Life
Yambo Ouloguem was born an only son in an aristocratic Malian family in 1940 in Bandiagara, the main city in the Dogon region of Mali (then a part of French Soudan). His father was a prominent landowner and school inspector. He learned several African languages and gained fluency in French, English, and Spanish. After matriculating at a Lycée in the capital city of Bamako, he went to Paris in 1960, where he studied sociology, philosophy and English at Lycée Henry IV and from 1964 to 1966 he taught at the Lycée de Clarenton in suburban Paris, while studying for a doctorate in sociology at the École Normale Supérieure.
His major work, Le devoir de violence (1968), resulted controversy and a continuing academic debate over charges of plagiarism.
In 1969, he published out a volume of biting essays, Lettre à la France nègre as well as an erotic novel, Les Milles et un bibles du sexe, published under the pseudonym of Utto Rodolph.
After the plagiarism controversy over Le Devoir de violence, Ouloguem returned to Mali in the late seventies. Until 1984, he was the director of a Youth centre near Mopti in central Mali, where he wrote and edited a series of children's textbooks. He is reputed to have been leading a secluded Islamic life as a Marabout since then.
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