Quote by Amadou Hampâté Bâ: “In Africa, when an elder dies, a library burns.”

Before written records, knowledge was carried inside people — in stories, songs, histories, and memories passed down across generations. When an elder dies without passing this on, that knowledge is gone forever. This is a call to listen to old people before it is too late, and to honour oral tradition as a real form of knowledge.

Bâ spoke this at a UNESCO General Conference in 1960, the year sixteen African nations gained independence. Colonial education systems had systematically devalued and displaced African oral traditions. His intervention at UNESCO was a call to recognise oral knowledge as legitimate and to fund its preservation before entire knowledge systems disappeared.

Malian writer, oral historian, and diplomat who devoted his life to recording West African oral traditions before they were lost. He represented Mali at UNESCO in the 1960s and 1970s, and his memoir Amkoullel, l'enfant peul remains a celebrated document of pre-colonial Sahelian life. He coined the phrase that became the rallying cry for African oral history.