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  • To Live in a World without Strangers:The Legacy of Professor Cheick Mamadou Chérif Keïta
  • Bruce Whitehouse (bio)
KEYWORDS

Mali, pedagogy, philosophy, mentorship

MOTS-CLÉS

Mali, pédagogie, philosophie, parrainage

In October 1998, about midway through what would become a three-year stint as a Peace Corps Volunteer in southern Mali, I paid a social visit to a PCV friend posted in the village of Karamokola, not far from Siby. During my brief stay, I learned that the village of Nana Kéniéba was just a few kilometers away, so the next day I pedaled my bike down the path which, according to my host, led to Nana Kéniéba. I had never been there before, but I knew it was the ancestral village of Cheick Mamadou Chérif Keïta, whom I knew from my college days. I thought I should go pay my respects. (As a PCV I found myself with ample free time for such things; this was absolutely the best part of being a PCV. It was also sometimes the worst).

The ride to Nana Kéniéba was not hard. The single-track dirt path never diverged, so I faced no decisions about which way to go, and I only had to ford one stream, not even high enough in that season to wet my ankles. The landscape, several weeks into the dry season, was full of tall golden grasses waving in the breeze, nestled between expanses of scrub brush and trees.

I arrived in Nana Kenieba, where nobody seemed to mind that I had just shown up uninvited; as soon as I dropped Chérif's name, I became an honored guest. I received a tour of the village's infrastructure, which deeply impressed me. There was a well-staffed primary school and brand new maternity clinic, far better than anything my post had to offer. I enjoyed making the rounds and meeting new [End Page 199] people. The one problem I noticed, however, was that I seemed to have struggled to convey to my interlocutors in Nana Kéniéba the exact nature of my relationship with Chérif. A ye n' degin tubabukanna, I would tell them—"He taught me French." Ohoo, they would reply; i y'a degin tubabukanna! [You taught him French!] Ayi, ale de ye'n degin tubabukanna. No, I corrected them, he taught me French.

O-hoon, they would say, with what now struck me as a hint of perplexity, as though something about my explanation were a little off—as though maybe I hadn't expressed it properly in Manding, or perhaps what I was saying didn't fit with something they already knew. As I recall, this friendly if somewhat confused exchange repeated itself at least three times with various people during my short visit. Later I wondered if the problem might have stemmed from the name tubabukan, the most common Manding term for the French language, which literally means the sound or language of whites. Perhaps what I'd been telling the good people of Nana Kéniéba was that it had been their son Chérif Keïta who had taught me to talk like a white person.

Nearly nine years before this encounter, Chérif had been my very first professor of French at Carleton College. I'd shown up in his classroom in January 1990, at the start of the winter term of my freshman year. Chérif would spend the next ten weeks coaching me and a small class of Carleton students through the delights and challenges of French conversation and composition. From what I recall, students had described him as an outgoing, enthusiastic teacher. I remember visiting him during office hours (his office for some reason was in the basement of the college chapel) and being warmly received. I learned that he and his family lived in an apartment in one of the dorms—one of his daughters, then a preschooler, was a regular sight in the dining hall there.

What I came to admire most about Chérif in the classroom back then is what I still admire about him today: his ability...

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