Ba, Mariama 1929–1981

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Mariama Ba 1929–1981

Novelist

The Senegalese novelist Mariama Ba was considered one of the most important African writers of the twentieth century. A crusader for the rights of women in the strongly patriarchal world of Islamic West Africa, she wrote two widely acclaimed novels that explored the psychological damage done to African women traditional misogynistic practices, such as polygamy. In a wider sense, Ba captured the conflicts that arose in many African societies as Africans struggled to reconcile their traditional cultures with influences brought by their European former colonizers.

Senegal is a small country on Africa’s Atlantic coast. When Mariama Ba was born in its capital city of Dakar in 1929, Senegal had been under French domination for several centuries; it was one of the areas from which African slaves were shipped to the Western Hemisphere. Ba’s family was a powerful one. Her father was a government official, and she enjoyed the best education available to an African woman of the day, attending and excelling in French-language schools. But Ba was mostly raised by her strict, traditional maternal grandparents, her mother having died when she was young. Her father, who in 1956 became the first health minister of newly independent Senegal, continued to take an interest in her welfare and to stress the benefits of a European-style education.

So Ba enjoyed, in a sense, the best of two worlds. In her writing career she would combined a talent for expression in the European forms of the novel and the essay with a moral strength and certainty rooted in her traditional belief system. When she was 14 she placed first in a West Africa wide competition for admission to a select French secondary school, and she became a published essayist before she graduated. In 1947 she became a teacher. She married the Senegalese politician Obeye Diop and had nine children by him; the rigors of raising such a large family took their toll on her health, and she was forced to give up her teaching post. Later divorced from Diop, she worked as a secretary and as a school inspector.

Many of Ba’s experiences found their way into her two novels, which appeared in the last years of her life. Prior to becoming a fiction writer, though, Ba became more and more involved in women’s issues in general. Joining several international women’s organizations that were establishing fledgling chapters in Africa, she became a noted essayist and lecturer. “We do not have time to waste if we are going to bring something better to African women,” she was quoted as saying in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. Ba spoke out on women’s legal rights, on education, on polygamy, and, anticipating by many years an issue that became hotly debated at the century’s end, on female genital mutilation.

Ba’s first novel, Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter), was published in 1980, when Ba was 51 years old. Ba wrote in French, which was used in much of West Africa to bridge the divide between the area’s various indigenous languages. Une si longue lettre was immediately successful and was quickly translated into English and other languages. Ba cast her story in the form of an epic letter written by a recently widowed

At a Glance…

Born Mariama Ba in Dakar, Senegal, in 1929; died in Senegal in 1981; father a politician and government health minister. Married Obeye Diop (Senegalese Minister of Information); later divorced; nine children. Education: Graduated from the French-language Ecole Normale secondary school, Senegal. Religion: Islam.

Career: Senegalese novelist. Became a schoolteacher after graduating from secondary school, 1947; worked as secretary and school inspector; joined international women’s organizations and became essayist and lecturer, 1960s and 1970s; worked to end female genital mutilation; first novel, Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter), published 1980; second novel, Un chant éclarate (Scarlet Song), published 1981.

Awards: First-ever Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, 1980.

Senegalese woman named Ramatoulaye during a days-long period of mourning prescribed by Islamic law. In writing to a childhood friend, the widow has the chance to reflect on her own life and those of several other women she knows.

Ramatoulaye is the mother of 12 children, and like Ba herself, she lives a traditional life that nonetheless includes European-style schooling. When her life comes apart, she is forced to question many practices of the society in which she lives. The letter recounts the circumstances under which Ramatoulaye’s husband left her five years earlier and took a seventeen-year-old woman as his second wife. After his death, the husband’s brother, again according to tradition, offers to make Ramatoulaye one of his own wives. His motivation is to gain control over the modest amount of money and property Ramatoulaye has acquired. She refuses his proposal.

Une si longue lettre also introduces the reader to two other women, one more Westernized than Ramatoulaye and the other less so. First, the letter is addressed to her friend Aissatou, a divorced woman who has been working at the Senegalese embassy in the United States. Although divorce was rare in Islamic Senegal, Aissatou took that step after her husband, too, married a second woman. Ramatoulaye’s second friend, Jacqueline experiences an identity crisis after her marriage dissolves. As the widow sorts out her own future with these examples before her, Ramatoulaye resolves to develop an independent existence, and when her unmarried daughter returns home pregnant, a major mark of shame in her traditional belief system, Ramatoulaye suspends her anger and indignation and decides to support her.

Ba’s novel won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, and plans were made for the publication of her second book, Un chant éclarate (Scarlet Song). However, long in poor health, Ba died in 1981 before the novel’s publication. Un chant éclarate takes up the theme of interracial and intercultural partnership. Its central figure, a white French woman and diplomat’s daughter, Mireille, falls in love with and marries a black Senegalese classmate at the university in Dakar where she is studying, thus severing her ties with her disapproving family. After the husband, Ousmane, takes a second wife, a traditional Senegalese woman, Mireille begins a long descent into mental instability, finally killing the couple’s only child.

Mariama Ba did not live long enough to witness and reap the rewards of her own expanding literary reputation. A strong voice for the growing self-consciousness of African women and a keen observer of changes in the society of her native country, Ba became the focus of numerous studies in American and European journals and book-length studies of African literature soon after her death. By the turn of the century, Un si longue lettre, especially, was widely taught in college literature, women’s studies, black studies, and French-language classes in the United States and around the world.