Malian writer, whose most famous novel, Le Devoir de violence (1968, Bound to Violence), is a satirical portrayal of African spiritual values. Ouologuem depicted African participation in colonial rule and the role of local overlords who sold their subjects into bondage in league with Arab slave dealers. The postmodernist work was published to great acclaim in Paris and it received the prestigious Prix Théophraste-Renaudot.

Cannibal or not cannibal
Speak up
Ah you think yourself clever
And try to look proud

Now we'll see you get what's coming to you
What is your last word
Poor condemned man
(from 'When Negro Teeth Speak')

Yambo Ouologuem was born in Bandiagary, in the Dogon country, French Sudan (now Mali), to a ruling-class family. He was the only son of a land owner and school inspector. As result of his background, Ouologuem learned several African languages and became fluent in English, French, and Spain. After attending a lycée in Bamako, Mali, he went in 1960 to France to continue his education. He attended the famous Lycée Henry IV and from 1964 to 1966 he taught at the Lycée de Charenton in Paris and then continued his studies for his doctorate in sociology. In the late 1970s Ouologuem returned to his home country and worked until 1984 as a director of a youth center near Mopti in the central Mali. Ouologuem has led a secluded life in the Sahel, devoting himself to religion. In Christopher Wise's study on Ouologuem from 1999, the author was labelled as an Islamic militant.

Bound to Violence told the tale of the fictional Empire of Nakem from the 13th-century to the end of the European colonial rule. Ouologuem sees that the ancient African emperors, the Moslems, and finally the European colonial administrators were responsible for the black African's "slave mentality." These three forces produces "négraille" (a word coined by Ouologuem, meaning "nigger rabble" in its translation). In addition Ouologuem was skeptical about the potential for liberation through struggle. "The French worker with his minimum wage, tied to certain activities, restricted, in some way ostracized, is a Negro", the author said in an interview in The Guardian (28 Nov. 1968). In the last scene a descendant of the early Islamic Dynasty of Saïf and a representative of the European colonial system play diplomatically chess, but the power game continues. "I have a horror of folkloric attitudes to Africa", said Ouologuem in 1968. His disenchanted vision collided directly with Léopold Senghor's concept of négritude and Africanist mystifications, which later was crystallized in Alex Haley's famous novel Roots. Ayi Kwei Armah shared later Ouologuem's view in The Healers (1978), in which one of the characters becomes an ally of the colonialists in order to consolidate his power.

"The problem of African literature is fundamentally linked to that of African unity. It is certain that if these racial and political barriers existing among African people could be pulled down the literature would respond. It is because we haven't yet succeeded in this that we have shut ourselves in ghettos of a sort." (Ouologuem in 1969)

Bound to Violence went on to become a scandal when critics discovered that it used material among others from Graham Greene's thriller It's a Battlefield (1934), set in London. Greene had spent a year in West Africa during the World War II and wrote The Heart of the Matter (1948), which was partly based on his experiences and people he met there. For legal reasons the English publisher of Ouologuem's work was obliged to acknowledge the "use of certain passages" from Greene. "I object to Bound to Violence because of this image of Africa as "bound to violence," which I don't accept," said Chinua Achebe in an interview. "Yet as a strategy for reinterpreting African history it is two thousand times more successful than Ayi Kwei Armah's [Two Thousand Seasons]." You can see that Ouologuem's book moves; it has an epic scope and movement." (from Conversations With Chinua Achebe, ed. by by Bernth Lindofors, 1997) The Nobel writer Wole Soyinka attacked the author because of his portrayal of homoerotic tenderness and linked Ouologuem's work with Western decadence and such writers as Jean Genet and James Baldwin (Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions by Randy P. Conner, David Hatfield Sparks, 2004).

Mohamed-Saleh Dembri called the book an imitation of André Schwarz-Bart's family novel Le Dernier des Justes (1959), which was awarded the Prix Goncourt. Some critics pointed out that the author continued the great tradition of the African oral chronicler, the griot, and in oral culture recycling is taken for granted. "How in profound displeasure, with perfumed mouth and eloquence on his tongue, Saif ben Isaac al-Heit endeavored to mobilize the energies of the fanatical people against the invader; how to that end he spread reports of fanatical people against the invader; how to that end he spread reports of daily miracles throughout the Nakem Empire - earthquakes, the opening of tombs, resurrections of saints, fountains of milk springing up in his path, visions of archangels stepping out of the sunset, village women drawing buckets from the well and finding them full of blood; how on one of his journeys he transformed three pages of the Holy Book, the Koran, into as many doves, which flew on ahead of him as though to summon the people to Saif's banner; and with what diplomacy he feigned indifference to the goods of this world: in all that there is nothing out of the ordinary." (from Bound to Violence) Ouologuem also parodied the religious theme of Camara Ley's novel The Radiance of the King (1954), inspired in part by Sufi mysticism.

After Bound to Violence Ouologuem published Lettre ouverte à la France-nègre, a satirical pamphlet, which criticized paternalistic French liberals and was addressed to General de Gaulle. His other works include Les Milles et un bibles du sexe (1969), described as "frankly pornographic" and published under the pseudonym Utto Rodolph. Several of Ouologuem's poems have appeared in Nouvelle somme.

For further reading: 'Ouologuem's Blueprint for "Le Devoir de violence"' by E. Sellin, in Research in African Literatures 2, (1971); 'Fiction and Subversion' by A. Songolo, in Présence africaine, no. 120 (1981); Rape and Representation, ed. by Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (1991); 'De l'histoire à sa métaphore dans Le Devoir de violence de Yambo Ouologuem' by Josias Semujanga, in Études françaises, vol. 31, no 1, été (1995); Yambo Ouologuem: Postcolonial Writer, Islamic Militant, ed. by Christopher Wise (1999)

Selected works:

• Le Devoir de violence, 1968 - Bound to Violence (trans. by Ralph Manheim)
• Lettre à la France nègre, 1969
• Les Milles et un bibles du sexe, 1969 (published under the Utto Rodolph)
• Terres du Soleil, 1971 (with others)