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

This profound metaphor highlights the immense value of oral tradition and indigenous knowledge. It suggests that with the passing of an elder, an entire repository of unwritten history, wisdom, and culture is irrevocably lost to humanity.

In the newly independent African nations, much traditional knowledge was oral. Bâ highlighted the urgency of preserving this wisdom by emphasizing that the passing of elders meant an irreversible loss of unrecorded history and culture.

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.