Dr. Stefan Elders, a Dutch linguist working out of University of Bayreuth in Germany, died in Mopti after a brief illness February 19 2007. He had joined our project in September 2006 and was working on the Bangeri Me language in the village of Bounou. At the age of 41 he had already built an important career as a West Africanist, and this was a great loss to the field as well as to our project. The 2007 CALL conference in Leiden was dedicated to his memory.
We intend to continue the work on Bangeri Me.
On this site are scans from Dr. Elders field notebooks on Bangeri Me (the originals are in the possession of his family and are being archived at the library of the University of Leiden), a pdf of the handout he prepared for a workshop in Bamako in December 2006, and a brief commemorative video (we apologize for the amateur camerawork) showing where he worked in Bounou and Douentza and ending with comments by a few of us who knew him.