Yambo Ouologuem (August 22, 1940 – October 14, 2017) was a Malian writer. His first novel, Le devoir de violence (English: Bound to Violence, 1968), won the Prix Renaudot. He later published Lettre à la France nègre (1969), and Les mille et une bibles du sexe (1969) under the pseudonym Utto Rodolph. Le devoir de violence was initially well-received, but critics later charged that Ouologuem had plagiarized passages from Graham Greene and other established authors such as André Schwartz-Bart. Ouologuem turned away from the Western press as a result of the matter, and remained reclusive for the rest of his life.
Life
Yambo Ouologuem was born an only son in an aristocratic Tidjaniya Malian family in 1940 in Bandiagara, the main city in the Dogon region of Mali (then a part of French Soudan). His father, Boukary Ouologuem, was a prominent landowner and school inspector. He learned several African languages and gained fluency in French, English, and Spanish. After matriculating at a Lycée in the capital city of Bamako, he went to Paris in 1960, where he studied sociology, philosophy and English at Lycée Henry IV and from 1964 to 1966 he taught at the Lycée de Clarenton in suburban Paris, while studying for a doctorate in sociology at the École Normale Supérieure.
His major work, Le devoir de violence (1968), resulted in controversy and a continuing academic debate over charges of plagiarism. In 1969, he published a volume of biting essays, Lettre à la France nègre as well as an erotic novel, Les mille et une bibles du sexe, published under the pseudonym of Utto Rodolph. After the plagiarism controversy over Le devoir de violence, Ouologuem returned to Mali in the late seventies. Until 1984, he was the director of a youth centre in the small town of Sévaré near Mopti in central Mali, where he wrote and edited a series of children's textbooks. He is reputed to have led a secluded Islamic life as a marabout until his death on 14 October 2017 in Sévaré, aged 77.
Le devoir de violence
Le devoir de violence (published in English as Bound to Violence) was published in 1968 by Editions du Seuil. It was met with wide critical acclaim, winning the Prix Renaudot that very year, the first African author to do so. Ouologuem became a celebrity, and Le Monde called him one of "the rare intellectuals of international stature presented to the world by Black Africa", comparing him to Leopold Sedar Senghor. It was translated into English (Bound to Violence) by Ralph Manheim in 1971. Ouologuem's novel is harshly critical of African nationalism, and "reserves its greatest hostility for the violence Africans committed against other Africans". Some critics felt that the praise and initial response of "authenticity" for the novel, which is often historically inaccurate, was a Western response. These critics viewed it as a rejection of a glorified view of African history: a review in The Nation said that Ouologuem had "shattered the ... myth of a glorious African past".
However, the novel was soon mired in controversy, as some of its passages appeared to have been plagiarized from Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield (first published in 1934) and the French novel The Last of the Just (Le dernier des justes, 1959) by Andre Schwartz-Bart. After a lawsuit by Greene, the book was banned in France, and has only recently been re-published there. At the time, Ouologuem claimed that he had originally used quotations on some of the controversial passages and that the quotations were deleted by his editor, but his original manuscript is not available to verify this; this fact was not denied by his publisher. He also claimed that in some early interviews, he had openly spoken of excerpting these passages, which is why it was not as controversial in France. Since 1977, the English edition has carried the note: "The Publishers acknowledge the use of certain passages on pages 54–56 from It's a Battlefield by Graham Greene." Despite the controversy, the novel remains one of the landmarks of postcolonial African literature, notable for its "cultural sweep: legends, myths, chronicles, religious matter woven into an opulent narrative; for eloquence: the cadence and music of the prose".