Ebrima "Ebou" Dibba was born in Bathurst (now Banjul), capital of the Gambia, where he was raised in the prevalent Wolof culture to which his mother belonged, although his father's family was from Baddibu, a Mandinka area up-river.
He 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] In 1974 he moved to the adult education center at Bletchingley, Surrey, initially to teach modern languages and organise classes for the disadvantaged; then from 1975 he served as the centre's director for much of the next two decades, during which period he also wrote two novels, published in the 1980s.
Engaging wholeheartedly with the home counties community, "he saw his role as that of a missionary for African culture" and seemed to take it as a personal blow when the job came to an end in 1993.
Set in the Gambia in the 1930s, as World War 2 approaches, it has been called "a tenderly written portrait of a time and a place hardly ever represented in African literature".