Ebou Dibba
Ebou Dibba, MBE (10 August 1943 – 29 December 2000), was a Gambian novelist and a teacher.
Biography
Ebrima "Ebou" Dibba was born in Bathurst (now Banjul), capital of the Gambia. Attending the Gambian Methodist high school, he was an exceptionally bright student and won a scholarship to University College, Cardiff, in the late 1960s, "at a time when Neil Kinnock was president of the students' union", as Kaye Whiteman notes.[1] Dibba studied French classical literature, and took a year out teaching English in Toulon, before graduating with a B.A. in French Literature. He earned his M.A. from King's College London, and subsequently worked as a teacher as a teacher at an adult education centre in Muswell Hill, north London, in the early 1970s, and at a drug clinic, as well as helping at a youth club in Kilburn.[1]
From 1975 until 1993 he served as the director of an adult education center in Bletchingley, Surrey.
His first novel, Chaff on the Wind, is set in the Gambia in the 1930s, as World War 2 approaches and has been called "a tenderly written portrait of a time and a place hardly ever represented in African literature".[2] The story of some of the characters is continued in his second novel, Fafa.
In 1993, Dibba was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). He died in the UK, aged 57.
Selected works
- Olu and the Smugglers (1980)
- Chaff on the Wind (Macmillan, 1986)
- Fafa (1989)
- Alhaji (1992)
References
- 1 2 Obituary in The Guardian by Kaye Whiteman, 3 April 2001.
- ↑ Stewart Brown, Writers From Africa, London: Book Trust, 1989, p. 18.
External links
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