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Hampâté Bâ is perhaps best remembered for the saying “An old man that dies is a library that burns.” Promulgated to the level of a proverb and often cited, sometimes out of context, this saying has come to epitomize what Hampâté Bâ stood for: the defense and illustration of African traditional values. Born at the dawn of the twentieth century in Bandiagara in Mali, Hampâté Bâ constituted himself, well before his old age, into a “living library” for everything that touched on the source of African precolonial culture and history. Having lost his father at the age of 2, he was adopted by a provincial chief and at age 12 was sent to the French colonial school. Even as a student at the French school he continued his Koranic studies under the direction of his spiritual master, Tierno Bokar, and therefore stayed attached to the traditions of Islam and his ancestors.