He’s gone, MY Teacher!
When they heard the news, few people of my generation could say, “We don’t owe him anything.” “, there are so many of them who owed it entirely or partially to him for being what they became. If there were any who were his students, we can say that it was not us who inaugurated this marvelous teaching pedagogy. We are the group that accompanied the transfer of Ponty from Sébikotane to the Thiès Air Base with teachers Mbaye Guèye, Cheik Aliou Ndao and Madior Diouf… The latter was introduced to us by the irreplaceable History teacher as “My Friend Madior “. Mbaye Guèye, “the Duke of Berry” name which designated not the one who fell pierced by Louis-Pierre Louvelle’s knife, but the “Duke of Beringaraf” who took us straight into a historical space invaded by names , strange to us, from “diawrigne”, “sarafari”, and “Amary Ndella Coumba”. The descendants of Mahécor Diouf thus kept this name of “My Friend Madior”, for the rest of us throughout our stay in Ponty.
The one whose hoarse voice broke through the ranks of our class one Monday morning with this beginning of the text: “Ronsard, I saw the pride of the ancient colossi”, this voice which never left you once it had crossed the threshold of your ears, forced you on the straightforward path to excellence. This being understood not as the desire to be the best, but the best of the best. Which pushed us throughout our higher education and our vocation as teachers. She speaks to us, she accompanies us from a day that cannot be located in the pages of a diary. It pushes us to read, to reread everything that came to hand, with the conviction that we should have read it. During all our studies, far from the shores of the country from which this “Minerva with the perky eyes” emerged – the University of Dakar – I could only return by chanting my journey with his verses: “The more I like the stay that ‘have built my ancestors / Only Roman palaces with a bold front. »
If I have resolutely locked myself into the “Regrets”, it is because their evocation sums up my filial relations with MY Dear Professor. And his eyes which looked at the ancient colossi closed once and for all at once, and I realized that it’s a little colder since they opened on the side where the fraternal Duke of Berry was waiting for them.
-Mamoussé DIAGNE
Senegal
