Mahama Johnson Traoré (1942–2010) was a Senegalese film director, writer, and co-founder of the Ouagadougou-based Pan-African Cinema Festival (FESPACO).
There he enrolled in the Conservatoire libre du cinéma français, an avant-garde school inspired by current German and Italian cinema and the theoretical approaches of the French ORTF.
[4][5] Traoré was working on an historical drama (Nder ou les flammes de l’honneur), co-written with Algerian producer Mariem Hamidat, at the time of his death.
It is a story of the women of the town of Nder in the Senegalese Waalo Kingdom who committed suicide rather than surrender to the Maure invaders in 1820.
[7] He died on 8 March 2010 in Paris, after suffering a long term kidney illness,[1] and was interred in the Muslim cemetery of Yoff, near Dakar.