Birago Diop

Birago Ismaël Diop (11 December 1906 – 25 November 1989) was a Senegalese poet, storyteller, veterinarian, and diplomat. He helped revive interest in African folktales and made important contributions to the Négritude literary movement.

Diop was born in Ouakam, a Dakar neighborhood, to Ismaël Diop and Sokhna Diawara. His father had disappeared—possibly dead—two months before his birth. Raised by his mother, aunt, and extended family alongside his older brothers Massyla and Youssoupha, he was introduced to folktales and literary culture by his siblings. In 1920, he won a scholarship to Lycée Faidherbe in Saint-Louis, then Senegal’s capital. There he became fascinated with Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, and others, and began writing his own poetry. In the late 1920s, he worked as a nurse at a military hospital in Saint-Louis. In 1928, he went to France to study veterinary medicine at the University of Toulouse, graduating in 1933.

After graduating, Diop interned at the Institute for Exotic Veterinary Medicine in Alfort. During this time, he met many African, African-American, and Caribbean intellectuals and artists in the Négritude movement, including Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon Damas. One of his first publications, "Kotje Barma ou les Toupets Apophtegmes," appeared in *L'Étudiant noir*. He married Marie-Louise Pradère, a French accountant, with whom he had two daughters, Renée and Andrée. In 1934, he returned to Africa and worked as a veterinary surgeon for the French colonial government in the French Sudan (now Mali) from 1934 to 1937 and again from 1937 to 1942. While heading the cattle-inspection service in parts of Senegal and Mali, he met many storytellers, including the Wolof griot Amadou Koumba. Many of his poems and tales draw on the oral traditions he encountered in childhood and during this period.

In 1942, during World War II, Diop returned to France for two years, working again at the Institute for Exotic Veterinary Medicine and reconnecting with old friends. Encouraged by Damas, he published "Un jugement" in *La Revue du Monde* and a version of "Sarzan," and began writing the tales that would become *Tales of Amadou Koumba*. Homesick, he wrote in "The Humps": "Here, far from my home in Senegal, my eyes are surrounded by closed horizons... I seek the vast expanses of the Savannah, and find only bare mountains, sombre as ancient prostrate giants that the snow refuses to bury because of their misdeed...."

Returning to Africa in 1944, Diop served as director of zoological technical services in Ivory Coast and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) from 1946 to 1950, then worked in Mauritania from 1950 to 1954. His first collection, *Tales of Amadou Koumba*, was published by Damas through Fasquelle in 1947. In 1950, he shared the Grand Prix littéraire de l'Afrique occidentale française with Ousmane Socé Diop. A second volume, *Les Nouveaux Contes d'Amadou Koumba*, appeared in 1958, followed by *Contes et Lavanes* in 1963, which won the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire in 1964. Diop later acknowledged that the tales came from several storytellers, not only Amadou Koumba. They blend humor, fantasy, and realism, with people, supernatural beings, and animals interacting.

After Senegal’s independence, Diop was appointed the country’s first ambassador to Tunisia in 1961. Accepting the post, he said he had "broken his pen" ("cassé sa plume"), suggesting he had stopped writing. But in 1964 he returned to Dakar, opened a veterinary clinic, and remained active in literary circles, publishing in the women’s magazine *Awa* and adapting his story "L'Os" into the play *L'Os de Mor Lam*. Between 1978 and 1989, he published five volumes of memoirs: *La Plume raboutée* (1978), *À Rebrousse-temps* (1982), *À Rebrousse-gens* (1985), *Du temps de...* (1986), and *Et les yeux pour me dire* (1989).

Birago Diop died in Dakar on 25 November 1989 at age 82.