Bernard Binlin Dadié

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Bernard Dadié

Bernard Binlin Dadié (10 January 1916 – 9 March 2019) was an

Côte d'Ivoire
from 1977 to 1986.

Biography

Dadié was born in

Grand Bassam and then the Ecole William Ponty.[1] He worked for the French government in Dakar, Senegal, at the Institut français d’Afrique noire, then returned to his homeland in 1947.[2] He became part of its movement for independence. Before Côte d'Ivoire's independence in 1960, he was detained for sixteen months for taking part in demonstrations that opposed the French colonial government.[1]

In his writing, influenced by his experiences of

F. J. Amon d'Aby, he founded the Cercle Culturel et Folklorique de la Côte d'Ivoire (CCFCI) in 1953.[3] In 1955, he published a collection called The Black Cloth: A Collection of African Folktales
(in French).

Dadié was rediscovered with the release of Steven Spielberg's 1997 movie Amistad[4] which features the music by American composer John Williams. The choral text of Dadié's poem, "Dry Your Tears, Afrika" (“Sèche Tes Pleurs“) is used for a song of the same name. Published in 1967, the poem is about coming home to Africa.[5]

Dadié was the brother of politician Hortense Aka-Anghui.[6] He turned 100 in January 2016[7] and died in Abidjan in March 2019 at the age of 103.[8]

Awards

Dadié received several awards in recognition of his literary career, with one of the last being the Grand Prix des Mécènes of the GPLA in 2016.[9]

Main works

  • Afrique debout (1950)
  • Légendes africaines (1954)
  • Le pagne noir (1955)
  • La ronde des jours (1956)
  • Climbié (1956)
  • Un Nègre à Paris (1959)
  • Patron de New York (1964)
  • Hommes de tous les continents (1967)
  • La ville où nul ne meurt (1969)
  • Monsieur Thôgô-Gnini (1970)
  • Les voix dans le vent (1970)
  • Béatrice du Congo (1970)
  • Îles de tempête (1973)
  • Papassidi maître-escroc (1975)
  • Mhoi cheul (1979)
  • Opinions d'un nègre (1979)
  • Les belles histoires de Kacou Ananzè
  • Commandant Taureault et ses nègres (1980)
  • Les jambes du fils de Dieu (1980)
  • Carnets de prison (1981) – details his time in prison
  • Les contes de Koutou-as-Samala (1982)
  • Escale dans le temps : le combat pour la dignité de l'Afrique (2017)

References

External links