Camara Laye, an African author, was born on January 1, 1928 in Kouroussa, Guinea, then a French colonial possession. Laye (his first name, but used as a preceding name to adhere to regional customs) was born into a Malinke family, an ethnic group related to the Mandingo people who founded the Mali Empire. Camara Komady and Daman Sadan, Laye’s parents, had twelve children. His father was an artisan blacksmith.
Laye briefly attended a Koranic school before his father enrolled him in a French Colonial Government school. Laye excelled academically throughout his primary school years and began attending Ecole Georges Poiret School in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, around the age of fourteen. Laye finished his studies in 1947 and received first place in his school’s final examinations, earning him a scholarship to study in France.
Laye, now 19, was a student at the Central School of Automobile Engineering in Argentueil, France. Laye was forced to work as a porter in the public transportation system and a skilled auto worker for a car assembly plant after his scholarship expired after one year. During his time in France, Laye met other African students and scholars, exposing him to concepts such as Pan-Negro and Negritude, which later influenced his writings. Laye married his first wife, Marie Lorifo, in 1953, after meeting her in Conakry before leaving for France.
In 1948 Laye began writing while still working in the automobile factory. Partly due to loneliness and nostalgia, Laye completed an autobiography of his early childhood in Guinea, titled The African Child or The Dark Child (1954) which was his first published work. Reviews were positive for the aspiring writer, and the work won him the Prix Charles Veillon Award in 1954.
Laye and his wife returned to Guinea in 1956, two years before the country declared independence from France. Marie gave birth to their first child soon after. Laye taught in a French-run school in Accra, Ghana, from 1957 to 1958, and by the end of 1958, he had been appointed as the newly independent Guinea’s first ambassador to Ghana. In 1958, they welcomed their second child.
Laye and his family fled Guinea for Dakar, Senegal, in 1965, as the country’s political and social situation deteriorated under President Sekou Toure’s rule. Laye worked as a Research Fellow at the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), which was part of the University of Dakar (now known as Cheikh Anta Diop University) while in Senegal. He researched folklore and oral histories. Laye’s passion for research and writing, as well as his interest in politics, remained unabated until his death. Camara Laye died on February 4, 1980, in Dakar, of a kidney infection, at the age of 52.
Camara Laye’s net worth or net income was estimated to be $1 million – $6 million dollars. He has made such an amount of wealth from his primary career as a Writer.