Birago Diop (11 December 1906 – 25 November 1989) was a Senegalese poet and storyteller whose work restored general interest in African folktales and promoted him to one of the most outstanding African francophone writers. A renowned veterinarian, diplomat and leading voice of the Négritude literary movement, Diop exemplified the "African renaissance man". Early life Son of Ismael and Sokhna Diop, Birago Diop was born on 11 December 1906 in Ouakam, a neighborhood in Dakar, Senegal. His mother raised him with his two older brothers, Massyla and Youssoupha; his father, for unknown reasons, disappeared two months before Diop was born. Diop's childhood exposed him to many folktales, which he later used in his literary work. In 1920, Diop earned a scholarship to attend the French-speaking school Lycée Faidherbe in Saint-Louis, which was then Senegal's capital. During this time, he became fascinated with the poems and style of writing of Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe and several others and began writing his own. In the late 1920s, he served as a nurse in a military hospital and later went on to study veterinary medicine at the University of Toulouse in France, graduating in 1933. Career Although he was mostly recognized for his poems and folktales, Diop also worked as a veterinary surgeon for the French colonial government in several West African countries, spending 1937–39 in the French Sudan (now Mali), 1940 in the Ivory Coast and French Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and 1950 in Mauritania. Throughout his civil service career in 1934, he collected and reworked Wolof folktales, and also wrote poetry, memoirs, and a play. He also served as the first Senegalese ambassador to Tunisia from 1960 to 1965. Early literary work During his time in France as a veterinary student, Diop met numerous African, African-American and Caribbean students, among them Léopold Sédar Senghor, who later went on to become Senegal's first president after its independence. Inspired by these young black intellectuals, artists and poets, Diop drafted his earliest poems in L'étudiant noir ("the black student") - a student review that established the idea of the Négritude movement, which protested against the assimilation theory in favour of African cultural values. Inspiration During his work as the head of the government's cattle-inspection service for several regions in Senegal and Mali, he was introduced to traditional folktales, most of which he committed to memory. These served as the main