Writer Abdourahman Waberi was born in Djibouti in 1965 when Djibouti was a French colony, and his native language was somali. He came to France in 1985 to study English Litterature.  He started his career as an English teacher in Caen in Normandy while pursuing in parallel a career as a writer in French. His first collection of short stories Le pays sans ombre published in France in 1994, was translated in English in 2005 as The Land Without Shadows.  So did his novel Les Etats-Unis d'Afrique, In The United States of Africa (novel), published by University of Nebraska Press in March 2009. For that novel initially published in France in 2006, he received the prize of Best French Writing : 21st Century. French Voices 2006. 

Today Waberi is also an Assistant professor at Georges Washington University where he teaches Francophone literature as well as French literature and film. 

For the teachers at the Lycee Francais de New York, Professor Waberi gave a crash course on Francophone litterature, and for all of us he explains what its is to a be a francophone.