The Yazi Dogo Youth and Culture club is located in Dogon Doutchi. Very few activities are currently offered, owing to a lack of means. Tarbiyya Tatali intends to develop a cultural resource center on the Arewa. One step in implementing the project consists in collecting information to better know Yazi Dogo.
Who is Yazi Dogo ?
A teacher by trade, who is better known and appreciated by Nigeriens as a theatre man: actor, playwright, director. He has written some thirty plays and a hundred or so sketches. Those have been shown on Nigerien Television since it started in 1978.
His work is staged in French and in Haoussa, his mother tongue.
Born circa 1942 in Maizani, in the Dogon Doutchi department, he has now retired.
He still directs the Yazi Dogo Company.
He finds his inspiration in historical tradition (for instance the legend of the wicked king Kabrin Kabra who wanted to kill all the old people), in current affairs (such as the struggle against bribery) and in comic and farcical situations, for in Haoussa society people love to have a good laugh. He also contributes to raise awareness of women’s condition ( girls’ schooling, early or forced marriages, spacing out births, malnutrition) and also of AIDS, polio…
For more information see his CV below.
Further information about Yazi Dogo.
There have been several studies devoted to the works or Yazi Dogo, among them an interview and a video film to which members of our association contributed.
Jean-Dominique Penel’s interview of Yazi Dogo.
Made on October 22nd 1989 and published in the first volume of Rencontre, Nigerien Literature, Editions du Ténéré, published by J-D Penel and A. Maïlele.
The video film by Joanna Cussigh
A twenty-minute video entitled “Yazi Dogo and the Nigerien Folk Theatre”, made by Joanna during a solidarity stay in 2010.
