Moussa Bathily

Moussa Bathily (also Moussa Yoro Bathily, born in 1946) is a Senegalese history teacher, journalist, film director and producer, screen writer, and novelist. Born in Bakel, East Senegal, as the Soninke son of a provincial governor, Bathily studied at a French colonial school and at the Dakar Lycée Van Vollenhoven (later named Lamine-Guèye). Starting in 1968, he read history at the Cheikh Anta Diop University at Dakar and graduated on a thesis on Blaise Diagne, who was in 1914 the first West African member elected to the French Chamber of Deputies. Bathily worked for three years as a history teacher in Rufisque, West Senegal, and wrote film reviews for the Dakar newspaper Le Soleil. Returning to Dakar he met filmmakers such as Djibril Diop Mambety and Mahama Johnson Traoré at the forerunner of the later Institut Français du Sénégal and started directing realist short films and documentaries, and later features.