Ahmadou Kourouma obituary

Ahmadou Kourouma, Cotê d'Ivoire's leading novelist, died on December 11 in in a French hospital. The 76-year old author of such works as Suns of Independence (1968), Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote (1998) and Allah n'est pas Oblige (2000), had been admitted to hospital for treatment of a benign tumor.

He wrote his first novel, Suns of Independence, in the early 1960s but had difficulty in finding a publisher and it was only after submitting it for a University of Montreal competition, and winning, that it came to be published in 1968. It was first appeared in English translation in 1981. Kourouma's second novel, Monnew, was only published in 1990, and Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote only in 1998. His most recent novel, the still untranslated Allah n'est pas Oblige (2000), deals with the issue of child soldiers under the West African regimes in Liberia and Sierre Leone.

He was born in 1927 in Boundiali, Cotê d'Ivoire. Kourouma's family belonged to the assimilated elite, but he was brought up by an uncle who was on the other side of the fence.

As a student Kourouma took part in protests at the Bamako Technical High School in Mali. Then he was drafted into the French army and ordered to Côte d'Ivoire to participate in a crackdown on the emerging liberation movement. When he refused to do this, he was drafted into the French colonial army in Indochina, a posting he only accepted because Bernard Dadier, then Côte d'Ivoire's most famous writer, persuaded him that military experience would prepare him for the anti-colonial war which he believed to be inevitable.

The next stage of Kourouma's life came when he travelled to France to study science-a field spurned by most children of the African elite. He returned to Côte d'Ivoire just after independence and worked as an insurance executive, but did not stay long. "I was impervious to the magic of the
single party, which claimed to be the only form of authority capable of developing the country," he says. Kourouma was jailed for a few months and eventually went into exile.

His second homecoming, in 1970, was almost as brief. When his play Le diseur de Verite ("The Truth Teller"), was published in 1974, it was deemed "revolutionary". So he left the country and lived in Cameroon and Togo until 1993, continuing his career in private insurance companies.

For a more complete overview of his life and work, read the This Day article on AllAfrica.com.