociology in Paris.

His best-known work, Le Devoir de violence, is an epic about a fictitious Sudanese empire, in which hundreds of years of African history are unfolded and in which three forces down through the centuries are responsible for the black man’s “slave mentality”—the ancient African emperors, the Arabs, and finally, since the mid-1800s, the European colonial administrators—reducing the black man to “négraille” (a word coined by Ouologuem, which Ralph Manheim rendered as “nigger-trash” in his 1971 translation of the novel). The work was highly controversial, some critics claiming it to be a new form of African literature, others maintaining that it was highly derivative of Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield (1934) and of a work by André Schwarz-Bart, Le Dernier des Justes (1959; The Last of the Just). Ouologuem viewed the African’s lot as a legacy of violence and, in modern times, as a duty of violence toward white misconceptions of blacks that impose on them a slave mentality and character.

Ouologuem’s bitterness about white attitudes also appears in some of his poems, and his Lettre à la France nègre (1969) attacks the “noble” sentiments that have been expressed by paternalistic French liberals about Africa.

Other works included Les Milles et un bibles du sexe (1969; “The Thousand and One Bibles of Sex”), published under his pseudonym, Utto Rodolph. Ouologuem also coauthored French-language textbooks for foreigners under the title Terres du Soleil (1971; “Lands of the Sun”).