Yambo Ouologuem (August 22, 1940 – October 14, 2017) was a Malian writer. His first novel, Le devoir de violence (English: Bound to Violence, 1968), won the Prix Renaudot. He later published Lettre à la France nègre (1969), and Les mille et une bibles du sexe (1969) under the pseudonym Utto Rodolph. Le devoir de violence was initially well-received, but critics later charged that Ouologuem had plagiarized passages from Graham Greene and other established authors such as André Schwartz-Bart. Ouologuem turned away from the Western press as a result of the matter, and remained reclusive for the rest of his life.
Yambo Ouologuem was born an only son in an aristocratic Tidjaniya Malian family in 1940 in Bandiagara, the main city in the Dogon region of Mali (then a part of French Soudan). His father, Boukary Ouologuem, 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 in controversy and a continuing academic debate over charges of plagiarism. In 1969, he published a volume of biting essays, Lettre à la France nègre as well as an erotic novel, Les mille et une bibles du sexe, published under the pseudonym of Utto Rodolph. After the plagiarism controversy over Le devoir de violence, Ouologuem returned to Mali in the late seventies.
Until 1984, he was the director of a youth centre in the small town of Sévaré near Mopti in central Mali, where he wrote and edited a series of children’s textbooks. He is reputed to have led a secluded Islamic life as a marabout until his death on 14 October 2017 in Sévaré, aged 77.
