[In the following essay, Austen explains that Bâ stands out among his African contemporaries because he is one of the only authors who has lived the colonial experience and reproduced it in his works, and thus his works provide an insight into how African scholars and writers have found their voice, both as participants and recorders of the colonial experience as creators of their own tradition, in the postcolonial era.]

In our broad use of the term “postcolonial” to characterize contemporary African culture, there is an implicit understanding that the colonial 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 produced under colonialism as well as through various reflections on this experience 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 conspicuous 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 reference 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 Hampaté Bâ stands out in this context, first of all because he is older than even such senior francophone figures as Léopold Sédar 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 Hampaté Bâ, with his rather limited formal French education, who produced probably the richest literary account of colonialism in L'étrange destin de Wangrin (discussed elsewhere in this issue). In the memoir of his own childhood, Amkoullel, Hampaté Bâ 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 Hampaté Bâ acquired in his childhood and continued to use later in life.³ It translates as “Little Koullel” and characterizes young Amadou as the apprentice of Koullel, a storyteller in his Malian home town, Bandiagara. Koullel is described by Hampaté Bâ 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 Hampaté Bâ'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 with IFAN (L'Institut Français [now Fondamentale] d'Afrique Noire), and a diplomat. First, however, I wish to deal with the narrative text of Amkoullel as a major exemplar of an African/colonial—bildungsroman.

At its most manifest level, Amkoullel is a story about childhood and adolescence under colonialism. It tells us how the author grew up between 1900 and 1921 in various towns of south-central Mali (Bandiagara, Bougouni, Bamako, Jenne, and Kati). We learn about the earlier history of both sides of Hampaté Bâ's family, about his formal education in Quranic and French schools, about his informal education through figures like Koullel, and about his independent childhood and adolescent life, with 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 rather because it falls into a genre where the boundaries between fact and fiction are often unclear and not necessarily very significant. More specifically, I am calling it a “colonial bildungsroman” because the conditions of coming of age under colonialism raise issues which distinguish writing on this subject from more familiar versions in Western literature.⁴

The central theme of any bildungsroman is the passage from childhood to the threshold of adulthood. In the colonial variant, this process usually culminates in some kind of exile, with its major vehicle being the alien European school. Such narratives usually expend considerable effort upon depicting the world left behind as a result of the hero's movement: the world of the parents (often already located in an urban, partially “modernized” setting, which provides a base for the literacy required to produce the very work in which it is recalled); and the world of the grandparents, located in a more distant time and space (often an “ancestral village”) and represented as a purer version of “tradition.” Along with the distance established between the author and his familial past, colonial narratives of this 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 critical detail.⁵ Hampaté Bâ 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 system 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 chef de quartier in Bandiagara is charged by the French administration with providing two children of notable 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 consigns 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

Hampaté Bâ 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 unlikely 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 École Normale (Teachers Training College, later the Ponty School) at Gorée (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 Français). This official punishes the recalcitrant scholar by sending him “au Diable,” which translates into an assignment 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 Gorée, so the account of colonial childhood does terminate in the obligatory exile, complete with a tearful farewell scene between mother and child.

The difference between the exile of Hampaté Bâ and that of a youthful 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 interior of his own extended homeland. He goes there, however, not in withdrawal from European culture but rather as its classically hybrid representative, a “blanc-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 Gorée. The level of literacy necessary for bureaucratic work of this kind has given rise to some autobiographical accounts of great personal 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 Hampaté Bâ 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 Hampaté Bâ'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. Hampaté Bâ 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.⁷ Hampaté Bâ 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 of a secondary Tukuleur ruling lineage. These dramas 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 principal 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 Hampaté Bâ's case, however, it has the additional and 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 (courtyard) 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 (considered 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 displaced 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 participate in forms of his own cultural almost entirely uninflected by colonialism 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 Amkoullel (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 “à 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 celebrates the result.

It is in his pre-adolescent role as chief of a waalde (Fulbe age association) in Bandiagara that Amadou experiences the most full and autonomous version of the culture he will evoke in his writings. The waalde operates in the streets of the town without any adult supervision or conscious preparation for later life; indeed, Amadou's mother evokes the pranks carried on by this group as evidence that her son is a juvenile delinquent 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 of a female counterpart association, Amadou and his associates do act out the key roles of Fulbe adulthood, 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 without 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 age in modern Western society, the events of Hampaté Bâ'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 Hampaté Bâ'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, Hampaté Bâ 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 fresh wax.

(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 followed 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). Hampaté Bâ, 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 Hampaté Bâ'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, François 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 interpreter's historical identity (Chemin¹²) and to undermine the ethnographic authority of the French official's publication (Ricard, untitled paper).

Hampaté Bâ, however, does not express any sense of exposé 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 Hampaté Bâ, 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 performance abilities and a first step towards a necessary program of preservation. It is no more fitting for commentators armed with the wisdom of postcolonial theory to simply dismiss colonial or any other early ethnography, 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 Hampaté Bâ's renditions of oral traditions (and even to some extent in the collaborative publication of Equilbecq and Wangrin) but it reaches a new level in works such as Wangrin and Amkoullel.

It is not possible within the compass of the present essay (and will probably not be possible at all until Hampaté Bâ's full archive along with related documentation is available for full scholarly examination) to explain how Hampaté Bâ arrived at the French-language literary powers displayed in his later work. This capacity clearly owes a great deal to the author's long “postgraduate” education in the colonial bureaucracy, in IFAN, and in subsequent sojourns in France. The influence of various IFAN mentors (some of whom are also the co-authors of Hampaté Bâ's early books), and of his editor, and literary executrix, Hélène Heckmann, cannot be evaluated here. Nor do we now have much information on the French reading that Hampaté Bâ 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 Amkoullel.

Although the primary issue to which the present essay addresses itself is Hampaté Bâ'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 autobiographical writing. Such an investigation, however, must be prefaced both with a disclaimer—I am not sufficiently expert in such forms to make any very definitive judgements—and a qualification—the kinds of oral performance upon which Hampaté Bâ models himself are themselves already “colonized” in ways that the author does not always acknowledge.

Hampaté Bâ 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 contains 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). Hampaté Bâ's considerable ability as a raconteur is explained primarily as a capacity of memory (see above) and secondly by exposure to “traditionalistes” such as Koullel. Before attempting to understand what Hampaté Bâ 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 Hampaté Bâ '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 Hampaté Bâ, however, the various categories of performers (whether instrumental or verbal) who fall under this heading belong to clearly designated endogamous descent groups (“castes”) and are associated with specific genres of music and spoken text (see Austen, In Search of Sunjata). When Hampaté Bâ 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 jali.¹⁵ Far from acknowledging griots as an inspiration for his own renditions of “tradition,” Hampaté Bâ 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” ‘I have an inborn hatred for the way griots shout praises’ (OC 33). Hampaté Bâ'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 noting 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 Hampaté Bâ, none, as far as I know, are transcribed from the performances of griots.¹⁶

The ethnographic basis for Hampaté Bâ'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 Hampaté Bâ ever maintained a griot in his adult life,¹⁷ but in any case it would have been unseemly for him to take on himself the functions of praise singing and epic performance associated with griots.

Yet, there is some suggestion that Hampaté Bâ's verbal performances are somewhat closer to those associated with griots than he would like to admit. Early in Amkoullel 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 Bâ 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.

Hampaté Bâ 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 Théodore 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 Hampaté Bâ elsewhere 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 ambiguity; Hampaté Bâ 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 Hampaté Bâ seeks to develop his concept of “traditionalist” more fully, his references are all to someone else.

Within the text of Amkoullel, the closest that Hampaté Bâ 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 Hampaté Bâ's positive accounts of his family from the style of griots' praise or even the Mande epics with which Amkoullel has been (I believe erroneously) compared (see Amselle) is the shift in emphasis from declamations and displays of power to more contemplative reflections on moral behavior. This morality is often linked to Islam and may thus have some model in the performances of finew, 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 paramount 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 of a string of moral precepts blended with panegyric than an act of contemplation. I will suggest below that the form of moral discourse that occurs in key moments of the memoir may have some European sources.

While griots occupy quite a bit of space in Amkoullel, very few pages are devoted to anyone who represents Hampaté Bâ 's chosen model of the traditionalist. The brevity and ambiguity in the presentation of Koullel has already been noted. A different set of issues arises from the relatively more extended passage (198-202) devoted to another traditionalist, Danfo Siné, whom Hampaté Bâ knew only during his very young years in Bougouni. Danfo, a Bambara, was the possessor of both great musical skills and considerable local lore, the latter deriving from his role as a numu (“casted” blacksmith) and a leader of the komo power society. The discussion of Danfo provides Hampaté Bâ with a local term for “traditionalist,” the Bamana doma, meaning literally a man of knowledge (dom). As a non-Bambara and, more especially, as a child of at most eight, Amadou could not begin to be initiated into the practices and status that would provide a contextualized understanding of Danfo's erudition.¹⁹ Instead, he encounters only the publicly performed version of this knowledge, as provided for African outsiders like himself in his stepfather's court and in the open spaces of the town.

What Hampaté Bâ transfers into writing is thus quite aptly defined as “tradition,” in the sense that this term implies of cultural practices abstracted from an earlier functional setting and transformed into a representation of the past. I do not mean to imply here that there is ever an “authentic” moment in the history of any culture during which its entire representational repertoire is embedded in fully active political, social, and religious institutions. However, in the case of colonial Africa the abruptness of European imposition and the perceived distance between the local and the global/modern create a sense of “tradition” far more distinct than in most historical settings. Hampaté Bâ's IFAN career and much of his subsequent writing was dedicated to presenting such lore and art to a European or Europeanized African audience. His autobiography brings to life the experiences by which the conditions for such representation were established within a colonized but not yet Europeanized African world.

For the inhabitants of this world one important bridge between European scribal culture and African oracity was Islam. Hampaté Bâ notes (332, 338) that his previous Quranic training allowed him to grasp quickly the rote memorization and alphabet lessons that comprised the main elements of his first French school classes. Despite later efforts to resume Quranic studies and learn Arabic, as well as his leadership in regional religious life, Hampaté Bâ never appears to have attained the ability to read advanced works of Islamic learning in their original language. However, in 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 learning was reversed, as Hampaté Bâ transcribed his Fulbe dialogues with Cerno Bokar into French, thus producing one of his most important archives and the basis of several books (Hampaté Bâ and Cardaire; Hampaté Bâ, Vie et enseignement; Brenner, West African Sufi, espec. 444-48).

This is not the place to analyze the Islam of either Cerno Bokar or Hampaté Bâ, both of which have been subjected to considerable examination by more qualified scholars (see Brenner, West African Sufi, “Becoming Muslim,” and “Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Tijani francophone”; see also Sanankoua). From a literary perspective, however, it is clear that Hampaté Bâ'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 Amkoullel. But it is, after all, Hampaté Bâ 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 Hampaté Bâ'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 Hampaté Bâ's “postcolonial” writings.

In the end the effectiveness of Wangrin and Amkoullel may rest mainly on Hampaté Bâ'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 “knowledge.” 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 religion. The appeal of the memoirs is certainly based upon their abandonment 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. Hampaté Bâ'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 cautiously, is in the literature of the French language, which is, after all, Hampaté Bâ's main instrument of written self-expression.

Despite the argument in the first section of this essay, we can assume that Hampaté Bâ did not compose Amkoullel with any European or probably 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 Hampaté Bâ's claims that his knowledge of events affecting his grandparents, his parents, and his stepfather came from oral accounts by older relatives 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 Hampaté Bâ's inquiries. They are equally unlikely, for reasons already discussed above, to draw upon the rhetoric of formal African literary performance or Islamic teachings. It is thus possible that Hampaté Bâ 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 Hampaté Bâ'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 lineage, has undertaken to hide himself from the Tukuleur conquerors of Macina. Hampaté Bâ père 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” passage in this episode is then put in the mouth of Anta N'diobdi, Amadou's grandmother:

“Certes, il est plus honteux d'être ingrat que d'être garçon boucher.”

Elle se tourna vers Hampaté:

“Va, lui dit-elle, retourne chez Allamodio, sers-le, je l'accepte. Mon âme en pleurera chaque jour de dépit, mais ma raison séchera les larmes que l'orgueil familial me fera verser. Quand c'est l'honneur que fail accepter un sacrifice, celui-ci devient sublime. Tu choisis de vivre dans une obscurité opaque alors qu'un soleil grand et radieux s'offre à répandre sa lumière sur toi. Puisse le Seigneur tenir compte de ta conduite et faire sortir de toi des fils qui rehausseront ton nom!”

“Certainly, it is more shameful to be ungrateful than to be a butcher boy”

She turned towards Hampaté:

“Go, she said, return to Allamodio [the butcher], serve him, I accept it. My soul will weep daily in chagrin over this, but my reason 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, Niélé, whom Hampaté Bâ names as his informant²¹—the effect is to give a highly “literary” quality to the autobiography. 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 Hampaté Bâ has managed to find a voice that is postcolonial in its liberation 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 postmodernism or “magical realism.”²³

Amadou Hampaté Bâ holds such a unique place in modern African literature 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 Hampaté Bâ'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 réappropriation”). The most striking difference, of course, is that Hampaté Bâ 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 Amkoullel 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 this article while excusing him from any responsibility for the outcome.

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 Théodore Monod in the 1940s (see Brenner, “Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Tijani francophone”).

4. For more extensive discussion of these comparative issues as applied to Camara Laye's L'enfant 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'école, but this is as much a postcolonial as a colonial work.

6. Brenner (“Becoming Muslim” 470) sees such action as “virtually unheard of” in its time, implying that it points toward the ecumenical Islam later propagated by Hampaté Bâ through Cerno Bokar's teachings. Benjamin Soares (private communication) has suggested, however, that accounts of such advice from Quranic teachers are common in the biographies of Western-educated Malian Muslims (most of them certainly younger than Hampaté Bâ).

7. The Tukuleur, a Fulbe-speaking people of northeastern Senegal (Futa Toro) invaded central Mali in the 1860s under the leadership of al-Haj Umar Tall, a representative of the Tijani Sufi order. This jihad destroyed the two states that previously dominated the region, Segu and Macina (the latter itself the product of a previous Fulbe jihad that is the subject of Hampaté Bâ's first book, L'empire peul du Macina).

8. Bandiagara also gave him some access to Dogon culture, which may have influenced his later work with French anthropologists but is not evoked in Amkoullel.

9. These circumstances need to be taken into account when analyzing the considerable attention that Hampaté Bâ devoted, in both his IFAN and “autonomous” writings, to Fulbe “initiation texts.”

10. An African version of this latter genre, describing both a literary and a political-administrative life, is Diop. OC falls somewhere between the two categories and it will be interesting to see what the so-far unpublished third volume of Hampaté Bâ's memoirs is like.

11. The dating is unclear from the relationship between a list of the manuscripts in his archives in 1969 (see Sow) and later accounts by his literary executor, Heckmann.

12. For further confirmation, see Heckmann.

13. “In Africa, every time that an elder dies it is as if a library had burned down.”

14. For a further discussion, which includes a critical appreciation of Equilbecq, see my “Africans Speak.”

15. It is thus ironic that in the English translation of his 1981 UNESCO history article, “griot,” which was then still considered unfamiliar to non-French readers, becomes “jeli.”

16. These texts are all Fulbe rather than Mande (see bibliography in Devey), but the Fulbe have a comparable tradition of praise poetry and epics performed by groups with similar status to the jeliw (see Seydou).

17. Devey, relying upon unpublished sections of Hampaté Bâ'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 nineteenth-century Islamic religious wars, recorded at great length from nongriot sources by Hampaté Bâ (L'empire peul du Macina).

19. In his 1981 essay, Hampaté Bâ 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 Hampaté Bâ'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, or 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 Condé's Ségou and Les enfants de Ségou, 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 this 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.

Works Cited

Amselle, Jean-Loup. “L'autobiographie d'Amadou-Wangrin.” Quinzaine litteraire 586 (1-5 Oct. 1991): 26-27.

Austen, Ralph A. “Africans Speak, Colonialism Writes: The Transcription and Translation of Oral Literature before World War II.” Cahiers de Littérature Orale 28 (1990): 29-53.

———. “The Historical Transformation of Genres: Sunjata as Panegyric, Folktale, Epic and Novel.” Austen, In Search of Sunjata 69-87.

———. “Coming of Age through Colonial Education: African Autobiography as Reluctant Bildungsroman (the Case of Camara Laye).” Boston U Discussion Papers in the African Humanities, 2000..

———, ed. In Search of Sunjata: The Mande Epic as History, Literature and Performance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999.

Brenner, Louis. West African Sufi: The Religious Heritage and Spiritual Quest of Cerno Bokar Saalif Taal. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

———. “Becoming Muslim in Soudan français.” Le temps des marabouts: itinéraires et stratégies islamiques en Afrique occidentale français v. 1880-1960. Ed. David Robinson and Jean-Louis Triaud. Paris: Karthala, 1997. 467-92.

———. “Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Tijani francophone.” L'ascension d'une confrérie musulmane: la Tijaniyya en Afrique de l'Ouest et du Nord (XIXe-XXe siècles). Ed. David Robinson and Jean-Louis Triaud. Paris: Karthala, forthcoming.

Camara Laye. L'enfant noir. Paris: Plon, 1953.

Chemin, Roger. “L'enfant peul, l'interprète, et le commis des affaires indigènes.” Lectures de l'oeuvre d'Hampaté Bâ. Ed. Robert Jouanny. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1992.

Clifford, James. “Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griale's Initiation.” The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. 55-71.

Devey, Muriel. Hampaté Bâ, l'homme de la tradition. Senegal: Livre Sud, 1993.

Diop, Birago. La plume raboutée. 3 vols. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1978, 1982, 1985.

Hale, Thomas A. Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.

Hampaté Bâ, Amadou. Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar: le sage de Bandiagara. Paris: Seuil, 1980.

———. “The Living Tradition.” General History of Africa/UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, vol 1, Methodology and African Prehistory. Ed. Joseph Ki-Zerbo. London: Heinemann, 1981. 166-203.

———. L'étrange destin de Wangrin ou, Les roueries d'un interprète africain. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1973.

———. Amkoullel, l'enfant peul. Mémoires. Arles: Actes Sud, 1991, 1992 (Citations from 1992 paperback edition.)

———. Oui mon commandant! Mémoires (II). [OC]Arles: Actes Sud, 1994.

——— and J. Daget. L'empire peul du Macina. I (1818-1853). Bamako: IFAN, 1955.

——— and Marcel Cardaire. Tierno Bokar: le sage de Bandiagara. Paris, Présence Africaine, 1957.

Heckmann, Hélène. “Annexe I. Genèse et authenticité des ouvrages L'étrange destin de Wangrin et la serie des Mémoires.” Hampaté Bâ, OC 389-93.

———. “Annexe II. La véritable identité de “Wangrin.” Hampaté Bâ OC 394-95.

Kayamba, Martin. “The Story of Martin Kayamba.” Ten Africans. Ed. M. Perham. London: Faber and Faber, 1936. 173-99.

Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 1987.

Monod, Théodore. “Au pays de Kaydara.” Première conférence internationale des Africanistes de l'Ouest: Comptes Rendus. Paris: Adrian-Maisonneuve, 1950. I: 19-31.

Nirad Chaudhuri. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. London: Macmillan, 1951.

Ricard, Alain. “La réappropriation de la signature brèves réflections sur l'oeuvre d'Amadou Hampaté Bâ.” Jeune Afrique Economie 56 (14 Feb. 1985): 203-07.

———. Untitled paper presented at African Studies Association Meeting, Philadelphia, 13 Nov. 1999.

Sanankoua, Bintou. “Amadou Hampaté Bâ (v. 1900-1991).” Le temps des marabouts: itinéraires et stratégies islamiques en Afrique occidentale français v. 1880-1960. Ed. David Robinson and Jean-Louis Triaud. Paris: Karthala, 1997. 395-411.

Seydou, Christiane, ed. Silâmaka & Poullôri: récit épique peul / Raconté par Tinguidji. Paris: A. Colin, 1972.

Sow. Alpha Ibrahim. Inventaire du fonds Amadou Hampaté Bâ. Paris: Klincksieck, 1970.

Soyinka, Wole. Aké: The Years of Childhood. New York: Random, 1981.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper, 1937.