With Mali's independence in 1960, Bâ founded the Institute of Human Sciences in Bamako, and represented his country at the UNESCO general conferences. In 1951, he obtained a UNESCO grant, allowing him to travel to Paris and meet with intellectuals from Africanist circles, notably Marcel Griaule. For 15 years he devoted himself to research, which would later lead to the publication of his work L'Empire peul de Macina (The Peul Empire of Macina). At IFAN, he made ethnological surveys and collected traditions. In 1942, he was appointed to the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN, French Institute of Black Africa) in Dakar thanks to the benevolence of Théodore Monod, its director. In 1933, he took a six month leave to visit Tierno Bokar, his spiritual leader.(see also:Sufi studies) From 1922 to 1932, he filled several posts in the colonial administration in Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso and from 1932 to 1942 in Bamako. As a punishment, the governor appointed him to Ouagadougou with the role he later described as that of "an essentially precarious and revocable temporary writer". In 1921, he turned down entry into the école normale in Gorée. In 1915, he ran away from school and rejoined his mother at Kati, where he resumed his studies. He first attended the Qur'anic school run by Tierno Bokar, a dignitary of the Tijaniyyah brotherhood, then transferred to a French school at Bandiagara, then to one at Djenné. After his father's death, he was adopted by his mother's second husband, Tidjani Amadou Ali Thiam of the Toucouleur ethnic group. Amadou Hampâté Bâ was born to an aristocratic Fula family in Bandiagara, the largest city in Dogon territory and the capital of the precolonial Masina Empire.
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