Camara Laye

Camara Laye was born on the first of January 1928 at Kouroussa, on the upper Niger River in eastern Guinea, the eldest son of Komady Camara — a Malinké goldsmith of the village blacksmith caste — and Daman Sadan. He was raised in the goldsmith compound of his father at Kouroussa across the closing decade of the French colonial period of West Africa.

He was placed at six at the Quranic school of Kouroussa and at eight at the French colonial primary school of Kouroussa. He completed the secondary education at the École technique supérieure Poiret at Conakry — the principal technical secondary school of French Guinea — in 1947 with the certificate of mechanical engineering.

He went to France in late 1947 on a French colonial scholarship to complete the engineering education at the Centre national de formation des techniciens automobiles at Argenteuil and the École centrale d’ingénieurs des arts et métiers at Paris between 1947 and 1951. He took employment at the Renault and the Simca automobile plants at the Paris suburbs at the close of the engineering course.

He wrote the autobiographical novel L’Enfant noir at the Argenteuil engineering school across the homesick autumn of 1951 — the chronicle of his Kouroussa childhood in the goldsmith compound of his father — and the manuscript was accepted in 1952 by Robert Plon at the Paris house Plon.

L’Enfant noir was published in October 1953 at Paris and was awarded the 1954 Prix Charles Veillon — among the principal francophone literary prizes of the period and one of the first awarded to a Black African novelist.

He published in 1954 the novel Le Regard du roi (The Radiance of the King) — the allegorical chronicle of a white European at the court of a Black African king — and returned to independent Guinea in October 1956 under the Sékou Touré government, taking the post of director of the Centre d’études et de recherches africaines at Conakry between 1956 and 1965.

He was placed under suspicion by the Sékou Touré regime in 1965 and went into exile in 1965 to Dakar, where he lived under the protection of Léopold Sédar Senghor at the Université de Dakar — the post he held for the remaining fifteen years of his life.

He published in 1966 the novel Dramouss (A Dream of Africa) and in 1978 the epic compilation Le Maître de la parole — a transcription of the oral epic of Soundjata Keïta (placed in this archive) from a Malinké griot of Fadama.

He died at Dakar on the fourth of February 1980 of complications of a kidney infection, at fifty-two.

He is honored here as the author of L’Enfant noir.