Death of the Guinean writer and historian Djibril Tamsir Niane

Djibril Tamsir Niane succumbed on March 8 to Covid-19 in Dakar, Senegal, where he had lived in recent years and where he had been hospitalized. The news was announced to an AFP correspondent by his grandson and namesake Djibril Tamsir Niane. “It’s a huge loss for our country for everything it stood for. It was a library, but he recorded his knowledge in writing, and now it’s up to us to pass on this heritage through his library, which he founded and which bears his name in Conakry, ”he said. -he explains.

An intellectual rooted in international influence

Djibril Tamsir Niane was a specialist in the history and culture of the Mandingo peoples of West Africa encountered in Guinea, Mali and Senegal. Author at the dawn of the 1970s of Soundjata or the Mandingo epic, he had directed the drafting of volume IV of theGeneral History of Africa, a vast project launched by Unesco to remedy ignorance about the continent’s past. He was also the author of plays and had been imprisoned for his writings under the regime of the autocrat Sékou Touré in the 1960s. Suddenly, he had been forced into exile. Honorary professor at Howard University in Washington and at the University of Tokyo, Djibril Tamsir Niane was also the father of the former model Katoucha Niane, revealed by Yves Saint Laurent and found dead at the age of 47, in February 2008, in the Seine in Paris.

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