Djibril Tamsir Niane

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Djibril Tamsir Niane is a historian, playwright, and short story writer born January 9, 1932 in Conakry, Guinea. His secondary education was in Senegal and his degree from the University of Bordeaux. He is an honorary professor of Howard University and the University of Tokyo. He is noted for introducing the story of Sundiata to the Western world in 1960 by translating the story told to him by griot Djeli Mamoudou Kouyate. He also edited the UNESCO General History of Africa and did other UNESCO projects. He is the father of the late French supermodel and activist Katoucha Niane.

When his late daughter Katoucha was nine years old, he consented to her sexual mutilation. She later campaigned forcefully against this barbaric practice, describing her own pain and suffering in her autobiography, Dans Ma Chair (In My Flesh).