by Marcia Tiede
We were saddened by the unexpected loss of Lansiné Kaba on May 27 in Conakry, Guinea, the victim of a stroke suffered earlier. He was buried in his birthplace of Kankan, as he would have wished. To echo his remembrance of his friend I. B. Kaké: “La mort [est] compagne inséparable de la vie … La vie a ses mystères; et les secrets de Dieu, notre Créateur omnipotent et éternel, sont inscrutables.”
Kaba was a historian of West Africa and of Islam in Africa. He was a respected professor and engaging teacher, a persistent critic of Guinean politics, an omnivorous interdisciplinary reader of religion, history, politics, and literature, a willing public speaker in various media, and a collector of books and African art. In his 2000 presidential address to the African Studies Association (ASA), he described his early Qur’anic education and how those teachers and elders imprinted him with “a respect for learning and spirituality as a path to self-knowledge and social consciousness” and with firm ethical perspectives. He was placed in the French colonial education system at a young age by his paternal uncle (his father died in 1948). In 1956, he entered the prestigious classical Lycée Henri-IV in Paris (baccalauréat 1959), followed by the Sorbonne (licence es-lettres 1965). During a campus lunch break, he met Sheridan Bell, a Princeton graduate in Paris on a Fulbright grant. They became friends, and Bell invited Kaba to visit his family in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, during the summer of 1965.
The US agreed with him, and Kaba returned in the spring of 1966 to teach French at a Friends’ school in Philadelphia. The director there connected Kaba with a Winnetka friend, and he was invited to teach French at North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, where he heard about Northwestern. He was impressed by his initial visit: “L’atmosphère du campus situé au milieu du parc et au bord du lac et dans un coin paisible, créait une impression de fraîcheur et de calme favorable au dialogue et à l’acquisition des idées. He found the US educational system more open, merit-based, and streamlined. He applied to Northwestern and was admitted in 1967 to the Graduate School. Kaba completed his doctorate in 1972. His book The Wahhabiyya: Islamic Reform and Politics in French West Africa, 1945-1960 (Northwestern University Press, 1974), based on his doctoral thesis, earned the ASA’s 1975 Melville J. Herskovits Prize for best work in English in African Studies.
Kaba considered returning to Guinea upon completing his doctorate, but his uncle warned him not to, given Sekou Touré’s relentless purges of intellectuals and others. Instead, Kaba accepted a position teaching African history at the University of Minnesota in 1970, where he remained until 1985. During that time, Kaba spent 1981–1982 in Senegal as a Fulbright Scholar.
In 1986, Kaba became head of the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There, he served as dean of the Honors College from 1996 to 2001. In the 1990s, he also had a brief foray into Guinean politics, cofounding the Parti National pour le Développement et la Démocratie (PNDD).
From 2006–2007, Kaba served as Madeleine Haas Russell Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brandeis University. A colleague here, French professor Jane A. Hale, observed: “Lansiné Kaba is an elegant example of a highly cultured, globally educated person who can move among cultures with grace, putting those he meets at ease, too, while he remains very clear to himself and others about who he is and where he comes from.” While at Brandeis, Kaba testified at a hearing of the US House of Representatives Committee on Africa and Global Health regarding conditions in Guinea during the turbulent transition after a general strike and President Lansana Conté’s resignation.
In 2009, Kaba became Distinguished Visiting Professor of African History (later Thomas M. Kerr Distinguished Career Professor) at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. In that capacity, he also gave occasional lectures at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. He officially retired from there in 2022, though he had returned to the US in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Kaba’s book Cheikh Mouhammad Chérif et son temps, ou Islam et société à Kankan en Guinée (1874-1955) was published in 2004 by Présence Africaine. That was a particularly personal project, rooted in his own “lived (and living)” childhood memories of the ethnically complex and religiously devout Kankan community and recapturing the life and milieu of an influential Muslim figure of pre-independence Guinea. He revised and expanded it as Cheikh Mouhammad Chérif, le Saint de Kankan: Islam et société en Guinée, ca. 1865-1955 (Présence Africaine, 2017).
Kaba was present at the 1986 ASA meeting in Madison, Wisconsin when the Mande Studies Association (MANSA) was formed. Since 1993, MANSA has organized triennial conferences. Kaba also served on the Advisory Board of MANSA.
In 1999-2000, Kaba served as president of the African Studies Association. His presidential address was a forceful response to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “The Wonders of Africa” television series with its accusation of African responsibility for enslaving the ancestors of African Americans. He also served on the Advisory Board of MANSA. Upon the news of his passing, he was remembered by the MANSA community as a gentleman and scholar; a wonderful colleague, friend, and historian; a pioneering historian and true statesman; one who walked with dignity and pride while encouraging others; and an insightful commentator on the interface between tradition and modernity.
Other than knowing him as a figure in MANSA’s history and attending his 2018 talk at the Program of African Studies, my glimpses of Lansiné Kaba were mostly through editing a text on Cheikh Mouhammad Chérif for him in early 2022 via email and phone calls, with him communicating in his ever-courtly French. This 47-page ‘brochure,’ La piété de Cheikh Mouhammad Chérif de Kankan: (retourné vers La Lumière le 8 septembre 1955) with its reverential phrasing and emphasis on the Cheikh’s mysticism, was intended to complement his second book on Cheikh Mouhammad Chérif (2017). My assumption was that it was destined for a more local audience. Lansiné and I eventually met in person, and we discussed the 1972 SOAS conference, the proceedings of which I had just cataloged at Northwestern’s Herskovits Library. He invited me to his home to see “where he did his work”—an offer I didn’t follow up on soon enough. Since his death, I have been working with his wife, Fanta Traoré, to inventory his vast book collection at their home in Evanston.
Kaba’s last trip to Guinea was timed for him to be in Kankan on January 15 – a day of major pilgrimage to the grave of Cheikh Mouhammad Chérif.
(Many thanks to Fanta Traoré for her useful information and comments, and to Stephen Belcher for providing helpful documentation.)
Marcia Tiede is Africana cataloger, Northwestern University Libraries, and Secretary-Treasurer of the Mande Studies Association.