Quote by Amadou Hampâté Bâ: “When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.”

Every elder carries decades of lived experience, stories, practical knowledge, and cultural memory that were never written down. When they die, all of that is gone — permanently. This calls on us to listen more carefully to older generations before their irreplaceable knowledge disappears forever.

Bâ delivered this line in a speech to UNESCO in 1960, the year often called Africa's Year of Independence, when seventeen African nations gained independence from European colonial powers. Amidst the excitement of liberation, Bâ urged that the destruction of indigenous knowledge systems under colonialism also had to be urgently addressed.

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.