Koulsy Lamko – Chadian writer exiled tribute to Sankara

Koulsy Lamko in Geneva, 2012

Koulsy Lamko (born 1959) is a Chadian-born playwright, poet, novelist and university lecturer. Born in Dadouar, Lamko left his country for Burkina Faso in 1979 due to the beginning of the civil war. There, he became acquainted with Thomas Sankara and involved with the Institute of Black Peoples in Ouagadougou. Lamko spent ten years promoting community theater in Burkina Faso through the Theater of the Community and helped found the International Festival of Theatre for Development. Some of his poetry was published in Revue Noire in 1994. In 1997 he co-released the album Bir Ki Mbo of mixed poetry and music in tribute to Sankara in collaboration with Stéphane Scott and Rémi Stengel. A regular attendant at the Limousin Festival International des Francophonies, he briefly lived in Limoges, France. He then moved to Rwanda, where he read for his doctorate at the National University in Butare while founding the university’s Center for the Arts and the Theater and teaching theater and creative writing. His doctoral thesis was on emerging theatrical aesthetics in Africa.His experience in Rwanda led him to write his novel, La phalène des collines (“The butterfly of the hills”), about the 1994 genocide against Tutsi.

In 2009 he stayed, as a guest of Amsterdam Vluchtstad, in the former apartment of Anne Frank and her family at the Amsterdam Merwedeplein.

He currently lives in Mexico City.

Koulsy Lamko: “My country, a breeding ground of immense beauty and unspeakable violence”

In exile since 1983, the writer, poet, and playwright says he is still “inhabited” by Chad. From Mexico, where he lives, he now fights to make the voices of the Black diaspora heard.

Koulsy Lamko, Chadian writer exiled in Mexico. © DR

A nomad at heart, Koulsy Lamko recounts wanderings: his own, but also those of the women and men he meets during his journeys across borders and oceans. He himself left his native Chad in 1983, fleeing civil war. He then lived in Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Togo, Ivory Coast, France, the Netherlands… before settling nine years ago in Mexico, which has become his adopted country. A prolific and serious writer, Lamko has published plays, novels, and poetry, while also teaching drama. His latest novel, published in 2011, is titled Les Racines du yucca (Philippe Rey). Its action takes place in a village in Yucatán, with survivors of the Guatemalan war as protagonists. The narrator is an exiled African writer who talks about “his shitty country that he loves.”