He later published Lettre à la France nègre (1969), and Les mille et une bibles du sexe (1969) under the pseudonym Utto Rodolph.

Le devoir de violence was initially well-received, but critics later charged that Ouologuem had plagiarized passages from Graham Greene and other established authors such as André Schwartz-Bart.

Yambo Ouologuem was born an only son in an aristocratic Tidjaniya Malian family in 1940 in Bandiagara, the main city in the Dogon region of Mali (then a part of French Soudan).

[2] Until 1984, he was the director of a youth centre in the small town of Sévaré near Mopti in central Mali, where he wrote and edited a series of children's textbooks.

Ouologuem became a celebrity, and Le Monde called him one of "the rare intellectuals of international stature presented to the world by Black Africa", comparing him to Leopold Sedar Senghor.

"[10] Despite the controversy, the novel remains one of the landmarks of postcolonial African literature,[11] notable for its "cultural sweep: legends, myths, chronicles, religious matter woven into an opulent narrative; for eloquence: the cadence and music of the prose".

[12] Le devoir de violence delineates the seven-and-a-half centuries of history of central Mali (specifically, the Dogon region), from 1202 to 1947, when a fictitious nation, Nakem-Zuiko, is on the threshold of independence.

Wise called "Ouologuem's decision to return to Mali and wash his hands of writing in French ... an incalculable loss to world literature.

Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's novel La plus secrète mémoire des hommes, which won the Prix Goncourt in 2021, is inspired by Ouologuem's experiences in French publishing.

[15][16] In 2023, it was announced that Penguin Modern Classics would be publishing a new English edition of Bound to Violence in March 2024, with an introduction by Malian scholar Chérif Keïta.