André Raponda Walker

André Raponda Walker (19 July 1871–11 December 1968) was a Gabonese author, ethnographer, Catholic priest, and missionary. Walker wrote extensively about Gabonese language and culture.

Biography Raponda-Walker was born to a Mpongwe mother, and Robert Bruce Napoleon Walker, a British merchant in Gabon, and member of the Anthropological Society.

The young boy spent a year in England around his fourth birthday but returned to Gabon in 1876 and started at the school of Sainte-Marie in 1877.

He was ordained on 23 July 1899 and his first assignment was at Notre-Dame-des-Trois-Épis in Ngounié in southern Gabon.

Works Dictionnaire mpongwè-français, suivi d'éléments de grammaire, Metz, 1934. Essai de grammaire tsogo, Brazzaville, 1937. Notes d'Histoire du Gabon, 1960. Dictionnaire français-mpongwè, 1961. Les Plantes utiles du Gabon (with Roger Sillans), Paris, Le Chevalier, 1961, 614 p. (Coll. Encyclopédie biologique, 56). Rites et croyances des peuples du Gabon (with Roger Sillans), 1962. Contes gabonais, 1967.